'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.