Edit your own video on a PC with miro DC30

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Remember I told you recently how people in the computer industry wreaked havoc with the English language by creating their own rules for writing names? Here's another example: miro Computer Products.

It's not spelled "Miro", but "miro" with a lowercase "m". It's a German company based in Palo Alto that specializes in video capture and editing peripherals for both the PC and Mac.

For the uninitiated, a video capture board is an expansion card inside the CPU that lets one connect a PC to a video source.

The source can be a video camera, a camcorder, a TV, a VCR or even a laser disc player as long as they have composite video or S-Video input/output ports.

Some video capture boards handle only the video signal, leaving the audio part to the PC's audio card. Others handle both types of data to ensure that the video and audio are kept in sync.

Courtesy of Bhinneka Mentari Dimensi, I was able to play around with a very popular video capture board from miro, the DC30.

Just in case you are wondering, a video capture add-on for the PC or Mac is not new stuff. About two years ago I reviewed RealMagic Producer in this column.

It was a video capture board that could also convert video into MPEG files. At that time, the processor inside my test machine was a Pentium 90 MHz, and I was using a very expensive Micropolis SCSI hard disk. I was able to capture long video footage through a camcorder and store it on the PC. I was quite happy with the results.

Today, there are many other tools from different manufacturers that allow us to capture video from any video source. Some are expansion cards that we have to install inside the CPU, others are add-on peripherals that we can connect to the PC through the printer port.

There is the Snappy from Play, QuickVideo Transport from Alaris, Broadway 2.5 from Data Translation and Rainbow Runner Studio from Matrox.

The miroVideo DC30 board is one that has gained popularity among computer video hobbyists as well as professionals. I searched the Web with the help of AltaVista, and I ended up with more than 3,500 documents mentioning both miro and DC30. That's impressive.

This time around, Bhinneka, which is the product's distributor, let me use their Pentium 233 MHz Micron Millenia for the test bed. With a much faster machine, I had much more fun with video capturing and editing. If you like authoring your own videos, you will have a lot of fun with the DC30, too.

The DC30

The products of miro (www.miro.com) are aimed at both the home and low-end professional markets. These include the miroVideo DC20, DC30 and the more professionally oriented DC30 Plus video capture boards.

There is also a PC/TV board that also has a built-in video capture capability. For Mac users, miro has miroMotion DC30. If you're serious about video editing, you will need quick storage. Miro has a SCSI solution based on a RAID system consisting of Ultra-SCSI Seagate Barracuda hard disks. The price of this high- end storage is quite hefty though -- US$2,799.95 -- including a DC30 Plus package.

Also for those who want the latest in technology, miro has a Firewire capture board, the miroVideo DV100. It is based on the latest digital camcorder technology from Sony and you can connect it directly to your Sony digital camcorder.

At the low end, there is the miro DRX video capture board that carries a price tag under $300. That's not so bad, considering the fact that the RealMagic Producer that I tested cost around Rp 4 million at that time.

The miroVideo DC30 that I tested was a PCI card capable of a 6 MB per second data transfer (DC30 Plus has a 7 MB data transfer capability). It is capable of handling various video formats, including NTSC, SECAM and PAL -- the last format being what we have in Indonesia.

The DC30 is feature packed. It includes support for an external display so that you can preview the actual video footage on a TV monitor, for instance.

It also has a CD-quality audio input to ensure synchronization with the video. Video compression capability can be adjusted up to 3.5:1 for PAL and 3.1:1 for NTSC, but there is no MPEG conversion facility.

The frame capture rate is up to 30/25 frames per second and 60/50 fields per second for NTSC/PAL, and resolution can be up to 720 x 480 (NTSC) and 768 x 576 (PAL).

The package that I tested came with Adobe Premier LE. The newer releases come with the full version of the industry standard software. This program allows one to combine video and audio tracks and add titles and transition effects. It also comes with Asymetrix 3D F/X, so that one can create flying logos and add them to the video.

I captured the video with the Microsoft VidCap utility, but I could also use Premier to capture it. The result that you see in the accompanying picture is rather grainy because I enlarged the preview window a little too much.

Requirements

It is claimed by miro that the DC30 can be used on a PC with a Pentium 90 MHz, 16 MB of RAM and about 500 MB free space on the hard disk.

However, keep in mind that video editing is a processor- intensive application. A Pentium II system will definitely let you work more comfortably.

The next thing you should remember is that video and audio data consume a lot of hard disk space. A one-minute video occupied almost 60 MB in my test. In addition to capacity, you need a really fast hard disk for higher quality capture. That is why you may want an Ultra-SCSI hard disk, too.

A video capture board serves a lot of other functions as well, including video conferencing and video phone. However, the most important aspect of video capturing and editing is that it is a growing field that looks promising.

Just think about all the different multimedia we will need once the infrastructure for our Nusantara 21 Information Superhighway is put into place. If you want to shift gears and pursue a more promising career path, this would certainly be a good time.

But if you're not interested in working as a multimedia author, then keep in mind that a new type of E-mail attachment has been becoming increasingly popular. It is called a Videogram, and of course you can guess what that is.