Testing Platform: To test Windows video capturecards we used a state-of-the-art Dell 90MHz Pentiumwith PCI and ISA buses as our principal test machinealong with two similarly configured clones. Wechose the P90 because it has enough horsepower toplay back software-only codec files like Indeo andCinePak at their top rates. Each machine had 16MBof RAM, an internal 440MB IDE harddrive, an Adaptec AHA 1542CF SCSIadapter/controller and a 1.7GB Microp-olis Microdisk AV-ready removablehard drive. Creative Labs Sound Blaster16 cards were installed with double-speed CD-ROM players. We also useda 486DX2/66 with 8MB of RAM to testthe cards with PC Video chips, whichrequire less than 16MB of memory tobe present.

Our standard software included DOS 6.2.1,Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Video for Windows1.1a, Adobe Premiere 1.1, Adaptec EZ-SCSI, SoundBlaster 16, graphics display card drivers, Norton

Utilities and a number of hard disk speed test andvideo playback test utilities. We loaded standardconfig.sys and other boot files with the baseline sys-tem. The Adaptec BIOS settings were set to thesame shadow RAM and DMA transfer rates, and themotherboards' BIOS used the same shadow RAM forgraphics display. We restored the entire boot disk

before installing each new card for testingandSCI.permanent 50MB Windows swap file on the bootdrive. We then installed each card according to themanufacturer's directions. All cards had installation

(continued on page 78)

Windows Video Capture CardsBy Bob Doyle

C users who need to cap-ture video for corporatepresentations, CD-ROM

games, kiosks or educational appli-cations used to be at a decided dis-advantage compared to their Macpeers. Just one year ago we tested14 Video for Windows capturecards, and only half could evenachieve 8-bit color,

160-by-120-pixelcapture at 15 frames per sec-ond. (Intel's Smart Video Recorderwas a notable exception.) Further-more, no editing software was thenavailable for the PC. Adobe's Pre-miere was at version 2.0 on theMac, but only just about to appearfor Windows.

Today, there are more than 40PC capture cards that do betterthan last year's standard, and atleast 20 include hardware compres-sion chips enabling full-color (24-bit) capture, many at full -motion(defined as 30fps) and some at full-screen (640 by 480). Several newediting packages are also available,including Premiere 4.0 for Win-dows, the undisputed champ.

For this review we looked forboards that were supposed to beable to capture and compress full-color (24-bit), full-motion (30fps),quarter-screen (320 by 240) videoin real time on Level 2 multimediaPCs. This size is appropriate forcomputer screen presentations,and the data rates are small enoughto play back from CD-ROMs andover video server networks. Thirtyframes per second can also elimi-nate lip-sync problems in the "talk-ing head" shots so common inmultimedia presentations. While

we started out with 22 cards, only11 met this standard and nineare top-rated. Eighteen arereviewed here.

Full-motion video captureshould not be confused with still-frame capture. All these cards cancapture very high-quality 640-by-480 still frames for use in imageprocessing.

Prices for the top-ratedboards range from $500 to$3,000. We do not include twoboards from Matrox and Truevi-sion in the $6,000 range that arecapable of 60-field, full-screencapture, the standard for broad-

cast-quality nonlinear video edit-ing. (We reviewed these cards inthe August issue.)

Surprisingly, many of themore expensive cards do not pro-vide better performance. These aregenerally cards of older design,some taking up two full-length ISAslots and originally intended forhigh-quality JPEG still-framecapture and video-in-a-windowoverlay. M-JPEG video capturecapability was added to these cardsto take advantage of the emergingdesktop video market, and captureperformance is generally poor.Some older cards also use the

Chips & Technologies PC Videochip, which requires less than16MB of RAM, a severe limitationfor work in Windows. Newercards are usually 3/4- or 1/2-lengthISA and PCI cards that exploitcompression chips from LSILogic and Zoran optimized for320-by-240 capture or integrate theC-Cube CL-550 chip onto muchsmaller cards or daughtercardoptions. Despite their small sizeand lower prices, many newercards provide video overlay func-tions, excellent 640-by-480 still-frame capture and even NTSCvideo encoding.

77 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

NewMedia Lab Test ProceduresFeature'.Choosing the right capture card hasbecome a lot more complicatedthan last year. Major decisionsinclude:

>Which compression algo-rithm to use—Motion-JPEG,Indeo, DVI, Auravision, MPEG orsoftware-only;

>Which slot and system bustype—ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI;

>Connection to your VGAcard for video overlay—VESA Fea-ture Connector, VESA AdvancedFeature Connector, VESA MediaChannel or external passthroughconnector (see page 82);

>Whether you want movieplayback acceleration and scalingfeatures—these can reside on yourcapture/overlay card or on yourgraphics display card;

>Whether you want the cardto double as a VGA graphics card;

>Whether you want NTSCencoding (output) for videotaperecording; and

>Whether you want audiocapture on the video capture cardor on a separate sound card.

Other options include TVtuners for video-in-a-window,MPEG playback and A/B switcherswith wipes and dissolves betweentwo video input sources.

QualityAs you might expect, average videoimage quality is much better than lastyear, and the range of quality is nar-rower. There is less color variationfrom card to card, and quarter-screenimages (320 by 240) are the samequality as the user interfaces of cur-rent high-end nonlinear editing sys-tems such as the Avid MediaComposers. This quality is fine for"offline" video editing in which youcapture with time code, edit in Pre-miere and later take the batch list ofyour Premiere project to a higher-end system for broadcast-quality 60-field capture. (Premiere is the onlyprogram offering time code supportand batch recapture on the PC.)

For multimedia distributionon CD-ROMs or on video servernetworks where data rates are lim-

(continued from page 77)

woes (see "Installing and Tuning Windows CaptureCards," page 92).Capture Procedures: To provide identical sourcemedia for each card, and a challenge for their videocompression chips, we created a four-minute digitalmedia diagnostic test on Betacam SP tape with theMatrox Studio 2300 nonlinear editing system. Ourtape sources were top-quality (i.e., low-noise) BetaSP materials.

Each section of the tape was designed to high-

light typical compression problems. One sectionemphasized motion to test interframe compressorslike Indeo, another section had little motion but com-plex scenes and another had still frames. Whiteframes and beep tones at one-minute intervalstested audio-video synchronization. We recordedstandard video test signals generated by a TruevisionVIDI/0 Workbench, and five seconds of a resolutiontest chart were shot with an Ikegami studio camera.We also generated random video noise alternatingwith black-and-white frames and a number of wipesand DVE moves of checkerboard black/white/-color/noise patterns, using Inscriber CG software andthe Matrox Studio's DVE capability.

We captured this test tape with each board in

several combinations of compression quality, win-dow size and color depth, and determined the maxi-mum frame rate that could be obtained with eachone. So that we could quickly detect dropped framesupon playback of captured video, our test tape hadan animated time code display with a sweeping bar.

The Micropolis AV drives were defragmentedwith Norton Speed Disk before each capture toensure optimum performance. We then used theVideo for Windows VidCap utility as the capture soft-ware whenever possible. Contiguous sectors could bepre-allocated for the video capture file in VidCap or inthe card's own capture utility. We color-calibratedour three 17-inch monitors with a standard SMPTEcolor-bar pattern stored as a disk file and made videoadjustments for each capture card's video input withthe SMPTE color bars on our test tape.

