“I want to convert video from a 3/4″ video deck into QuickTime movies to lock with my Digital Performer sequencer. I have a Mac G3 with all 3 PCI slots spoken for. Is there a technology that will enable me to capture frame accurate video without the use of a PCI slot?”
For the answer we consulted Sweetwater computer/video expert, and Sales Engineer, Jim Metzendorf. He says…
I think the best way to capture video into your G3 since all three of your PCI slots are full would be via Firewire. Sony and several other companies make analog to Firewire converter boxes that will encode the video signal from your 3/4″ deck into a DV (Digital Video) format stream. When used in conjunction with a program like Adobe Premiere or Apple’s own Final Cut Pro, you would be able to make full screen, full motion QuickTime movies from your 3/4″ deck.
The one thing you would have to do after this point is recompress the files into a more manageable resolution and file size. Here’s some quick tech talk: DV format video consumes approximately 3.6 MB per second, and has a relative compression ratio of about 5:1 compared to an uncompressed video signal. When calculated in longer run times, 30 minutes of DV uses a bit more than 6 GB of hard drive space. While this has been an incredible boon to the desktop video market, Digital Performer and other DAW applications would simply choke on files of this magnitude; especially when playing back MIDI and Audio tracks, not to mention the presence of any plug-ins! Because of this, it is best to recompress the video into a resolution of 320×240 and a less CPU intensive compression codec like Sorenson (included in Apple’s QuickTime Pro). The end result will be full motion video that can accurately be scrubbed frame by frame in sync with your DP session that not only looks great, but doesn’t hog precious system resources.
