DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Mark,

Does Serious Magic recommend an certain type of external drive to capture clips to? In your opinion what would be better, USB 2.0, Firewire or a combo drive where you can use either?

I downloaded the Demo and love it, can't wait to get the real thing when it is delivered.

Thanks for any info.

Chris
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

I would recommend a USB2 drive, because on a laptop you are fixed to a single Firewire Channel, unless you use an add in card. USB will give you 2 seperate full bandwidth pipelines, once for the camera, one for the storage.
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Elvis,

DV Rack was designed to be friendly to non-engineering type users. While we've gotten great comments from engineers used to using multi-thousand dollar scopes, the majority of DV shooters today do not have much, if any, experience with a waveform monitor or vectorscope. That's why we developed a printed booklet that comes with DV Rack that's called "The Field Guide to Better Video". It walks you through using the tools in DV Rack step-by-step. We were careful to avoid making it a voluminous textbook on video and instead developed practical A-to-B instructions focused on getting the job done. Knowledge is power!

Even if you really know what you're doing, using a waveform and vectorscope to set up your camera can introduce occasional delays in the production process, so we developed a module called SureShot that is a unique camera setup wizard. Using the printed camera setup charts included with DV Rack it is very fast to get your camera dialed in. Although the printed charts obviously can't be included in a download, you can still play around with SureShot and get the idea in the trial version.

--- Mark
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Is there a way to reshift all the scoped to default? somehow I managed to drag all the modules down a couple pages so everytime I start I just see black. I guess I gotta stop being so lazy and pull each one up, but a one step thing would be cool.
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Chris,

Jarred is correct. In general it's best to avoid using one controller chip (Firewire or USB) for both your camera and your storage HD. This is because a good number of cameras allocate almost the entire Firewire bandwidth, even though they aren't using all of it. This could steal bandwidth from the HD and might potentially lead to slowness.

Note that a FireWire port and a controller aren't necessarily the same thing. Even if your FireWire card (or motherboard) features two ports, they are probably both from the same controller chip. A separate card is the way to ensure maximum bandwidth to a device. Fortunately, they are cheap.

If you have an extra Firewire controller (I have a FW PC Card interface) then you can be sure that your data streams won't conflict. It may work fine anyway but I suggest that you test it out first. If you don't have the DV Rack free trial you can still get an idea of how your system deals with moving data around by using your NLE software to capture from your camera to your internal drive. At the same time, do a Windows copy of a really big DV clip from your internal HD to your external drive. If everything is fine, then that indicates that everything with DV Rack should be fine as well.

Either way, I'd suggest looking at a dual interface (USB 2 / FireWire) HD. They cost about the same and are just more flexible.

--- Mark
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Mark and Jarred,

Thanks so much for your help with the hard drive issue. It helped alot.

Chris
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

>That's a ***** about a Mac not being supported!<

I'm with ya! Pretty major slap in the face!
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

I downloaded the public beta and installed it on my W2K machine (1 GHz processor). Apart from being slow (expected as the processor speed doesn't meet the req's), the application also kept on crashing.

I am quite enthusiastic about the "idea" of this software, and all the reviews are great, but I am a little concerned about compatibility. Is there a "time-bombed" golden release version that would allow me to test the real thing before spending money?
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Jarred,

If you want to restore the default layout of the application, quit DV Rack then go to:
"C:\documents and settings\\Local settings\application data\serious magic\dv rack"
and delete or rename the file named "appProps.xml".

Then restart DV Rack and the default layout will be reloaded.

Saving and loading various component layouts is a feature planned for the near future.

--- Mark
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

XCheck,

I've not ever heard of DV Rack frequently crashing for anyone. However, on a machine as under-spec as that, all bets are off. You might try closing as many components as possible to improve performance. Also make sure that the Windows Advanced Performance Memory Usage option "System Cache" is set to "Programs" and not "System". (I'm not sure if it's called the same thing under Win2K)

We will be posting a trial version based on the release software sometime in the next week or so. But I'm not sure that things will be much different on a 1 Ghz system. Sorry, but it's just not fast enough...

--- Mark
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

I'm considering this in lieu of a hard disc and monitor. However my so yesterday 1Ghz laptop will have to be replaced. Has this been tested with the new 64bit CPU? What other considerations should I make when purchasing the laptop. Here's what I'm looking at right now.

Operating System Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional
Processor AMD Athlon(TM) 64 3200+ 2.00 GHz
Display 15.4" WVA WUXGA (1920x1200)
Graphics Card 64MB NVIDIA(R) GeForce(TM) 4 440 Go +1394 & 5-in-1
Memory 1.0GB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB)
Hard Drive 60GB 4200 RPM Hard Drive
Primary CD/DVD Drive 2X DVD+RW/R & CD-RW Combo Drive
Networking 54g(TM) Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN

In addition what should I consider for an external drive? Is the speed of an external drive sufficient? What type of file is it AVI? Can the live video be broadcast over a network card?