Analysis: Our testresults varied widelyin image quality andframe rates achieved.(For image-qualityresults, see page 84.)As far as frame rates,only 11 of the 18cards we tested metour standard of 24-bitcolor, 30fps captureof a 320-by-240 videowindow. The othercards dropped lots offrames—if theycould capture at thislevel at all.

We also testedhow well the cardsplayed back a cap-

tured video file on disk and found that few could playback as well as they could capture—a surprisingresult, since M-JPEG compression takes longer thandecompression (although both tasks are completed inreal time with appropriate chips). Most would occa-sionally skip frames.

Video for Windows apparently has trouble pro-ducing smooth playback. This may be caused by Win-dows and DOS software servicing higher-priorityinterrupt handlers and not coming back in time. Wealso found that VidCap's status line was inaccurate insome cases. VidCap would report zero frames droppedduring capture when there were actually missingframes. The capture driver, written by the card manu-facturer, may not be reporting accurately to VidCap.

NewMedia Lab's DigitalMedia Test Tape isdesigned to evaluate thei mage and motion qualityachieved by video com-pression products. A vari-ety of text, animation andcomplex motion videosequences are includedon the tape.

7 8 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

Windows Video Capture CardsCompanyPhone

AlphaSystems Lab(714) 252-0117

ATI(905) 882-2600

CogentElectronics/ADS(415) 591-6617

Creative Labs(800) 998-1000

DiamondMultimedia(408) 736.2000

FastElectronic US(415) 802-0772

HauppaugeComputer Works(800) 443.6284

IBM/Intel(800) 241-1620

Product MegaMotion Video-Itl Video Wizard Video BlasterRT300

VideoStar Pro MovieMachine Pro

WIN/TV Cinema ActionMedia II

Tested with 2MB VRAM M-JPEG option M-JPEG option Capture option

Slot type, size ISA, full ISA, 1/2 ISA, full ISA, 3/4 ISA, 3/4 2 slots, ISA 3/4 ISA, 1/2 ISA (also MC)

Minimum system 386, 4MB RAM,sound card

486/33, 8MB RAM 386/33, 4MB RAM 386DX/33, 4MB RAM,Sound Blaster

486SX/25,8MB RAM

386/25,4MB RAM

386 386/25,6-8MB RAM

Memory limit o o 8MB o 0 ) 0 0

Configuration needs 2 IRQ, 1 I/Oaddress, 2 memorybase addresses

1 1/0 address I IRQ, 2 DMA, I I/Oaddress, I memory address,I buffer address

1 I/O address, I IRQ 2I/0 addresses,2 IRQ, 1 memoryaddress

2 IRQ, 2 DMA,

2 I/O addresses,

I memory address

I IRQ, I I/O address,I memory address

1 IRQ, 1 I/O,I memory

address

VESA/Passthrough connectors *t• o/o bib oh • i• e/• • /• °t•

VIDEO CAPTURE

Standards NTSC, PAL NTSC, PAL NTH, PAL NTSC, PALNTSC, PAL NTSC, PAL NTSC, PAL NTSC, PAL

Connectors 1 S-video 2 RCA, 1 S-video 3 RCA, 3 audio 3 RCA, 1 S-video 2 RCA, 1 S-video 2 RCA in, I out 2 RCA Splitter cable

Sampling YUV 4:2:2 Selectable YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:1:1 YUV 4:1:1 YUV 2:1:1 YUV

Compression chip C-Cube CL-55O Intel 8275OPD C-Cube CL-550 Intel i750 Zoran/Auravision loran Auravision Intel i750

Compression scheme M-JPEG Index M-JPEG lndeo M-JPEG M-/PEG Auravision DVI

Dynamic•Q control oo o o 3 'D o

Video controls Brightness, Contrast,Hue, Saturation

Brightness, Contrast,Color, Tint

Brightness, Hue, Red, Green,Blue

Brightness, Contrast,

Tint, Saturation

Brightness, Contrast,Hue, Saturation

Brightness, Contrast,

Hue, Saturation

Brightness, Contrast, Hue,Saturation

Brightness,

Contrast,Saturation, Tint

Capture to AVI file • • o • • • • DVI only

VIDEO PLAYBACKLive overlay 0 o • •o • • •Onboard VGA Optional o o o o o 0

Analog output • • o Optional • 0 o

Video acceleration 0 o o o • 0 •

Audio capture o 0 • 0 o o 0 o

Other options o o o o o TV tuner TV tuner o

BUNDLED SOFTWAREEditing MediaMerge Premiere o oPremiere Premiere 0

Video for Windows • • o • • • o 3

Other ASL Utilities Media Capture 0 Compel PE 0 Premiere option $SS o a

Uninstall feature o • 0 .D D o o o

Warranty (years) 2 5 I 1 5 1 I I

Price (w/test options) $1,095 $499 $1,950 $499.95 $529 $940 $349 $995

Reader Service No. 580 599 582 583 584 585 586 S87

• = Yes, o = No or none.

8 0 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

In-Motion Intelechnologies (800) 538-3373415) 968-6363

Matrox(800) 810-2550

Miro ComputerProducts(800) 249-6476

OmnicompGraphics(713) 464.2990

OrchidTechnology(800) 767-2443

Triumph LogisticComputers(818) 858-S700

VIC Hi-Tech(310) 643-S193

VideoLogic(800)S78.5644

XingTechnology(800) 294-6448

icture Smart Videoerfect Pro Recorder Pro

Marvel II miroVIDEODC1 tv

M&M Pro VidiolaPremium Pro/D

TriumphonyVisual Forge

Video Packer DVA-4000 Xingltl

igital:R option

Studio %PressM-JPEG card

11 -JPEG option M-JPEG option V-20 8 V-30 options MediaSpaceM-JPEG card

A, 2 slots ISA PCI ISA, full ISA, full ISA, full I ISA, I PCI slot ISA, full ISA, 2 slots ISA, full

86, 4MB RAM 386/25, 4MB 386, 8MB RAM 486, 8MB RAM 386 386, 4MB RAM 486, 4MB RAM 386/33,4MB RAM

386 386, 4MB RAM

) D 0 8MB 3 08m

o 3

IRQ, I I/O I IRQ,I I/O addressidress, Iemory address

I memory address I I/O address, Imemory address

I I/O address, I DMA, IIRQ

I IRQ,2 I/O addresses,I memory address

2 IRQ, II/O address, IDMA

2 IRQ, videoDMA, audio DMA,memory address

2 IRQ, 2 memoryaddresses

I IRQ,I I/O address

I.• o/o 0/0 o/3 If SVGA not installed/3 • /• •/• 3/3 • /• o/0

SSC, PAL RISC, PAL NTSC, PAL, SECAM NTSC, PAL RISC, PAL NTSC, PAL SECAMNTSC, PAL NTSC, PAL SECAM NTSC, PAL SECAM NTSC, PAL

RCA I RCA, I S-video Splitter options I RCA, I S-video I RCA, 3 S-video in,I S-video out

I RCA, I S-video I RCA, 1S-video I RCA, audio 2 RCA I RCA

16 4:1:1 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:2:2 YUV 4:1:1 4:2:0

Tan Intel i150 C-Cube CL-450 LSI 64702 C-Cube CL-550 C-Cube CL-550 a C-Cube CL-55O C-Cube CL-550 DSP

