DV Rack - Does it work as good as they claim?

I never looked at Serious Magic's claims for it, but I couldn't live without it.

Well...I could live, but I'd have to be a banker or a plumber or something. I certainly wouldn't want to do any filming.

Dan
 
Awesome program but the monitor is not good enough for critical focusing. Supposedly they are releasing a patch to fix it in the future. Right now if you buy the HDV pack, the monitor rocks according to Barry.
 
DV Rack is absolutely essential for field work, if you care about the image. It's just fantastic. And yes, the new monitor in the HDV Power Pack does extremely rock. There's some indication they may include the new monitor in the regular DV Rack, but that's not confirmed yet.

It's a *must buy*, if you want to do any monitoring or recording in the field. A laptop is infinitely more portable than a conventional CRT monitor, plus it's a waveform, a vectorscope, a disk recorder, plus it gives you basically P2 workflow right now, plus you can do split-screens between live and captured footage to match scenes up...

... it really is a massive home run.
 
So I understand it right... regarding how it loads the footage... it adds the video into your laptop AS you shoot it so you don't have to go in a load it later?

This is one of those neat programs where it seems too good to be true.
 
Yes. It does exactly that. Even better, stream it to an external hard drive hooked up to the laptop then you can take the HD and move to a desktop to edit. That's what I do.
 
Sirius_Doggy said:
Yes. It does exactly that. Even better, stream it to an external hard drive hooked up to the laptop then you can take the HD and move to a desktop to edit. That's what I do.
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How good of a laptop do you need? Can I get by with your average model or do I need a $5000 alienware?
 
Sirius_Doggy said:
Yes. It does exactly that. Even better, stream it to an external hard drive hooked up to the laptop then you can take the HD and move to a desktop to edit. That's what I do.
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That's a great idea. :thumbup:
 
safarijoe said:
How good of a laptop do you need? Can I get by with your average model or do I need a $5000 alienware?
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I don't know about running DV Rack but I have done plenty of video work on my HP zd8000. That thing is a great (but large) machine for field work. It churns through video just as easy as my desktop does.

The downside is it's very large and is about 9 or 10 lbs.
 
safarijoe said:
How good of a laptop do you need? Can I get by with your average model or do I need a $5000 alienware?
Click to expand...

Here's what SeriousMagic reccommends:
http://www.seriousmagic.com/dvrcompatibility.cfm

It helps to have a PCIMIA firewire card along with the firewire built into the laptop so you can stream the video from the camera into the main firewire port then point it into the external HD hooked to the firewire port on the PCMIA card .
 
DV Rack is great. The field monitor could be better (I understand that the next upgrade will fix that) or maybe my eyes are just too bad to properly adjust the monitor, but the program is most impressive. I'm not smart enough to know how to use most of the scopes (but plan to learn), but the fact that you can record directly to a hard drive and then review the clips you want to keep and then move them to your editing computer saves me a ton of time and a lot of wear on my camera. The computer specs required to run DV Rack are on their site and are not outrageous. I had hoped to get a laptop for around $500, but had to spend a little over a grand with Dell to get above the minimum CPU speed (1.4 GB) a decent sized hard drive and a firewire port. The "cool" factor of the program and how it looks when you are in the field with a client is priceless.
 
Barry,

I just got DV Rack, and will be using it with my Alienware laptop. Newbie question fer ya: How do you move the laptop with the DVX100a, when you have tracking shots or others with movement? Do you use some kind of rolling stand? I'm just starting to experiment with this stuff.

Thanks,

Keith
 
We used a 30' firewire cable. And constantly wished that it was longer.

For dolly shots, I'd frequently just put the laptop on the dolly. But for most shots, a long long firewire cable.
 
safarijoe said:
How good of a laptop do you need? Can I get by with your average model or do I need a $5000 alienware?
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I got a Toshiba M35X-S309 and it works fine. Mine cost me 1200...and I just saw one for 750 (pissed me off, that did).

Bare minimum specs, but with the 1.4GHz Pentium M Centrino Processor, not the regular kind.

Dan
 
This looks amazing - how is 24p handled with it - does it capture in 60i with the dropdown encoding?

Are the files uncompressed? - is there anything lost by using a harddrive and not a tape?

If you capture to tape and hard drive is there greater chance for dropouts or is this a great way to have redundant capture of the footage?
 
smelni said:
This looks amazing - how is 24p handled with it - does it capture in 60i with the dropdown encoding?
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Never tried 60i. :)


smelni said:
Are the files uncompressed? - is there anything lost by using a harddrive and not a tape?
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They're AVIs compressed with the DV codec. It's gotten to the point where I don't even bother capturing from the tape anymore...just copy the AVIs off to my NLE machine.

smelni said:
If you capture to tape and hard drive is there greater chance for dropouts or is this a great way to have redundant capture of the footage?
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I've never had a dropout (but I've never had a dropout from tape, either). But, yeah, instant archive/backup footage.

Dan
 
DV Rack records exactly what would have gone on the tape. So yes, a 24p file is recorded as 60i with 2-3 or 2-3-3-2 pulldown. The flags are preserved, so the files can be directly imported to Vegas and they're 100% compatible.

60i files are captured as 60i. Basically, if you capture live with DV Rack, or you capture into your NLE from tape, the resulting files will be bit-for-bit identical.

And yes, you can get redundant recording by rolling tape while you're recording on the computer. We shot an entire feature that way. The tapes go on a shelf, never to be seen again, as the footage is all already pre-digitized on the computer.
 
Barry - this seems amazing - almost revolutionary - seems strange to me that we arent hearing more about this.

I mean reduced workflow, automatic redundancy , slip separation, digital capture, immediate preview - all for les sthen 300 dollars.

How an anyone justify not using this. It really seems amazing to me
 
Barry_Green said:
And yes, you can get redundant recording by rolling tape while you're recording on the computer. We shot an entire feature that way. The tapes go on a shelf, never to be seen again, as the footage is all already pre-digitized on the computer.
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Okay, now I'm SOLD. I love the idea of the redundant footage onto tape.

Now, Q for anyone who's using it. I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO USE ANY OF THOSE SCOPES ... or even what they're for in most cases.

If I were to purchase DVRACK, and the largest friggin' firewire cable I could find (how long do they go?), does the software come with a online manual or anything to tell you what does what & how to understand it/use it?

Lastly, does RAM on your laptop come into play at all? I can probably get it ramped up, if needed, as it's only at 256MB right now. The processor should be fast enough (2+ something), and it's just a dell. I've got Vegas on it, but more for refrencing really as I don't edit on it.
 
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