Digital Editing on my A4000T, Toccata or Prelude ? VLAB-Motion comments please?

[Corrie]

I have an A4000T, Cyberstorm MKIII 060 66mhz, 128Mb FastRam, PicassoIV, 9Gig UltraSCSI HD. I am planning to experiment with the VLAB Motion digital editing card.

I would like to hear from people who have used/owned the VLAB-Motion card. Can you please tell me what it is like, how easy is movieshop to use and its effectivness on editing. I have a number of VHS videos that I want to transfer to HD/CD. How useful is this card?

Further to this, I don't have a soundcard as yet, I was keen on the prelude soundcard. Is it a better choice to use the toccata soundcard with the VLAB-Motion card? Will the prelude be just as compatible/useful?

Please reply if you can add some useful info. Does anyone know the history of these cards, pros and cons ?

Thanks in advance!

Hi there!

Tha VLab-Motion is the best (and come to think of it) the only card for the Amiga that you can use to do non-linear editing.

To edit videos with sound you need:

1 VLab-Motion
1 Toccata (or possibly a Repulse sound card although it is known not to work with some A4000 hardware revisions)
1 separate HD for video
1 separate HD for sound

Tha VLab-Motion has one "bug": you are limited size-wise as to how large your partitions (video and audio) can be.

Otherwise I can highly recommend it; I`m using one myself although in conjunction with two DraCo`s :-D

Hope this helps a bit.

CU

Alex

[wolfie]

There are some other options - for example the Video Toaster Flyer (only NTSC I think) and Broadcaster32 (the most professional video editing card for Amiga - takes up four (!) Zorro slots...

Personally I own a VLAB Motion, but in an Amiga you can't get very good quality. Too much motion will introduce errors in the video streams at higher quality levels. Then the Draco-version of VLAB Motion is much better since the speed of Draco's bus is much higher than Zorro-II/III.

If you use VLAB motion in an Amiga, make sure to use fast harddrives - preferably U-WIDE SCSI-3 at 10000 rpms. The software (Movieshop) is very neat and powerful. Especially if you link it with other programs such as Monument Designer (titling program).

[Corrie]

Alex,

Thanks for the reply mate, it certainly helped. When you talk about the limits of partitions (size-wise) for video and audio, what are those limits?

Can I use a prelude ZII soundcard with the VLAB-Motion?

Wolfie,

Thanks for your reply too. I am going to buy one of the Seagate 15k SCSI drives, so that will be fast enough! What is the best quality that I could do on the Amiga?

Thanks again!