PEG I ndeo M-JPEG M-JPEG M-JPEG M-JPEG o M-/PEG M-JPEG M PEG

o o • 3 D o o o oightness, Brightness, Contrast,mtrast, Hue Saturation, Tint

Brightness, Hue,Contrast, Saturation,Sharpness

Brightness, Contrast,Hue, Saturation

Brightness, Contrast, Hue,Saturation, Red, Green,Blue

Brightness, Contrast,Hue, Saturation

Brightness, Contrast, Hue,Saturation

Brightness, Contrast,Hue

Brightness, Hue,Contrast, Saturation,Sharpness

Brightness, Saturation

• • • • • • o • Converts to AVI

0 • • • •• • • •o • Optional SVGA 3 • J o o

• • • • 0 D • oa • • o • o D 0 o

• o o 0 • oHer memory ,)

grademiroMov e Pro 0 Orchid Wave o Win/DOS API $99 0 o

Digital Video Producer Ulead V-Studio Premiere -, XingltPremiere 0 0 Premiere

• • • o • o •

nel Multimedia, Compel, Gatekeeperdia Capture TriDigital CD, MediaBlitz

Premiereoption $100

0 Asymetrix Compel,PhotoMorph

iPhoto Plus D 3 Xing CD

• o ) 0 o o D o o

I I 2 I 4 2 I I 2

99 8570 $195 $899 $995 $899 $540 $1,995 $2,995 $499

9 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598

81 NEWMED TA NOVEMBER 1994

Do You Need Video Overlay?

a

V ideo overlay is very useful for accurate video capture, but manycards don't include it. Often called video-in-a-window, this fea-ture lets you see live video input on-screen without burdeningyour CPU. The live display lets you make real-time decisionsabout when to start and stop capture operations whilewatching the overlay image.No Overlay (tog►: Without overlay, you areforced to work blind (which is possible ifyou use time code), use a separateNTSC monitor or use the Previewfunction in Video for Windows'VidCap, Premiere and other edit-ing packages.

With Preview, the capture cardsends the decompressed video imageover the system bus to the graphics dis-play card with two unfortunate results: Thepictures are poorer quality and much slower in framerate, and the CPU cycles spent moving your uncompressedpreview images may reduce your capture frame rate. FuturePCI bus cards should be able to accomplish Preview withoutthese penalties, but all ISA cards suffer from them.

A better solution is to turn Preview off anduse a separate NTSC monitor to watchthe video input. You can eitherloop the video through the mon-itor or use a VCR/camcordersource with two outputs.Video Overlay (bottomleft►: Most video overlaycards take the VGA signalfrom your graphics dis-play card via the VESAFeature Connector (a rib-bon cable to your overlaycard), put it in a RAMframe buffer on the overlaycard, replace a part of the Win-dows screen image with the videoimage and output the combined signal to thecomputer monitor. Your capture card frame buffer therefore should have thesame amount of RAM as your VGA card for peak performance. Some cardsswitch the signal through an external passthrough cable when not doing videooverlay, which eases performance problems. Overlay is much faster than pre-view since compressed video moves over the system bus.Video Inlay (bottom right►: A more efficient overlay method used in newercards sends the video image, usually limited to 640 by 480, from your video

NO OVERLAY

card to the graphics display card for "inlay" there. Only one large frame bufferis needed. A new board connector, the VESA Advanced Feature Connector(VAFC), has been developed for this purpose. It is 32 bits wide instead of 16.VESA Media Channel is a multi-card version of VAFC that uses over-the-topribbon cables to connect cards. Inlay is as fast as overlay and less expensive,and any video acceleration circuitry on the graphics card can be used to scaleup video and perform color space conversion.

ited, you can recompress 320-by-240 program material with Super-Mac's CinePak or Intel's new Indeo3.2 software compressors, both ofwhich come with most of thesecards. Quarter-screen M-JPEGimages should compress nicely onthe new low-cost, real-time MPEGcompression engines, since MPEGand M-JPEG are related compres-sion methods, but be on the look-out for unusual artifacts fromcascading Indeo's vector quantiza-tion and MPEG's discrete cosine

transform quantization.Disappointingly, QuickTime

for Windows 2.0 drivers were notprovided with any of these cards. Autility called SmartCap, availablefrom Intel, allows some of thesecards to capture directly intoQuickTime for Windows format,using Indeo coders.

The top nine cards in ourreview were all able to capture full-motion (30fps), quarter-screen(320-by-240) AVI video with goodcolor and image quality.

MegaMotion

ASL's MegaMotion($1,095 includingPremiere) is one ofthe most unusual

cards we tested. It's aimed atsophisticated kiosk and teleconfer-encing applications in which devel-opers want to display up to fourresizable, repositionable videossimultaneously, along with a num-ber of still images. One videostream can be compressed video

from the hard disk. The othersmust be live video inputs, whichrequires a $70 auxiliary video inputadapter that takes up a slot.

A serious drawback is that thesimultaneous videos are limited to acombined total of 30fps. Threevideos would each play at only10fps. MegaMotion offers sometransitions between source videosand special effects, but the choicesare limited and the controls awk-ward. The Fast Movie Machine Prois better if you need A/B roll for

DOES THE JOB

82 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

Diamond's Video-Star Pro ($529including Premiere)is one of several

% of Frames Played 0 20 40 60 80 100

videotape production. MegaMo-tion's NTSC output is limited tostraight playback of AVI files.

MegaMotion doubles as amodest-quality VGA display card.Accelerated Windows graphics andvideo overlay are both done on thiscard, but it does not include movieacceleration and is not DCI-com-pliant (see "Video CompressionTechnology," page 88). If you needgood VGA capability along withvideo capture, the Matrox Marvel IIis better and cheaper.

On playback, MegaMotionskipped about 10 percent offrames, making it jerky and unat-tractive. While we had trouble withskipped frames on many cards,usually we could eliminate theproblem after optimizing our sys-tems. Only the Orchid (15 percentdrop rate) and Indeo (40-50 per-cent) cards were worse.

MegaMotion's inputs andoutput are S-video only; compos-ite adapter cables are supplied.We missed having simultaneouscomposite output for monitoringand S-video output for recording.The color-bar generator functionwas useful.

MegaMotion is a very com-plex and technical card. Unless youreally need its powerful features,stick with a simpler card for straightvideo capturing.

The Video BlasterRT3 0 0 ($499.95including Premiere)moves Creative Labs

from the bottom level of perfor-mance last year to near the toptoday. The board uses the sameadvanced Intel i750 PE compres-sion chip found in the Smart VideoRecorder Pro. It should be capableof the same 320-by-240 perfor-mance at 30fps, but we were onlyable to look at a prerelease versionof this card.

Like the other Indeo cards(from ATI and Intel), the RT300 isnot an overlay card. If you want towatch your incoming video care-

fully during the capture process,you need to hook up an NTSCmonitor to an extra output on yourcamcorder. The Preview functionin VidCap and Premiere can dis-play video as you capture, but whenthe ISA bus is busy it stops updatingthe Preview display.

At the highest quality settings,images from the RT300 (and theIntel card) are surprisingly good,even comparable to M-JPEG. Thedata rates are actually somewhathigher than the M-JPEG cards,because in real-time capture theIndeo algorithm consists entirely ofkey frames. This is fme for offlineediting, but you will have to recom-press to get down to CD-ROM datarates. You can set every fourthframe, for example, to be a keyframe, and Indeo will store only dif-ference information for the inter-mediate "delta" frames. This is avery time-consuming process,almost as slow as CinePak recom-pression.

