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This article is from June 26, 2000, and is no longer current.

Digital Video 101: Behind the Curtain

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Oh, boy! It’s another revolution. Yes, just a dozen years after changing the face of graphic design and printing, those wacky computer engineers have pointed their overactive craniums at video and film production. So, if you missed out on being a desktop publishing revolutionary, there’s still hope: Now you can be a “digital video” revolutionary, and start producing your own movies.

In this column we’ll be looking at what you need to know to join the revolution, including details on cameras, software, computers, lights, microphones, and more. However, before we can get into the nuts and bolts of digital video production, we need to answer a very simple question.

What is Digital Video?
In the old days, if you wanted to create a video, you had to shoot footage with your video camera and then edit the footage using special video editing decks. These decks were capable of precisely recording video from your original tapes onto a new tape. This “linear” editing process was a bit of a drag, because if you later wanted to make a change — insert or delete a scene, say — everything after that scene had to be re-edited. In addition, every re-recording step degraded video quality. (In the REALLY old days, things were even more of a drag because you actually had to cut and splice videotape with a razor blade!)

With digital video technology, your video footage is digitized and transferred to your computer, where it can be assembled into a masterpiece using non-linear video-editing software. With non-linear editing, scenes can be inserted, deleted, or rearranged at any time. And once your data has been digitized, you can copy and move it without loss of quality.

What’s revolutionary about the latest digital video technology is the way your video gets digitized. Until the development of the Digital Video (DV) format (and its attendant hardware), you had to add expensive video digitizing cards to your computer if you wanted to edit video. These cards take a video signal from a camera, digitize it, and compress it, and the resulting digital video is stored on your hard drive. After editing, the same hardware can write the edited footage back out to tape. This is how popular non-linear editing systems such as Avid and Media100 work with analog video.

A DV camera, on the other hand, digitizes the video, compresses it, and writes a digital file to its on-board tape, all as it is shooting the video. To prepare to edit using non-linear software, all you have to do is copy that digital file from the camera’s tape into your computer.

But the DV format is more than just a digital version of ordinary analog video. In overall image quality, resolution, color reproduction, and sharpness, DV far outperforms older consumer and industrial formats such as Hi-8 and 3/4″ Umatic. In fact, DV delivers image quality that rivals high-end broadcast formats such as Betacam SP.

Note that the DV and MiniDV formats are really the same thing. Professional video formats have usually had two variants — a large tape for editing and studio work, and a smaller tape for field work. MiniDV was originally intended simply as the field version of DV, but its quality and popularity have made it the most popular of all DV formats.

With all the gnarly digitizing and compression hardware packed in your DV camera, you won’t have to spring for all those expensive, complicated video-digitizing cards. However, you do need a way of getting that digitized video information into your computer.

Wire of Fire
Back in the late 80s, Apple began working out the design of a new high-speed serial interface meant to replace existing serial interfaces, as well as SCSI and even Ethernet. Though officially known as IEEE-1394, Apple branded the interface with the name FireWire.

FireWire serves as the interface between your computer and your DV camera. With a FireWire connection, your computer can have full control over the camera (that is, it can activate the camera’s transport controls to move forward and backward through the tape) and a speedy data-transfer path to and from the camera’s videotape. (Remember, when you’re moving video between your DV camera and your computer, you’re capturing, not digitizing. The camera has already done all the digitizing.)

So How Do I Start?
By now you know that joining the digital-video revolution will require more than just grabbing that old VHS camcorder out of the back of the closet. If you insist on using an older analog camera (or perhaps you have a vast legacy of analog footage), you have a number of options for making the analog footage digital. Sony makes an analog-to-digital converter that retails for $499, or you could opt for a digitizing card for your computer. A wide range of such cards are available, including mid-range options such as the $849 miroMOTION DC30plus (for Macs) and $899 miroVIDEO DC30pro (for PCs), and high-end options such as the $4,695 Targa 2000 package (for Macs and PCs). Some graphics adapters, such as the $299 Matrox Marvel G400-TV (for the PC only), also do a creditable job for casual applications.

Yet another option would be to buy a digital video camera with analog input capability (such as the Sony DCR-TRV11) and dub your old tapes onto digital tapes. Note that you may notice some degradation in quality if you opt for this last option.

If you’re planning to pick up a new DV camera, then check your computer for a FireWire port. If it’s a PC, chances are it doesn’t have one; if it’s a recent Mac, chances are it does (every Mac from the first blue and white ships with two FireWire ports). There are a number of add-on cards for Macs and PCs, such as the $99 OrangeLink FireWire PCI Board (for Macs and PCs) from Orange Micro and the $69 Western Digital 1394 Desktop Adapter (for Macs and PCs).

Regardless of how you get your video to digital format, you’ll also need editing software and a lot of storage (how much and how fast varies depending on what format you’re shooting and the nature of your project). We’ll talk more about these and other topics in future columns.

The digital video revolution is revolutionary partly because it provides affordable access to easy, non-linear video production. And at its best, DV provides a level of image quality that rivals broadcast and film production. For examples of DV quality, one need go no farther than the local movie theater or video rental store: “Timecode,” “The Celebration,” “The Cruise,” “The Saltmen of Tibet,” and “Buena Vista Social Club” are just a few feature films shot entirely or in part with relatively inexpensive DV cameras.

Whether you want to shoot home movies, feature films, or corporate videos, your next decision is to choose a tape format and pick a camera. We’ll cover those issues in the next column.

  • anonymous says:

    I have been getting into Dv and was looking for a heads up article or website for links to manufacturers, information on products etc… and this article started my search. I cant wait to read more. If anyone has better links or some that they think I should check out, Please pass them my way [email protected]

  • anonymous says:

    “Yet another option would be to buy a digital video camera with analog input capability (such as the Sony DCR-TRV11) and dub your old tapes onto digital tapes. Note that you may notice some degradation in quality if you opt for this last option.”
    Question: Why would it degrade compared to using the Sony converter or a DV deck?

  • anonymous says:

    I’ve been trying to sort out hardware/software options for Win2000.

  • anonymous says:

    This was a good basic introduction to DV, but way too short. I felt like I had started read the first page of a book, turned the page and discovered the rest of the book was filled with blank pages.

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