Video editing - some advice please!!

[selco]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the draco. The comment "MJPEG SUCKS" is definitely wrong. At least for the draco with Draco-Motion. It delivers absolute great picture quality. The software "Movieshop", especially the version5, is a really great editing program. The Draco has only a 50MHz CPU, that's correct, but the hard work is done in Hardware, so the 50MHz are no issue here. Ok, calculating effects takes some time, but again, the results abe really professional.

That might be different on a PC, but the Draco was a hell expensive Profi machine and it is still *very* good.

With the Vlab-Motion in an Amiga this a little bit different. There are restrictions in picture quality  due to limited bandwith of the ZorroII-Bus and the design of the Vlab-Motion.

(The draco motion can adapt the quality on the fly. So you can tell the draco to compress the video to always fit into 6MByte/second. On Amiga you must set the quality static so that the most compicated pictures of your move not exite the bandwith of about 2.5(?) MBtye/s. So you compress most the time much to hard just ensure the few complicated pictures to fit inti the bandwith.

If you can get cheap Draco (with Dracomotion and , if possible with DV-Inmodule) you sould  really consider it. It is really worth the money.

Over Chrismas I made a video with Amiga, Draco and Lightwave, TVPaint and so on. You can find it at
ftp://de.aminet.net/pub/aminet/pix/mpg/littlejedi.mpg

The picure-quality is only limited by the mpeg-encoder here.

For real working the Draco should have a network card. (Connection to the rest of the world Not all cards work in the Draco! I can recommend the Ariadne-II together with Envoy-3 for Amiga connection or Samba for PC-Connection.

There is also an adapted Amiga-OS3.9 available for the Draco.
The best (German) Draco-Portal is http://home.t-online.de/home/ing.sed/
There is also a (German) mailinglist at http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/draconer. But you could also ask in English, of course.

Hope that helps a little.

Kind regards, selco   http://selco.da.ru

[selco]

@Animagic:
"Have wou ever tried to measure the picture quality of M-JPEG using a Tectronix BROADCAST spectrum analyzer?"

No, of course not. And I don't want to offend anyone. I measured it with my eyes as that is what is important for an hobbyist. And judging from  the eyes the results are superb. Of course there is is a loss in a compression like MJPeg. But with the bandwith of over 6 MBytes/s and the dynamic adaption of compression rate on the draco motion, you will not detect any visible decrease in quality.

The same argument must be true for MPEG-2 as it is also a lossy compression.

In both cases, MJPEG and MPEG-2, only  the allowed datarate / compression ratio determines the quality.

Thats different on The Amiga with Vlab-Motion. Here the hardware-limitations of the Zorro-2 bus and the VlabMotion are more serious. Maximum Bandwith about 2.5 (?) MBytes/s and the VlabMotion requires a fixed compression level. Here you have to adjust between visible quality-loss and datarate that the hardware is able to handle.

The quality of the draco is much higher than the quality of my video-sources (Digital camcorder), so...

I have both, Amiga4000T/VlabMotion and Draco/Dracomotion so I can compare.

To summarize it: I paid abou 3500DM (ca. 1750 Euro) for the draco. (old but completely unused) excluding HD and RAM. That was alot of money but I am really happy with it. It is a tool that works good on the task it has been made for.

@Unit21:
I wrote a short description at
http://amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=43928
If you have more questions feel free to ask me. (Address is on my homepage)

I am not sure what a fair price for the draco is. Sometimes there are dracos for sale on ebay.
The best Draco-Website I know is http://home.t-online.de/home/ing.sed/     (German)

There is also a Yahoogroup for the draco. (German, but English is welcome too, of course) Sometimes member sell their machines, you could ask there.
http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/draconer/

The draco should be equipped with the "DV-Module", if possible. That gives you DV-In and -Out in addition to the analouge ports. You would probably not be able to get this module separately any more. Movieshop5 should be included, if possible. Version 4 is good too but V5 is better. If its not included you need to buy Version5, and that is quite expensive. (And you need a personal keycode that corresponds to your Draco-MachineID, so no chance get it for free somewhere)  64 MByte Ram is enough, harddisks should be huge. I replaced my 18GB HD with a 80GB-Harddisk recently. But even 18 GByte will give you about 40 Minutes at best quality. Fortunataly there are now SCSI->IDE adaptors available.(about 80 Euro IIRC)  So you can buy a cheap huge IDE Harddisk and such a connecter. This combination is much cheaper than a big SCSI-HD.

What can you do with a draco? It is made for video editing and there it is good. The draco is not an Amiga, it has no custom Chips, so no OCS/ECS/AGA nor Paula-sound. Most older programs will not work either due to custom chip-access or due to bad/incompatible programming. New programs should run.

Movieshop and especially Version 5 is great! It comes with alot of effects and additional effect-disks are still available for sale. You can combine all effects in the timelines. Additionally you can export the pictures and process them with ADPro for instance, wich is included with the Draco. Finally you would reimport them.

There is a shareware-tool wich mounts your scene as an usual Amiga-Drive. You can then load/process every single picture of your scene without exporting it before.

Finally there is a special adapted version of Amiga-OS 3.9 available for the Draco.

I use the Draco for Video-capture/editing and as additional render node for lightwave.


Kind regards selco, http://selco.da.ru