At these data rates, the Indeocards are operating at the limit ofthe ISA bus, so when the timecomes for playback the added over-head of the Windows graphics dis-play makes them skip lots offrames. However, the frames haveall been captured, so you can editaccurately. Playback relief shouldcome with video-accelerated dis-play cards and the new WindowsDisplay Control Interface.

cards using the Auravision chipset(see "Video Compression Technol-ogy," page 88), so it has verysmooth scaling of video playbackup to full-screen size with no reduc-tion in the frame rate. We couldexpand clips to full-screen withinMedia Player and Premiere. ThePro option is a daughtercard withthe Zoran 320-by-240 M-JPEGcompression chip. VideoStar Prouses a VESA feature connector and

AVI Playback Performance*

The top nine cards captured 30fps, 320-by-240 video without droppingany frames, but many did not perform as well on playback. The VideoBlaster RT300 and Smart Video Recorder Pro rely on software decom-pression and only play back 60 percent or less of the available frames.By contrast, the M-JPEG cards, which have hardware compression anddecompression, all rated 85 percent or better. Thus, there is a tradeoffbetween the ability to play a file on any machine (software decompres-sion) and maximum frame rate (hardware decompression).*Playback of 24-bit color, 320x240, 30fps AVI file.

Video Image Quality vs. File Size

Image Quality File Size(KB/frame)

miroVIDEO DC-1 tv Excellent 21Movie Machine Pro Very Good 18DVA-4000/MediaSpace Very Good 18Video Blaster RT300 Good 29Smart Video Recorder Pro Good 30MegaMotion Fair 22Vidiola Premium Fair 17VideoStar Pro Fair 24Picture Perfect Pro Poor 15

There were noticeable differences in image quality among our nine topboards, even those using the same compression chip. The top fivecards all produce good results, but steer clear of the bottom four.While one might expect a direct correlation between image qualityand file size, the codec also plays a large part. The Indeo codecs arenot quite as efficient as the M-JPEG codecs. To compare imagequality, we used the maximum quality setting that would still yield320-by-240, 30fps capture.

84 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

"1"1391? 11111111111

Video Image Quality Comparison

T o assess image quality, we compared several frames of our Diagnostic TestTape closely, including frames with animation, text and complex and sim-ple video images. All frames were captured at the highest quality possible whilemaintaining a 320-by-240, 30tps frame rate and 24-bit color. Some boards maybe capable of higher quality at a lesser frame rate, color depth or window size,but these frames reflect realistic results at our recommended capture rate formultimedia work. A summary of image quality of all the frames we saw, alongwith file sizes, is given on page 84.

A detail from one of our video test frames, including a graphic text overlay,is shown here for the top nine boards in our test. All deliver reasonable quality,but some are clearly superior to others. ASL's MegaMotion card delivered clear

numbers and had the best image in the windmill scene, although the MegaMo-tion's results on other frames did not match this one, and we judged it in themiddle of the pack overall. The miroVIDEO and DVA-4000/MediaSpace imageswere more true to form. Both were very good, matching their overall perfor-mance. Next came the Movie Machine Pro and Vidiola Premium, which deliveredgood results but with obvious JPEG artifacts. The two new Indeo-based boards,the Video Blaster RT300 and Smart Video Recorder Pro, came up with only fairimages of the windmill scene that were below their average results in otherframes. Color vectoring is evident. The VideoStar Pro also had fair results withbad JPEG artifacts. The Picture Perfect Pro brings up the rear, as it did in ourother tests, with bad JPEG artifacts.

Movie Machine Pro Picture Perfect Pro Smart Video Recorder Pro

an external connector to passthrough the screen graphics fromyour display card. Three videoinputs let you choose from twocomposite and one S-video source.VideoStar and the other Auravisionboard have a useful cropping func-tion that expands the image toeliminate noise at the edges of thepicture.

When the card was running,we were able to capture at com-pression ratios up to the highestquality setting of 16:1 withoutdropping any frames. VideoStarPro playback was among the threesmoothest cards tested. All othercards skipped at least a few of the6,000 frames in the test.

As expected, picture qualitywas also high. VideoStar Pro filtersincoming video by comparing suc-cessive frames for identical infor-mation. However, the Zoran codecchip means that making movies inPremiere will take longer withVideoStar Pro than with boardsbased on the C-Cube or LSI LogicM-JPEG chips that can use theircodec hardware to compress transi-tion frames.

vie Machine Pro

The Movie MachinePro with the M-JPEG option fromFast Electronic

($940; $995 with Premiere) is quiteunusual. In addition to capturingAVI files, it functions as a two-channel video switcher (like its bigbrother, the Fast Video Machine).It has a built-in time-base correctorthat lets you dissolve, wipe and evendo digital video effects (DVEs)between two video signals (NTSCor PAL). Your video sources can beanalog VTRs, graphics files for titlesand overlays, digital AVI files, oreven television signals from a built-in cable-ready TV tuner! It onlylacks machine control.

The Movie Machine Pro hasfull luminance keying and chromakeying of video over video, pluscolor keying of graphics over video.It has easy-to-use controls for set-ting the key values. If the graphicimage is a title, you can have it scroll( move vertically) or crawl (movehorizontally).

You can control the speed of

transition effects by moving a T-barfader with the mouse, pressing theup and down arrow keys or justpressing a play button. The playbutton icon changes to show theeffect you've selected. A slider boxnext to the play button lets you setthe rate of the effect.

The Movie Machine Pro hastwo buses: a background bus fornormal video and a foreground busfor the incoming effect. On eachbus you choose from Video A,Video B or the TV tuner. For theforeground source, you have twomore options. You can playback anAVI file or load one of six graphicor title images in a mini still storedisplayed across the top of thescreen. These can be selected fromany number of files on your harddisk. Movie Machine's videoencoder outputs recordable NTSCor PAL, making it useful for video-tape editing.

While its switching capabilitiesalone are impressive, the MovieMachine Pro was also tops as anAVI capture and playback card. Itnever skipped a frame on playback.

Movie Machine Pro does have

some drawbacks. The M-JPEGcompression option, which enables320-by-240 capture at 30fps, is aseparate card, so it uses up a secondISA slot. Movie Machine Pro alsohas only composite video inputsand outputs (no S-video). Andbecause it uses the Zoran codecchip, it will be relatively slow mak-ing movies in Adobe Premiere. Thedocumentation was also weak; for-tunately, installation was not toodifficult.

Like the MovieMachine Pro, theIn-Motion Picture

NEEDS WORK Perfect Pro with M-JPEG option ($699) is a two-cardset taking up two ISA slots. One ofthe cards has a daughtercard (the"Pro"), and the other, called theDigital VCR companion, is the M-JPEG option. In-Motion providesminimal documentation, but theM-JPEG documentation was theleast we've seen. A 2-by-2-inch pieceof paper with the IRQ and I/O Basejumper settings for the card fell out

Leal4, 5

LealAWESOME

86 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

Video Blaster RT300 VideoStar Pro

the Intel SmartVideo Recorder wasour top performera year ago, and theAWESOME Premiere for Windows' Capture dialog includes com-

pression and frame rate options. You can also view

incoming video in a Preview window.

MegaMotion

miroVIDEO DC1 tv Vidiola Premium Pro DVA-4000/MediaSpace

of the box when we opened it. Evenworse, the default interrupt settingsfor both boards were shown as IRQ10, which could really send begin-ners around in circles.

The Digital VCR's compres-sion setup dialog box does not havea quality setting. Instead, it givesthree different numbers with theirtypical values—bits per pixel (1.0),compression ratio (24:1), and com-pressed frame size (10,000). Youchoose one and it calculates theothers, but there is no indication ofhow they correspond to VidCap'squality settings of 1 to 100.

