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With the widespread adoption of highly portable compact digital video (DV) cameras capable of high quality presentation and reference material, tools for manipulating and authoring edited material are becoming both increasingly sophisticated and affordable.
PC editing of video has historically been hampered by the time required for the rendering of output and especially transitions.
Pinnacle's DV500 dual stream video capture card enables output of productions to the video monitor and recording device in full quality as soon as they have been arranged.
This can include transitions if the supplied realtime Pinnacle effects are used throughout.
The days of complex multimedia installations have also gone with the DV500 detected and software installed smoothly under Windows 2000.
The PCI card back plate offers two IEEE1394 FireWire ports plus a D connector for analogue connectivity via the supplied BLUE Box breakout module.
This has a sensible metre long cable for convenient location on the desktop for S-video, composite video and left and right audio input and output for preview of the edited material on a TV monitor or recording to VHS tape.
Whilst DV is clearly preferable in terms of image quality, other benefits also become apparent during capture.
The DVTools applet offers FireWire device control, automatically scanning a tape for frame accurate in-camera edit points and creating a thumbnail browser from which a batch capture list can be created.
This automated video acquisition can be a great timesaver in itself.