'Producer' lets you create your own movie on PC

'Producer' lets you create your own movie on PC

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Back in 1992, I attended a presentation of
AVID, a desktop video publisher that used a Macintosh Quadra. I
was especially dazzled by the Quadra's capability to capture
video and audio and mix them with animation to create rich
multimedia presentation. At that time, it really seemed that the
Mac was the only machine that could handle this kind of job. Just
three years later, however, I got the chance to experiment with
desktop video myself. But, this time, it was on a PC instead of a
Mac.

Courtesy of PT Memori Primatama, I had the opportunity to have
a little hands-on experience with desktop video, using a multimedia
authoring system called REALmagic Producer. This package
contained a video capture and compression board, a set of
Producer software kit that encodes and transcodes the video and
audio streams, Adobe Premiere 4.0 Deluxe CD, Caligari trueSpace
version 1.0, and Drastic Technologies frame-accurate software VTR
controller. The price of this package, I was told, is about Rp 8
million. That's actually not so bad, given the fact that the
price of trueSpace alone in the U.S. is already US$700.00, and
the leader of the video editing Premiere is sold at a slightly
higher price.

Requirements

Video and audio editing requires a lot of computing power, so
you need to have at least a 90 MHz Pentium machine. Even with
this type of CPU, transcoding will still take a lot of time.
Therefore, if you're serious about desktop video, you should
perhaps try to get a fully optimized Pentium 133 MHz with EDO
RAM.

The video capture and compression board comes only for 32-bit,
33 MHz PCI Bus, so your machine has to be high-end, PCI-based PC.
You need a lot of RAM, too; the system I used to test-drive
Producer, for instance, had 40 MB of RAM. Furthermore, you'll
need a REALmagic or REALmagic compatible MPEG playback card and a
sound card, as well. In addition, Adobe Premiere can only run on
a system with at least 256 color display capability. I had been
told that the best SuperVGA card for the system was the ones
based on Cirrus Logic chip, but I had no problem capturing and
playing back video clips on my aging, ISA-based Orchid
Technologies Fahrenheit 1280.

Finally, audio and video files gobble tremendous amounts of
hard disk space. A fully compressed MPEG file featuring my daugh
ter's two minute and twelve second poetry recital ate up a space
of more than 28 MB on hard disk. Therefore, you need the upward
of 2 GB hard disk. It has to be either Enhanced IDE or SCSI too;
otherwise the system will have difficulty keeping up with the
data stream coming in through Producer.

For the video source in my informal test, I used a Sony
HandyCam that had both composite and S-Video connectors. I could
also have used a TV monitor as the output device for video pre
view. The board had S-Video in and out, composite (RCA) in and
out, as well as sound in and out ports. As you can see in the
accompanying picture, Producer can also handle both NTSC and PAL
formats.

Editable MPEG

There are a number of video capture and compression boards
available on the market today, such as Video It! from ATI
Technologies, Video Blaster from Creative Labs, VideoStar Pro
from Diamond Multimedia Systems, and Intel Smart Video Recorder
Pro from Intel. What's special about Producer, however, is that
it is the first to be based on MPEG compression standard. As you
may already know, MPEG is not the only compression standard that
exists today. We have, for example, Indeo from Intel, Cinepak
from Radius/SuperMac, and Motion JPEG. However, MPEG is fast
gaining strong popularity because of its video quality, as
opposed to other technologies.

I wrote about the basics of MPEG compression in one of my
previous articles. Suffice it now to say that MPEG standard
compresses a file with a ratio of 100:1. This efficiency is one
of the things that make MPEG the hottest thing in digital desktop
video.

Having connected and turned on the video camera, I was
immediately able to get the Preview working. However, the
encoding did not work and I was unable to capture anything. I
tried changing all the settings, but it still didn't budge.
Finally, I decided to erase all my Windows files and reinstall
everything afresh. This time, everything worked properly.

Signals

The analog video signals coming in from the camera was
converted into digital form and saved as an .AVI file, while the
audio data was captured and saved as an .WAV file. Before I began
encoding, I had to preview the video first to check whether
things were acceptable. Once I was satisfied with the displayed
video, I told my daughter to read her poems in front of the
camera and I started encoding by clicking on the button with the
red dot. After two minutes and twelve seconds, she finished
reading her poems, and I stopped the encoding process. At this
point, I called up Media Player and previewed the captured video.
There was no sound, as the video file didn't contain any audio
data.

The next step was to transcode the separate .AVI video
and .WAV audio files into fully compressed MPEG-1 file. As prom
ised by Sigma Designs, this process took about three times longer
than the length of the clip itself; so, after over six minutes I
already had a .MPG file. I started Media Player again, I chose
Realmagic as the device, and a list of .MPG files appeared. I
clicked on the one I just created, and bingo! The next thing I
knew I was watching the video clip and listening to my daughter's
voice in CD quality.

I could use Premiere to edit the .AVI file, combine it with
other clips, add transition effects, add music background and add
titles before transcoding it into .MPG file. Finally, I could
create animation file with trueSpace and add it to the clip. The
possibility is endless.

Imperfections

Once the system is properly set up, everything should work
flawlessly. However, as my experience showed, it is best to
dedicate one PC just for Producer alone, as additional
application programs have potential for conflicts with the
complex setup of Producer.

The newly added on-line help is still very minimal, although
it does provide some useful configuration tips. In addition, the
software pieces still come in separate media. Producer tools,
trueSpace, and Drastic Technologies' software VTR come on
diskettes, while Adobe Premiere comes on a CD-ROM. It would be
nice if all of them came on one single CD, as it would simplify
installation significantly.

The manual talks about EDL, a feature which has yet to be
implemented in future versions of Producer. EDL was already on
the menu bar, although the menu items under it were grayed out.

I was not able to get the S-Video source working. I believe it
was caused by poor connection, as the casing of my PC made it
difficult to insert the plug properly into the board's jack.
Finally, Producer never warned me when it was to overwrite my
already existing clips. Needless to say, these are just some
glitches that Sigma Designs will soon iron out.

Final words

REALmagic Producer is not meant for professional, broadcast
quality video editing tasks. The video quality approaches that of
VHS, but the audio quality is on par with audio CD. REALmagic
Producer is targeted more on multimedia production houses which
specialize on authoring multimedia materials for training, educa
tion, marketing, information kiosks, etc. For these purposes,
Producer really shines.