The Picture Perfect Pro hascomposite video input only. Andagain it uses the Zoran codec chip,so it will be slower than C-Cubeand LSI Logic-based cards render-ing transition effects.

new Pro version ($570) keeps Intelin the front ranks. A capture-only

card, it epitomizes the Intel philoso-phy of leaving most functions tosoftware running on future fastbuses like PCI. The new Intel SmartVideo Recorder Pro is an ISA cardwhich captures 320-by-240 video at30fps with zero droppedframes. Since it's not anoverlay card, you can'tpreview video at highframe rates on the com-puter screen during cap-ture; however, you coulduse a separate NTSCmonitor.

We found imagequality to be quite high forreal-time Indeo captureand compression. Thedata rates were also high.At the highest quality set-ting, each frame had 25KBto 30KB of data, some-what more than high-quality quarter-screenM-JPEG frames, whichare around 20KB. TheISVR Pro can also capture"raw" uncompressedYUV files (at 320 by 240and 15fps; 30fps is too

much for the ISA bus at 80KB perframe for 320 by 240), and runthem through the new Indeo 3.2compressor later for improvedoverall quality.

The playback artifacts of a

vector quantization codec likeIndeo are quite different fromintraframe M-JPEG artifacts. Themost noticeable artifact shows upas blocks of color misregistered upto three pixels to the right and

down from a saturatedcolor area.

The ISVR Pro isbundled withAsymetrix's DigitalVideo Producer, whichis the second-bestvideo editing packageon the PC, well aheadof ATI's MediaMergeand Ulead's Video Stu-dio. We recommendthat you also buy Pre-miere if you're think-ing about videotapeproductions. ISVR Proalso comes with a CD-ROM of video clips,music and animations.The instruction manualis brief but clear andwell illustrated, exceptfor the tricky problemof resolving IRQ andI/O conflicts.

87 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

Video Compression Technology

T he video capture cards we tested achievetheir high frame rates by using hardware-assisted digital video compression techniques.Indeo, MPEG and Motion-JPEG (M-JPEG) arefamiliar compression/decompression algo-rithms (see "How Codecs Work," page 52,March), but a new approach from Auravisionand others applies a simple reversible (loss-less) form of hardware compression, AnalogDifferential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM) incombination with AVI software compression toachieve respectable results at a very low cost.

M-JPEG is by far the most popular algo-rithm, but quality varies widely among M-JPEGcards, and file formats are not standardized. Bycontrast, MPEG and lndeo provide much moreuniform results, and files can be played back onany other MPEG or lndeo hardware.

Quantization FactorsAt the root of the M-JPEG quality variations isa number called the Quantization factor. The (1-factor began life as an 8-bit number between 0and 255 that characterized the amount of quan-tization (subsampling), and therefore theamount of compression. Larger numbers meanmore compression, less data per frame andconsequently lower image quality. Marketeersdescribing the Q-factor were drawn by theappealing notion that Q equals quality, andengineers responded by reversing the directionof Q, usually changing its range to 0-100,where 100 means highest quality, not highestcompression. This scheme is used by VidCap,Premiere and many other editors.

Because the amount of data in a complexand detailed image can be much larger than apicture with a solid-color background, imagescompressed at the same Q-factor can havewidely different amounts of data. Long, com-plex scenes may exceed the data rate of theCPU bus or hard disk, and the compressor willbegin to drop frames at best, or "break" atworst, generating random noise images.

Two of the cards we tested, the miroVIDEODC1 tv and VideoLogic DVA-4000 w/Media-Space, have a sophisticated "Dynamic-Quality"

feature. This is an adaptive compression tech-nique that estimates the amount of data in thenext frame and turns the quality down (and thecompression ratio up) in complex scenes tokeep the data rate below a preset limit. Theseboards also come with utility software to cali-brate your hard disk's plausible maximum datarate. Dynamic-Q is also used by high-end sys-tems like the Radius VideoVision Studio on theMac and the Targa 2000 on the PC.

Elusive M-JPEG StandardsIf every M-JPEG card could write and read allthe parameters in the AVI MJPG file header,and identify the enclosed compressed digitalvideo file with a unique four-character code(FOURCC), it would be possible to decompressone manufacturer's M-JPEG files on another'shardware. While there are detailed differencesbetween the hardware chips used to compressM-JPEG from C-Cube, LSI Logic and Zoran, theyare not insuperable. One company, Mediamat-ics, has developed software codecs that candecode and decompress all of these files.Unfortunately, when we tried to play back AVIfiles on boards other than their creator in thisreview, we met with almost universal failure.Only one board, the Miro DC1 tv, successfullyopened a competitor's file (from VideoLogic),and played it in real time.

The codec differences show up becauseboard vendors avoid processing the bit streamthat comes out of the compressor chip, so theycan capture video at the highest possible datarate and image quality. They thus capture intoproprietary file formats, rather than the AVIMJPG standard. VideoLogic initially used a pro-prietary format called MSP, but the latest ver-sion of the MIC software, 2.2, captures directlyinto AVI MJPG format as well. The small speedpenalty in conforming to AVI MJPG is wellworth the capability of creating a high-qualityM-JPEG file that can play back on diverse man-ufacturers' hardware.

Auravision CodecThe ADPCM technique used by the Auravision

chip isn't new; it's widely used in audio com-pression and is one of the many steps in JPEGand MPEG, but we'll call its marriage with AVIcompression Auravision or ADPCM video com-pression.

The AVI compressed file formats YUV (16bits), YUV Compressed (12 bits) and PalettizedVGA (8 bits) have less information than full 24-bit RGB. This after-the-fact software-only com-pression, up to 3:1, is often called AVIcompression to distinguish it from lndeo, M-JPEG and other techniques requiring hardware.

The Auravision VxP500 chip combinesADPCM with AVI compression to get the datarate low enough to send the digital video overthe ISA bus. It also has hardware assistanceduring "software-only" decompression for pop-ular codecs like Microsoft Video 1, CinePak andIndeo. The VxP500 can smoothly scale videoplayback up to full-screen displays withoutobvious aliasing jaggies. This is the basic tech-nology in the Diamond VideoStar, HauppageWin/TV and Orchid Vidiola capture cards. Youmay want to save the expense of the "Pro" M-JPEG option daughtercards that we tested withthese cards and settle for ADPCM and AVIcompression alone. You can apply softwarecompression after capture to make the filesizes manageable; you'll trade compressionti me and higher frame rates for the moneysaved. Auravision compression alone does notmeet the standard of 24-bit, 30fps 320-by-240video capture that we set for this article.

The Matrox Marvel II uses a similarapproach to the Auravision, but it is based onTseng Labs' chips and manages to get higherframe rates. Since the Marvel II is also a high-quality graphics display card, nothing has tomove over a feature connector.

A number of new graphics display cards(Diamond's Viper Pro, Matrox's ImpressionPlus and VideoLogic's 928Movie and PCI-Movie) incorporate AVI video acceleration,and we will review them in a future article.Some of them may offer video capture daugh-ter or sister cards, like VideoLogic's VideoCatcher. —B.D.

The miroVIDEODC1 tv ($899) is thefirst card to use anew generation of

codec hardware from LSI Logic, asingle chip optimized for 320-by-240 capture. Our first impression

is of very high image quality. Thechip contains multi-tap horizontaland vertical prefilters thatsmoothly scale down the 640-by-480 picture without introducingaliasing artifacts.