Thanks!!!!
Gopher
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

make sure that laptop has a firewire port. :)

external drive the LAcie little porcshe ones are pretty good.
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

[quote author=MarkRan link=board=nws;num=1091717583;start=45#49 date=08/16/04 at 13:08:48]We will be posting a trial version based on the release software sometime in the next week or so. But I'm not sure that things will be much different on a 1 Ghz system. Sorry, but it's just not fast enough...

--- Mark
[/quote]

Thanks. Let us know when the trial version is up there. I am sure I am not the only one who wants to see the reall thing - in my case it's not just the software but obviously the cost of a laptop upgrade I have to consider...

Jerry
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Gopher,

I haven't tried it myself with a 64-bit processor but I believe it should work fine and we haven't heard any reports to the contrary.

That looks like a really nice system!

It's not necessary to have an external hard drive to use DV Rack. It just depends on how much storage you think you'll occupy before you have a chance to transfer, backup or dump the project. DV is approx. 13 GB / hour.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when shooting with DV Rack, I found that my "shoot to use" ratio improves because it's easy to immediately delete bad takes. So, you'll probably end up using less storage than you have previously.

The files that DV Rack saves are DV (exactly as received from your camera so there's no decompression/recompression step). The format of the DV file can be menu selected between a variety of DV 'flavors' including AVI, QuickTime, Canopus, Matrox.

There is no compression or "live streaming" capability on DV Rack as that's a whole 'nother kind of product.

--- Mark
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Mark -

Is there a setting to adjust the IRE level for 16RGB to be 7.5? RIght now it reads as 0 IRE but I want it to read as though it has setup. Is this possible already or as a prefrence?

Thanks

Michael
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Hi Mark,

I’d like to add my appreciation for the time you have taken to answer all of our questions. It is fun and exciting when a company develops a product that has such potential as yours.

Are the upgrades that you mentioned free? Companies often penalize their customers for buying into their development early by continually charging them for bug fixes and upgrades, for some (Adobe) it is their whole business model. I don’t mind feeling the pain with early product development if the vendor is willing to share the risk by providing free upgrades.

Congratulations and continued success with this product.

~chuck
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

Michael,

The whole "setup / IRE on bars" issue is complex. I want to check in with the developers before I answer your question.

ChuckS,

No problem! Happy to help. As I've mentioned, I initially came to DVXUser to get info on shooting with the DVX, which I've been able to do in spades.

Regarding upgrades, the best predictor of future actions is past behavior. Historically Serious Magic has always offered updates in two flavors. The first is free downloadable updates. Several have been released for each of SMs earlier products. These include bug fixes, enhancements and some new features.

The second is a major product expansion. These come along less frequently and add major new functionality to a product. Often such upgrades are in the form of an entirely new addition to the product line. In the case of Visual Communicator, the first major product expansion was a whole new version called Visual Communicator Pro. The original VC was $149. Pro was launched nine months later at $349 (now $399) and the original VC continues to be sold (now at $199). The price of the VC line was raised $50 when version 1.5 shipped. 1.5 was a free upgrade to existing users. Now we're on 1.6 (which was also free to existing users).

The cost of an upgrade from original VC to Pro is $229. However when Pro started shipping, existing VC users were able to upgrade, for a limited time, from original to Pro for $99 (less than half price). So, someone who invested in VC initially and upgraded to Pro paid a total of only $249 (original price + upgrade). Pro sells to new customers on our site today for $399. The same kind of thing happened when VC Studio was announced at $695. Existing original and Pro customers got a great deal. This is because we believe that great companies are built on customer relationships. So we've tried to ensure, wherever possible, that those that already owned the product got a better deal than any new customer. We've even offered great deals to our existing users on new products in our other lines (ie VC users got a great deal on Ultra, a different product line targeted at a different market).

If one were to use past history as a guide one might predict (if one were in a guessing mood) that there will be free upgrades to DV Rack. If there were someday a new high-end product added to the line that sells for more and has major new abilities (like a Pro version). *IF* that were to happen, you can safely assume that it would be less expensive to already own DV Rack and upgrade than to buy any new high-end version.


--- Mark
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

I love the programme, would need to have a laptop thiugh to use it on site which I dont own yet . . . sure would love to set up in that direction, great work and . . I see the layout thing has been talked about . . . I concur :P
 
Re: DV Rack by Serious Magic == Member Discount

haha great clip Mark.. looks good.
 
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