Ralph Bowman wrote in message <350A14DC.4EA8@qnet.com>...

>I am considering, like all of us, buying a 3 chip DV camera- Sony,
>Panasonic, Canon, whatever. Now how to edit and maintain the 500 lines
>resolution. Firewire to Spark or Miro 300? Firewire to Sony deck?
>Sony Deck has no effects, so only good for off line storage or cuts
>only editing. Spark or Miro board means additional outlay for AV hard
>drives with huge storage. So $3500 for the camera, $1000 for the board,
>and another $2000 to $3000 for the storage. $7000 or $8000 for 500 lines
>of resolution? Then what do you master to for multiple copies? SVHS...
>drop to 400 lines. Beta...who owns the deck? Sony DV deck? Another
>$3,000 to $4000 dollars? I have now jumped to $12,000 for 500 lines of
>resolution? Should I have gone out and bought a professional SVHS
>deck, a used SVHS pro camera, a color correction system and made my 400
>lines of resolution that I already have ( I shoot in Hi-8) better?
>Any ideas out there? Hey, how do you get your analog (second camera)
>footage onto the time line? Another Miro Board DC30+, $1000?
>
>What are you guys doing out there?


Hmmm, a bare-bones high-quality DV system could consist of:
- Sony VX-1000 3-chip camcorder................$2500-$3200 (used to new)
(or other good DV camcorder with FireWire connector)
- Computer with basic guts not incompatible with Spark, and an MMX
CPU with a speed of at least 200mHz..........(you may already own it)
- Spark or Miro-300 card with Premiere.........$700-900
- At least one 8.4-gig IBM Deskstar UDMA drive in addition to the
"C" drive (though I have captured DV successfully on the IBM used
as the "C" drive)............................$340 each
(these are cheap enough to buy several!)
- Use the camcorder for copying or assembling the master from the
computer.....................................$0
- Rent time on a DV VCR for conversion of analogue video to DV format,
or hope the $175 Iomega Buz eventually works well
I started with two IBM 9.1-gig Ultrastar SCSI drives (from www.onsale.com)
and an Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI card ($1600 total), an AMD K6-200MMX on
an Abit AX5 ATX motherboard, 96-megs of EDO RAM, and a mid-tower case
with LOTS OF ADDED FANS - THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT with the hot SCSI
drives!!! This was a conservative set-up, but I wanted to be reasonably
sure the whole thing could worked right off. It did, once I had downloaded
v. 1.05 of the Spark software from their web site (and used the Spark
software for capture, and Adaptec's DV-Deck for output back to the
camcorder [the Spark software can be used for output, but it is not as
pleasant to use]). While good DV footage is obviously (though not
extremely...) better than good original Hi-8 footage, the lack of
generation losses places it very noticeably ahead of Hi-8 in the edited
master - and the total cost is surprisingly low. I have made five videos
(5-60 minutes) with this outfit, and it works well for me.
--
David Ruether
http://www.fcinet.com/ruether
ruether@fcinet.com