The DC1 tv is primarily forvideotape producers. This makesMiro unusual among the leading

M-JPEG cards because it does nothave a video overlay function.Instead, it passes a real-time outputof the incoming video signal beingcaptured out through the same jackthat provides video encoder output.You'll need an NTSC or PAL mon-itor to view it.

The Miro card and Video-

Logic's MediaSpace are the onlyquarter-screen capture cards toemploy Dynamic-Quality adjust-ment and data rate limiting, guar-anteeing that no frames will bedropped during capture. WithDynamic-Q, the codec chip auto-matically reduces the quality forcomplex frames to keep the data

411brAWESOME

88 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

The VideoLogic DVA-4000/-M edia S p ace combination($2,995) is in the expensive cate-gory of board sets for multime-

TWIT

rate below the limit of your hard disk or to tuneit for CD-ROM playback.

Unfortunately, Miro's playback rate couldnot match its capture performance. The DC1 tvalways skipped several frames on playback.

The basic Orchid TechnologyVidiola is a remarkably low-costcard ($399) with Auravision'sADPCM compression on capture

and SuperZoom video acceleration on playback.SuperZoom takes even a tiny l60-by-l20 imageand expands it to full screen using a special algo-rithm that avoids the pixeli7ation and jaggies thatcome with ordinary software zooming.

Orchid also offers Vidiola "Pro" cards withNTSC and PAL encoder outputs. The Pro/Ccard is bundled with Abbate Video Toolkit con-trol cables and logging/editing software for $599.The Pro/D card is bundled with Premiere, multi-media presentation software and a morphingand special-effects program for $699. The Vidi-ola Premium Pro/D card we tested has an M-JPEG compression daughtercard (with a C-CubeCL-550 codec) for $899.

A VESA feature connector and an externalpassthrough cable loop regular VGA outputthrough the Vidiola for live video overlays,using a keying technique based on a magentacolor. By going into a draw or paint programand using a color other than magenta, you canoverlay graphics on top of the Vidiola livevideo. Like the other Auravision-based prod-ucts, it can also perform conventional chroma-key effects, making blue backgrounds in yourvideo transparent.

Unfortunately, as with many other cards,between 10 and 20 percent of frames wereskipped on playback with the Vidiola PremiumPro, making video look jerky.

dia developers. However, it was also designedfrom the beginning as a full-motion video cap-ture system and comes with lengthy documen-tation within the reach of end users. Many ofthe cards we evaluated that are aimed at devel-opers came with skimpy and highly technicalinformation.

Like the Miro board, VideoLogic's Media-Space has a data rate calibration function to help

you set appropriate compression ratios. A color-ful meter demonstrates the varying complexity ofpassing frames as compared to the calibrateddata rate for your system. When the complexityswings into the red, you can opt for droppingframes or reducing quality.

VideoLogic calls its board set and softwarethe Multimedia Interactive Control System. MICSystem II v2.2 is a reworking of the original MICsoftware, which integrates it smoothly and fullyinto Video for Windows (see "Video Compres-

sion Technology," page 88).The version we tested initially came only

with composite video inputs. VideoLogic latersent us an S-video input cable, which improvedsharpness, but images were still soft compared tomost other boards.

This is a two-card set, but it has very high-quality audio capture and playback built in. Iteven has a fiber-optic connector for input ofdirect digital audio from similarly equipped CDand DAT equipment. An onboard "Trans-

OVERALL VALUE 3 3 2 4FEATURES 4 3 3 3

PERFORMANCE 3 3 2 4

USER INTERFACE I 5 2 3LEARNING CURVE I 5 2 3

PRICE $1,095 $499 $1,950 $499.95

Ratings Key: 5=Excellent, 4=Very Good, 3=Good, 2=Fair, I =Poor. Overall Value takes price and cc*5995 with Adobe Premiere.

puter" chip is used to maintainperfect lip sync between audio andvideo, but only for MediaSpace'sproprietary MSP files and not forAVI files, which need it badly.

The DVA-4000/MediaSpacesystem works very well. It skippedjust a few frames on playback. It'sthe best of the older multimediacard sets, but has the handicap of ahigh price compared to newerentries. Since VideoLogic has beenat the forefront of both VESAMedia Channel and PCI bus devel-opment, we expect well-built newproducts from them soon.

e Jo -rarksThe following nine cards didn'tmeet our review criteria of 320-by-240, 30fps AVI image capture orhad unacceptable image quality. Insome cases they have redeemingfeatures or prices that may makethem attractive to those with lessdemanding requirements or lim-ited budgets.

The Matrox MarvelII ($795) is a brand-new board that inte-grates onto a single

PCI card the functions of last year'sexpensive two-card sets aimed atmultimedia kiosk and training sys-tem developers. As such, it doesvery high quality video-in-a-win-dow and still-frame captures, and itis a good VGA card. It also has thelatest features, thanks to its TsengLabs chipset: video acceleration(scaling and color space conver-sion), Windows graphics accelera-tion, MPEG video and audioplayback, digital audio WAV fileplayback, and a digital video expan-sion bus for an optional 640-by-480,60-field-per-second M-JPEG com-pression card (the same StudioXpress card used in the Matrox Stu-dio nonlinear editing system).

We were especially impressedwith the quality of the live video-in-

a-window playthrough. It is visiblybetter than other overlay cards.(We have not had a chance to testthe quality of MPEG playback, buthope to cover that in a futurereview.)

Like the other cards aimed atdevelopers, AVI capture is not thethe Marvel II's first priority, but anearly version captures 160-by-120video at 30fps, and when software is

optimized, Marvel II may becomean all-in-one solution for yourvideo editing, multimedia anddemonstrations of MPEG playback.The beta version we tested capturesin an RGB format. If the finalrelease software captures in one ofthe AVI formats that are naturallycompressive, like YUV or YUVCompressed (4:1:1), as do theAuravision cards, Marvel II should

ATI's Video-It($499) was the easi-est card to install anduse, in large part

4 5 2 2 2 5 4 5 2 4 3 I 4 2

3 5 3 3 3 3 4 4 2 4 3 2 4 2

3 4 3 3 3 4 4 4 2 4 2 2 3 3

3 3 3 2 2 4 3 4 2 3 2 I 3 2

3 3 3 2 I 4 3 3 I 3 3 2 3 3$529 $940- $349 $995 $699 $570 $195 $899 $995 $899 $540 $1,995 $2,995 $499

into account.

be capable of 320 by 240 at 30fps.Since our board was still an earlyversion, we do not include imagequality and performance data for itin our charts. The rating may go upon final release.

The optional XPress M-JPEGcard ($2,195) provides CCIR-6014:2:2 capture at a full 720 by 486 inNTSC (720-by-576 PAL). Thiscombination should yield 60fpsperformance at half the price of aTarga 2000, and we will test it assoon as possible. It would dramati-cally lower the cost of videotapeproduction in the Video for Win-dows environment. The Marvel IIwill have an optional NTSCencoder chip for video output.Matrox also sells a separate VideoPro Encoder (a $599 ISA card) thatworks with the feature connectoron Marvel II.

because of very well-written illus-trated manuals and the excellentdesign of its proprietary captureutility called MediaCapture.

