DPS-PAR (animation recorder)

[DGB]

Does anybody know what drives currently work well with the DPS Personal Animation Recorder board.  DPS has been absorbed by another company and doesn't seem to have any support for thier products for the Amiga.  The last list I had of reccomended drives is old and outdated.  When I bought it the highest reccomended drive at the time was a big Micropolis drive.  With all the advances in IDE drives I would guess there are a lot of units out on the market that would do the trick nicely.  

I was thinking that there must be somebody out there that has one of these and has been through this  already.  The Micropolis I have is a little over a GB and will hold 18 minutes of animation.  I am thinking that a good 40GB drive would be all I would ever need.  I don't want to go and buy one just to learn that it won't perform properly for the DPS-PAR.  

Any help and advice on this would sure be appreciated.

Dave

[ShadesOfGrey]

Didi you see this?

I remember setting up a DPS PAR for an IBM PC along time ago.  I'm not 100% sure, but I think the DPS PAR had a max. capacity of 8GB.

Some one PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.

[Exitof99]

I use Western Digital, Quantum Fireball, and Maxtor drives all the time with my PAR, the only issue is that the PAR won't address higher than 8 gigs which is entirely due to the PAR software. I've used many different drive sizes all without any problems. I suggest getting a 7200 RPM 10 gig drive so you can get the best frame capture rate, and my rule the rule is buy the cheapest you can.

I like to find $40 hard drives that are 'too small' to sell for a higher price. Try looking at www.pricewatch.com for these new older drives. Currently, I see Western Digital 7200 RPM 20 gig drives for $40. Try one of those, and if it doesn't work, which it should, then it's a great hard drive for only $2 per gig!

[DGB]

          Wow !!!  An answer to a post of over 10 months ago.  I do appreciate it though.  I had always suspected that a lot of different drives would work well but if you read the original documentation that came with the DPS PAR you would think that almost nothing would work.  I will give it a try.  BTW, welcome to Amiga.org.  


Dave

[Exitof99]

Hi Dave,

I just happened to sign back up again today, I used to be on the forums before the several hacking incidents that occured way back when.

I figure that if I can help anyone out, I will! The drive list was also very challenging to look at when I first got my PAR, but I made the mistake of buying a 'PAR' drive from Hal of Harddrivers which was simply a 1 gig Quantum Fireball. Shortly after, I ordered a similar Fireball (ii2c or something) and it worked great.

My question to you is have you ever been able to export with out corrupting the video or stills? My experience with my particular PAR has been that I CAN NOT archive the video to anything as the software interface between the PAR card and Amiga just simply was not 100%. I tried getting the PC PAR card, which is infinitely more difficult to use, even though it has more software. I tried mounting the Amiga drives to it, but the files names weren't compatable, since the PC PAR wanted 8.3 DOS format file names!!!

My solution has simply been buy another hard drive rather than backing up data. Cost comparision between (as of a few years ago) a $40 HD and 4 - 2 gig DAT tapes or $13 for CD-Rs or over $100 for a Jaz disk, it made sense just to not hassle with the time backing up and just swap drives!

Another 'improvement' you can do: I moved my PAR setup to my A1200 which has no PC slots for the TBC-IV. The TBC IV in only needs the power to be supplied to the card, so only a few pins need to even be connected. I went a little over board with my temporary solution and installed the TBC-IV card in an old useless 486 tower with the motherboard not even having any RAM on it! I had to extend the cable that goes between the PAR card and TBC-IV card, which is just a standard SCSI 50 pin internal cable.

My monster has no issues, except looking rather bulky and cumbersome.

In the end, I found it worthless to use the PAR card as there are PC video capture cards out there for $40 that work, but are really a pain in the ass software wise sometimes. I bought a Pinnicle DV10 Studio card on sale a few years ago for $80, it works, but I had a problem with capturing full frame. I figured the problem, the video signal had too much going on in the overscan area, and was crashing the capture. But my old friend TBC-IV stripped the crappy sync and cleaned it up so that I could capture full frame again!

Boys and their toys...

[DoomMaster]

To DGB:

I have this same board.  The biggest harddrive that you can reliably use on it is 4 Gigs (same as the Amiga 2000).  You can still buy new 4 Gig hard drives on eBay.  With a 4 Gig harddrive you can record up to 1.5 hours of video.     :roll:

[The_Editor]

With a 4 Gig harddrive you can record up to 1.5 hours of video

Hmm.  How far are you compressing ?

1 hour 23 mins, DV native (you wouldn't wanna capture at anything less before edit & render) gives me a file size of 17 GIGS     :-o

Use Mjpeg etc   and you run the risk of losing audio sync.  (ask DaveyD)

[DGB]

[My question to you is have you ever been able to export with out corrupting the video or stills? My experience with my particular PAR has been that I CAN NOT archive the video to anything as the software interface between the PAR card and Amiga just simply was not 100%. I tried getting the PC PAR card, which is infinitely more difficult to use, even though it has more software. I tried mounting the Amiga drives to it, but the files names weren't compatable, since the PC PAR wanted 8.3 DOS format file names!!!



         Before we get into this too deep I need to tell you that I haven't had my Amiga stuff running for several years.  I am in the process of getting stuff together to do a bit of updating and modifying with better accelerator and controller cards and a catweasel.  Oh yeah, I forgot the the ethernet card so I can tie into my LAN as well as the internet.  

         As for you question I can't answer it because it has been a long time since I actually used the PAR.  I do remember that I needed a bigger hard drive but at the time I bought my par and drive it was about the best I could afford and that was $600.00.  Now that drives are bigger and cheaper I wanted to upgrade.  I also remember that for that time the video was great quality.  For what I was doing it filled the bill.  It's important to remember that at that time digital video was not available to the consumer as it is now.  I now have a Pinnicle DV board and Pinnicle Studio 8 software on my PC.  I want to get my Toaster, Amiga and all my DPS stuff working to use in conjunction with Studio 8 and the PC.    I am about to start on the Amigas so I will be watching the forum closer than I have been.  I am sorry I could not be of help in answering your question.  I try to answer any responses to any of my posts because I want to establish as many contacts as I can.  I will need all the help I can get when I get into getting all this stuff up and running.  Thank you for your response and information.

Dave

[DoomMaster]

To The_Editor:

If you need more then 4 Gigs of harddrive space to record a simple video, then you have your settings set too high.  Anyway, the PC does video capturing better then the Amiga.  Even the mighty Amiga 4000T is NO MATCH for a modern Pentium 4 computer.     :roll:

[kd7ota]

DoomMaster wrote:

If you need more then 4 Gigs of harddrive space to record a simple video, then you have your settings set too high.  Anyway, the PC does video capturing better then the Amiga.  Even the mighty Amiga 4000T is NO MATCH for a modern Pentium 4 computer.     :roll:

Ugh,

Yet again, WHO CARES!

I think Pentium 4 is no match for AMD Athlon 64-bit processor.