DigitalBroadcaster Elite 32 Anyone used one?

[Jose]

What was the overall impression? How good was the quality?
And the software by the way?

[leirbag28]

I never owned one, but I have been looking for one.  Just dont know what it does and how well it does it

[Framiga]

Hi Jose

the best NLE solution for Amiga.

It uses Producer 2.2 as software and has a brackout box for Professional/Broadcast enviroment (CVBS-YC-YUV in-out)

A "must" for A/V NLE on Amiga and not only ;-)

If used with the companion SoundStage card (audio and video FX accelerator) is usable in professional works even now.

Buy it, if you can.

Ciao

[jeffimix]

and utterly rare, I think bboah has some info on it, it needs beefy systems.

[Jose]

@Framiga

I've read somewhere that it can reach 2:1 compression overall so the quality is completely preserved. Shame that only a few seem to have been produced. You have one right? Do you know if it can accept the RGB signal of most consumer devices or it only accepts the more pro component Betacam SP ?

[libz]

I've got a Broadcaster Elite 32 which I used together with a Sunrize16-audioboard. It has a long black breakout-box with Composite In/Out, Y/C In/Out as well as YUV In/Out. The board supports Linear TimeCode in/out, Composite sync out, key out, black burst in and a genlock input (for sync).
I don't think it reads RGB(+S) but I can't remember if there's a switch in software.

The software (Producer from Applied Magic) is quite OK. It works as a normal timeline-editor but at the same time you edit in the timeline you also produce an EDL (which can be imported/exported). So you can edit in both graphical as well as EDL-mode.
The quality is very good when running 2:1 compression BetaSP-material but it requires fast disks and a good SCSI-card (I use a Fastlane) and separate disks for audio and video. It has it's own filesystem which the disks must be formatted with.

The best companion for the Broadcaster Elite are the Soundstage-cards (16 or 20 bit), also from Applied Magic. But I think these are even more rare than the video card.

It works in 4 channels (2 stereo pairs) with a Sunrize 16-card but unfortunately you can't alter volume or panning from the Producer interface. This works in realtime with Soundstage-boards.

And it can't make transitions in realtime, everything must be rendered. There's PPC-modules for faster rendering (PowerUP).

Hope this helps :-)

[Jose]

Seems good alright. There are a couple of things that make me not go out and try to get one thought: the lack of digital in/out interfaces and the simple fact that I would be paying too much for something that wouldn't be much used after all, wich are the very high quality analog/digital converters (and D/A) and companion circuitry. From the few stuff I managed to read about it on the net those have really hight quality chips in there but since today it's all digital it would be a waste really.

[Jose]

Hmm,maybe with a Spider. Someone should make drivers for some Firewire cards for busboards, I wonder why it hasn't happened before. Maybe current busboards are not up to the job? Still, Firewire has 400, 200 and 100 Mbits/second. The lower speed is just a bit more than 12Mbytes /second so maybe that the problem. ZorroIII could handle it but I guess there's noone up for the job anymore.

[José Manuel]

Hi all.
libz have you the Elite?
I have one and need help to install in my Amiga 4000T PPC
Please email me
Thx

[jeffimix]

Maybe it'd be possible to do firewire if you could do what the VLab cards do for video, compress the data on the card then decompress it once it's gone through the slow Amiga busses, PPC might be up to the task of handling something like that, but I'm not sure if anyone's gonna do somethign that hard for a market losing its' most valued customers (hard core amiga nuts with cash, IE those who owns A1s/Pegs )

The Draco had a firewire card for its DraCo Bus