While all Windows video cap-ture programs have similar func-tions, such as Video Format, VideoSource, Video Display and Com-pression (since they all use basicsoftware building blocks providedby Microsoft's Video for Windowssoftware development kit), one of

the great confusions for beginnersis that the "Compression" optionin Video for Windows is not whatyou choose to select your compres-sion method for capture. VidCapcompression is for post-captureand recompression only. Com-pression methods for capture areselected in the Video Format dialogbox, along with image size. ATI haseliminated this confusion byrenaming the Video Format dialogCompression.

We would also like to cite ATIas having the best tech-support util-ity we've seen. Viditest examinesyour system configuration, thencreates a document you can save orprint that contains almost all thetidbits other manuals ask you tolook up before you call for support(if they even mention tech sup-port). It even creates listings of yourconfig.sys and autoexec.bat files.We suggest they add system.ini andwin.ini.

ATI Video-It encourages youto use the Preview function to pro-vide an on-screen video-in-a-win-dow version of incoming video.When you're not capturing video,this ATI TV works reasonably well,but remember that you aredegrading CPU system perfor-mance by putting all that videodata on the bus.

Although we give the ATIVideo-It top marks for ease ofinstallation, interface design, docu-mentation and tech support, itsperformance fell short of ourbenchmark because it uses an ear-

Executive Summary

mr he past year has seen an avalanche of development in Video for1 Windows products. Truevision Targa 2000 capture hardware and

Adobe Premiere 4.0 for Windows editing software now equal the topnonlinear editing performers on the Macintosh platform, and the numberof "multimedia-quality" cards far exceeds offerings on the Mac. If youare not timid about PC hardware, now is the time to get into PC video.

If your objective is high-quality video on a PC monitor, such as forpresentations or kiosk applications, any of the top three Motion-JPEGcards fill the bill (Fast, Miro and VideoLogic). These cards capture 24-bit, 320-by-240 video at 30fps and play back with few or no droppedframes, with very good image quality. The DVA-4000/Media Spacecombination is very expensive, however. The Diamond, Orchid and In-Motion M-JPEG cards also capture with no dropped frames, but haveonly fair image quality or drop many frames on playback. Note thatthese M-JPEG systems are not cross-compatible.

For multimedia distribution on CD-ROMs or video server net-works, you can recompress your final 320-by-240 M-JPEG files withSuperMac's CinePak or Intel's Indeo 3.2 compressor, both of whichcome with most of these cards. However, watch carefully for artifactsresulting from cascading different compression methods. Original M-JPEG material may look better in MPEG than Indeo, but playback willrequire dedicated MPEG hardware.

If your goal is 320-by-240 "VHS-quality" videotape output fromthe desktop, take a look at the Miro or Fast cards, which include videoencoding. For "offline" nonlinear editing in Premiere, and later batchrecapture on a broadcast-quality system like the Targa 2000, your bestbuy is one of the Indeo cards from Creative Labs or Intel, which alsoproduce digital video playable on any PC.

For multiple applications, the Fast card is unique and a best buy.It has excellent capture, playback, encoding and linear switchingcapabilities that make it a multimedia workhorse. The Matrox MarvelII is another all-around card with unique MPEG playback capabilities.(We will review it in more depth when the final version ships.)

Steer clear of the older generation of cards. Omnicomp's M&MPro, VIC Hi-Tech's Video Packer and CEI's Video Wizard are expensivedeveloper boards that have been eclipsed by the new generation ofmore capable, less expensive cards. These, and others, include PCVideo chips, which have severe RAM limitations.

91 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

The HauppaugeWIN/TV Cinema($349) is the leastexpensive capture

CEI's Video Wizard($1,950) is aimed atWindows developersand describes itself

lier version of the i750 chipset anddoes not work with the 3.2 releaseof Indeo, except for recompressionof already-captured files. One yearago it would have walked awaywith top honors, and we hope ATIissues a new card with the revisedchipset. Video-It comes with a CD-ROM of video clips, music and stillimages called MediaMontage.

as a professional-quality, full-motion capture card that provides"broadcast-quality multimedia." Italso has onboard audio capture.Unfortunately, it's an expensiveolder card that the manual says iscompatible with two types ofPC386/33 motherboard chipsets,and it did not work at all with ourPentium systems. Video Wizardalso uses the old Chips & Tech-nologies PC Video chipset and

requires a machine with 8MB orless of RAM.

Even in an 8MB 486 we had anumber of bizarre problems. Tech-nical support got us past wildly col-ored, and some black-and-white,Windows interfaces. We eventuallycaptured video, but playbackshowed multiple images offset fromone another in Media Player. Withtech support on the line, we system-atically tried every address from 9 to16MB, without being able to playback succesfully. When they askedus to pull out memory and try4MB, we decided this wasn't a cardthat would satisfy many Windowsmultimedia users.

card we looked at that incorporatesthe Auravision technology. How-ever, it does not have an M-JPEGoption and thus could not meet ourcapture rate requirements. If you

want to start with just AuravisionYUV 4:1:1 compressed capture,look at the Orchid Vidiola card at$399. You'll then have the option ofupgrading to M-JPEG capture andachieving our multimedia-qualitycriterion of 30fps.

The IBM/IntelActionMedia II card($995) has been aworkhorse in com-

pressed video for the past few years.Although CinePak, Indeo and nowMPEG are better known amongconsumers, the majority of com-pressed digital video used to be DVI(Digital Video Interactive), and thiscard has done most of the com-pressing. Unfortunately, althoughthe ActionMedia II card can easilycapture 320-by-240 images at 30fps,it lacks support for Video for Win-dows and AVI, making it unsuit-able for general multimedia use anddropping it out of the top rank.

We're surprised that newer

and faster versions of the i750 chiphave not led to new versions of theActionMedia card. It may be thatIntel is trying to draw attentionaway from "hardware-hardware"codecs like DVI (where the card isalso required for playback) to"hardware-software" codecs likeIndeo. The Duck Corp.'s TrueMo-tion and new TrueMotion S arehardware-software algorithms thatrun on the ActionMedia II andpromise to breathe new life into thiscard for multimedia.

The product we received fortesting came in a Developer Kit ver-sion only. IBM appears not to bemarketing the ActionMedia II cardto end users. (We reviewed its per-formance in the June issue alongwith TouchVision's CineWorksnonlinear editor.) It is also the basisfor the Montage Picture Processor.However, both Montage andTouchVision are reportedly consid-ering moving to Truevision's Targa2000 M-JPEG hardware to upgradeperformance of their popular edit-ing software to 60 fields per second.

Installing and Tuning Windows Capture Cards

G etting a PC video capture card installedand operating at peak efficiency is anenormously daunting task. Even our crew ofexpert testers did not successfully install a sin-gle one of the 20 cards on the first try. Andmany boards still had conflicts on our third andfourth attempts.

Why is installation so difficult? To aninstaller, the PC looks like a combination lockwith multiple dials called 160 (interrupt), I/OPort Address, Memory Base Address, DMAChannel, BIOS Shadow RAM Area and EMMMemory Exclusion. Each of these must be setby hardware jumpers or values in the BIOSsetup and the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.Identical values must be set in the software forthe installed video capture card, and these val-ues must be unique.

We spent many hours on the phone withtech support installing some of these cards; werecommend that you get your dealer to installyour video capture card. To be fair, many of ourconflicts stemmed from the Pentiums withhigh-end PCI graphics cards that we used; stan-

dard 486s with ISA bus graphics cards wouldlikely have not given us so much trouble.

