View Full Version : Speed Razor/Fast to what??


Stephen Zlamany
September 2nd, 2005, 06:39 PM
We produce "instructional" fitness tapes - not really for public sale as much as for "club sale".

We've had a home-made setup - Fast DV capture card - Speed Razor for editing. Nice thing about Fast DV card was 1/4" audio plugs - which went nice with the mixing board we have.

At any rate - Speed Razor appears to be gone (Fast DV and Windows NT seem to be dead as well!).

We are looking to re-do the editing desk - we have several XP Prof PC's in the office. Seems that Matrox 100 + Full Adobe Suite is a big option being pushed (costs nearly $2000). AVID seems over the top professional (and costs it as well).

I'm curious to get some opinions on options and other things that might matter. It's been 6 years since we looked into this type of hardware and software and things have greatly changed in those 6 years.

Thanks in advance!

Dan Euritt
September 3rd, 2005, 02:24 PM
i started editing with a fast video machine back in the early 90's... well actually i learned on a convergence analog unit, lol, but you can hardly call that editing.

without knowing what you use for acquisition it's kinda difficult to give advice, but suffice it to say that you probably won't be needing an audio mixing board for dv stuff... the software does all that, and much more.

the market you have outlined does not sound like it requires anything more than a 1394 port on the pc, unless you are doing some kind of real-time creation and burning? the key is to pick the editing software that you can be the most productive with... set aside some serious time to download and test all the demo's.

and oh, yeah, tape is completely dead... you should be doing dvd's only.

Stephen Zlamany
September 3rd, 2005, 02:47 PM
Thanks for the info...

Have you used ADOBE? What do you think of it in comparison to SPEED RAZOR? I'm still upset that SPEED RAZOR disappeared - that's one of the reasons I'm thinking that the next investment has to lean towards ADOBE since they seem to be a permanent fixture in the computer industry in general.

We have the audio mixing board because we have microphones - both wireless and 3-pin - kind of like a little studio in our office (high ceilings - mirrors on the walls - easy to light - kind of like a fitness/aerobics room would look in a health club.

Acquisition when we started all this was with analog video cameras - plugged right in to the breakout box - capture from camera directly into PC without recording to tape at all.

Do you know if the .DVSD files from the SPEED RAZOR/FAST DV will convert to anything else easily??

Glenn Chan
September 3rd, 2005, 03:04 PM
The hardware acceleration cards for Premiere Pro may not necessarily work in the future. i.e. When premiere moved to premiere pro from premiere 6.5, I believe none of the hardware acceleration cards really worked with the new version.

Nonetheless, computers get obsolete anyways so nothing really lasts. And some format like HDV or affordable DVCPRO100 is going to pop up and force you to move to newer hardware + software.

2- I'd check out Sony Vegas+DVD, which is really good value.
Will run on virtually any PC (no tricky hardware requirements, like Matrox RTX100 + Premiere Pro), all you need is a firewire card for $25.

3- For a sound card/interface, you could look at something like:
M-audio revolution. PCI slot, get adapters to take the tape outputs from your mixer board.
If you don't have a mixer, you could look at the M-audio mobilepre which gives you headphone out, preamps, phantom power (so there's really no point in a mixer).

Stephen Zlamany
September 3rd, 2005, 04:17 PM
Ok - I'll stop crying about the the FastDV/Speed Razor waste - I know your right - software/hardware continues to evolve.

Also - just to clarify - the "mixing board" that I've got is not a PC board - it's a 16 channel (actually 8 and 8) with lots of different inputs and outputs.

I just looked at videoguys.com and the Sony Vegas+DVD seems great. It's $549 - so that's an incredible savings over the Adobe/Matrox solution - and doesn't require an investment in faster CPU/better PC.

There is even a bundle with Sound Forge and Acid Pro for only $999.

If I go with a fire-wire only solution how do I get old analog stuff into the PC??

Glenn Chan
September 3rd, 2005, 06:04 PM
Various options to get analog into your editing system:

The easiest format is DV, I suggest you stick with that. No RAID necessary, reasonable level of compression, easy to edit (unlike MPEG2).

A- Some but not all DV cameras can convert analog-->digital on the fly.

B- You can get an analog-DV converter box like the Canopus ADVC300. It has some extras like line TBC (timebase corrector) if your analog source is not that great.

C- I think Canopus also makes a capture card which goes into a PCI slot, and it converts analog to DV.

There is even a bundle with Sound Forge and Acid Pro for only $999.
I find that Sound Forge isn't really necessary.
Acid Pro takes musical talent/knowledge.

Stephen Zlamany
September 4th, 2005, 06:42 AM
So what about Pinacle - the Liquid Edition 6 Pro with Breakout Box seems like a nice product.

Is it too consumer oriented - too low-power?

Seems that the PC requirements for the Pinacle are higher then the Sony Vegas...