Subject: RE: PVR drives
From: "David Norris (ACT)" <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 23:45:33 -0500

The PVR test indicates that on the inner tracks I get about 7Mb/s, and on 
the outer tracks the performance degrades to about 5.5 Mb/s.  This 
translates to somewhere between S-video and Betacam quality, I think (better 
for animations, which compress better).  I shopped around in Computer 
Shopper to get the best price.

My system is "homebrew."  It has an ASUS Pentium 133 motherboard /w 64M ram. 
 Each of my 3 kids has a networked Pentium which, combined with my laptop, 
makes a nice ScreamerNet rendering farm.  I use Adobe Premiere; I have Razor 
Pro but have stopped using it since getting the PVR.  It's advantage to me 
was that it directly used Targa 2000 DVM files.  Razor definitely had a lot 
of bugs in it when I was using it.

Some things I like about the PVR:
* The video is great!
* Separate video drives.  There are lots of good reasons to do this.  I 
tried the Miro DC20, which uses the system's hard drive, but just couldn't 
get the performance out of it; sooner or later it would drop a frame or two 
when I sneezed.  I couldn't reliably get more than 2Mb/s out of this board, 
which translates into pretty crappy video.  Also, as I've said, with 
separate drives you can turn them off if they're in a separate cabinet, 
which can save your ears.
* DPS' web site (www.dps-inc.com) seems to have regular software updates.

Some things I don't like about the PVR:
* The audio is very loosely coupled with the video.  It's stored as .WAV 
files on a local drive, and the PVR relies on Windows to synchronize the 
two.  I used to have a Turtle Beach Tahiti card (the audi specs are better), 
but the synchronization was so bad the card was unusable, so I had to go 
back to using a soundblaster (I know, it's disgusting but it works).  Also, 
I have no good way to set and manipulate audio levels with this setup.  I 
can produce great video, but the audio is hit and miss.
* I can't access the drives in Win95.  I want to back up the video files to 
tape or CD-ROM, but haven't figured out how to do it.
-- dn
=============================================================

What can you tell us about the sustained transfer rate of these drives? How
much did they cost? Also, some info on your entire editing setup would be
welcome, including host computer, edit software, and audio card. I am
particularly concerned about decent nonlinear software, as I've heard that
Razor has had some teething problems. Thanks!

  
Andy Hofman
LumaQuest Productions           
Animation and Dual Raptor 3 Rendering  
[email-masked]
513-643-7333