But even conflict-free installation does notguarantee optimal video capture performance.In our September review of Macintosh captureboards, we listed steps for optimizing videocapture. Very few steps apply to both plat-forms. The shared advice includes:>Use a video-ready, defragmented hard disk.>Pre-allocate your capture file to ensure con-tiguous memory blocks.>Close all other applications and screensavers, and turn off networking.>Turn on dynamic quantization, if available,and limit the data rate to match your harddisk's sustained throughput.>Don't capture audio simultaneously at thefull-frame, full-motion, highest-quality settings.The extra 175KB per second of data and pro-cessing overhead will break these systems.Capture sound with time code in a secondpass, then link the video and audio tracks in anediting program.>If your board can't match our 320-by-240,

30fps standard for multimedia-quality video,we recommend you use 160 by 120 at 30fpsinstead of 320 by 240 at 15fps for people talk-ing, and vice versa for shots with lots of detailbut not a lot of motion.>Video, of course, looks best in 24-bit color,but you'll have to trade off capture rates. Eight-bit color may be optimal, and 16-bit is a popu-lar trade-off. Standard VGA (16-color) videolooks terrible.>Light your video properly. Material shot inlow light is noisy and does not compress well.Avoid simple single-color backgrounds.Although easier to compress, they also showblockiness artifacts.>Buy a faster hard disk, more RAM or a fasterCPU, in that order.

The PC has many more complications, mostlydue to the hardware installation idiosyncrasies.If you don't know what all the following mean,cross your fingers or buy a Macintosh:>Don't use disk compression software (such asDoublespace or Stacker) on your video files.

(continued on page 94)

92 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1 994

Omnicomp's M&MPro ($995) has beenaround for two yearsnow, and its age

Installing and Tuning WindowsCapture Cards

(continued from page 92)

Use Windows for Workgroups for its faster filehandling.).-Enable 32-bit file access in the virtual mem-ory control panel, but not 32-bit disk accesswith SCSI.>Set a permanent swap file for your boot disk, butnot your video disk.>Use Smartdry carefully (/R) or turn it off. Turn offDouble Buffer.>Optimize your SCSI BIOS, set sync negotiation andthe highest DMA transfer rate that doesn't crashyour computer.>-Shadow the ROM BIOS of your graphics displayand SCSI adapter to RAM, but watch out for con-flicts with your capture card memory exclusion.>Get rid of TSRs that may cause interrupts. Createa special boot sequence for video work.>Once you've optimized your hardware setup forvideo, run MEMMAKER to load devices into uppermemory blocks and free up conventional memory.>Use EMM386.exe with NOEMS, and carefully setmemory exclusions required by your video card.X=D000- is often best. Look for conflicts with the

SCSI and graphics BIOS, typically around C000.>IRO conflicts are the most common problem.Make a list of every IRO used in your system. BestIRQs for capture cards: 10, 12, 15.>In Pentium machines, go into the motherboardBIOS and disable the same memory areas thereto prevent plug-and-play cards from grabbingthem. Also, mark the IRQs for your video cards asUSED or ISA.>-Always use the latest drivers. Check the dates onDOS and Windows and use the later one for Smart-dry, EMM386, etc. Get the latest drivers for yourgraphics card and VFW.>If you don't have video acceleration, set yourdisplay size to 640 by 480 to get the biggest pic-ture, or use the full-screen option in Media Player.>Don't use the modeswitch feature on advancedgraphics cards that lets you change resolutionwithout rebooting Windows. It eats memory.>Make sure you're in turbo mode and en-hanced mode.>Turn off energy conservation features inGreen PCs.

The VIC Hi-TechVideo Packer($1,995) overlaysvideo-in-a-window

shows. It was originally designed for24-bit frame grabbing and livevideo-in-a-window overlays onVGA graphics via the VESA featureconnector. Omnicomp has writtenMCI and AVI drivers to makeM&M Pro work with Video forWindows, but the board retains itsexpensive design.

M&M Pro's similarly expen-sive M-JPEG daughtercard ($1,920)uses the advanced C-Cube CL-550compression chip. Unfortunately,like the CEI Video Wizard, it isdesigned around the Chips & Tech-nologies PC Video chip, with an8-12MB RAM limitation.

This card was out of itselement in our Pentium PCImachines. Tech support said some486 machines have novel ways ofmapping the M&M Pro 14MBmemory location on the ISA businto physical memory at 30MB, butwe were unable to test thisworkaround. M&M Pro also doesnot support the Microsoft AVIMJPG standard, but Omnicompsays it plans to release a new captureand playback utility for use withAdobe Premiere. It is also lookingat licensing M-JPEG conversionsoftware from Mediamatics.

The basi c Tri-umphony VisualForge V-10 from Tri-umph Logistic is a

new-generation PCI VGA card thatuses a Tseng Labs chip to providevideo in a- window and still-framecapture. The V-20 daughtercard hasa Philips 7194 video chip, providingwhat the company calls full-screen,scalable full-motion video. Whilethis board set ($336) advertises anAVI motion-video capture capabil-ity, the capture rate was below ourstandard, and the video-in-a-win-

dow was fuzzy.The Visual Forge V-30, a com-

panion ISA card, provides MPEGvideo and audio playback capabili-ties. The most amazing thing aboutthese cards is the low price for fea-tures that so recently cost thou-sands of dollars. The V-30 MPEGcard is only $214, and all three cardssell for $540. Cost-conscious multi-media end users should check themout, but all this functionality andmore can be found with very highquality in the $795 PCI-basedMatrox Marvel II.

and performs still-image captureusing the VFSA Feature Connector.It is another developer/OEM cardlike the M&M Pro and Video Wiz-ard. Like them, it combines the C-Cube CL-550 compression chip withthe Chips & Technologies PC Videochip on an M-JPEG daughtercard. Ithas the usual memory aperture

problem, so the Video Packer mustbe run in a machine with 8MB or lessof RAM. Video Packer is newer thanthe other cards, having been releaseda year ago, and has monophonicaudio capture and playback.

We looked at Xing'sXinglt MPEG cap-ture board ($499)because of its innov-

ative approach, which captures justI-frames and therefore makeseditable MPEG AVI files. NormalMPEG files consist mostly offrames that carry only the inter-frame difference informationneeded to predict them (P- and B-frames) from the I-frames(intraframes). An edit at one ofthese P- or B-interframes wouldlack the necessary information toplay forward, so the MPEG is notnormally an editing format.

While it plays at 320 by 240,Xinglt actually captures 160-by-120images that are very soft and filledwith a diffuse random noise; wejudged this image quality unaccept-

able. Although Xinglt has madeeditable MPEG possible, this isprobably not the best way to edit orcapture MPEG video. Xing has amuch better product in XingCD,software that lets you take any AVIfiles captured with other cards, oredited movies, and recompressthem as full MPEG files with I-frames, P-frames and B-frames.While XingCD does not work inreal time, it produces much betterresults. Combine XingCD with alow-cost MPEG playback card ora multi-function card like theMarvel II, and you're an MPEGproducer. M

Research and testing was conductedfor the NewMedia Lab by theDesktop Video Group, an educa-tional organization focusing ondesktop video and multimediaauthoring in Cambridge, Massa-chusetts. Director Bob Doyle andassociate director Jeff Sauer pre-pared the feature table and super-vised testing by Mike Bergman, TedCarroll, Leo Cierpial, Peter Pinch,Will Martins, Peter Stassa andother DVG members.

94 NEWMEDIA NOVEMBER 1994

Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5Page 6Page 7Page 8Page 9Page 10Page 11Page 12Page 13Page 14