What’s wrong with the DV300?
Is Pinnacles’s cool new DV editing card for the PC fatally flawed?  

This is a list I made considering the problems that theoretically pure DV300 edit systems may have in comparison with an equivalent “conventional” MJPEG suite based, for argument’s sake, on a DC30+ card. This discussion assumes a reasonable level of general desktop video and DV knowledge. If you need more background information I’d recommend DV Central. For more info about the DV300, see Pinnacle’s site.
 
Taken as a whole, I think the following problems make the DV300 unsuitable, in fact virtually unusable, as a professional editing solution. We won’t be buying it.
 

Problems Specific to the DV300
 
The DV300 is a very new product. Many of the issues described below MAY be fixed in an upcoming software upgrade. However, everyone knows that such fixes have to be treated as hypothetical until they actually exist.

• Doesn't output previews or "scrubbing" video to the firewire port from inside Premiere, so neither can be seen  either fullsize or at full framerates. Use of InstantDV for previewing is a partial workaround, though another bug causes a delay of at least ten seconds when closing InstantDV each and every time its used. That’s a bigger problem than it sounds in a pressured professional situation, wasting a good deal of time over the course of a day’s cutting. Full framerate previewing is an absolute must for any serious editing application.

• Automatic "scantape" capture is, mysteriously, very slow (4 - 6 times as long as the tape is), and only works for the first 90 minutes of any tape. Only the very fastest of drives (ie. ultrawide "Cheetah" 10,000RPM SCSIs) seem to be able to avoid the frame dropping that causes this slowness. Though theories vary, it seems that this problem is caused by a conversion the DV300’s drivers attempt to .DVF format during the capture process. Intended as a part of a solution to potentially dropping frames, this process seems to actually cause the problem. This conversion CAN NOT be turned off if autoscan is used.

• Doesn't deal with real-world audio issues, like the VX1000's 12 bit audio, at all cleverly.

• Outputs everything via firewire with UNLOCKED AUDIO, regardless of what is input. This is due to Premiere not supporting any audio formats compatible with locked audio formats (32 kHz, 12-bit and 48 kHz 16-bit). Pinnacle Tech Support have written to point out that the card can output locked audio from outside of Premiere using the DVTools Device Control option. However, doing this will require the movie to be fully rendered first (ie. no "Instant DV"), and (as far as I can tell) even this render can't be done in Premiere, since this program just doesn't support the appropriate audio sample rates. So, its hard to see how this issue can be worked around in any useful way even with this new information.

 
 
Problems Generic to Soft Codec Cards (including the DV300)
 
I’d be the first to agree that some of these “problems” will be no problem at all for some users. All I know is, they are for me! As always, your mileage may vary...

• Requires camcorder or a DV deck to be present at all times during editing if you want fullsize and/or full framerate previews, and for all input and output from the system(including, for example, VHS preview dubs). See above for a description of DV300-specific problems in this regard.

• In a system with ONLY a DV video input card (either hard or soft codec) video datarates are fixed at 3.6MB/sec (about 5 minutes / GB). You cannot do low datarate "offline" cuts for large projects, as you can with MJPEG cards like the DC30+. (This is often described as "scalability").

•  To dub from a non-DV analog source, a DV deck is REQUIRED - no currently available DV camcorders feature analog inputs. (Sony’s new NTSC TRV-9 camcorder reportedly will)

•  If editing material coming from a non-DV source, for example Beta-SP, your only option on a DV suite is to dub to DV datarates for editing... no higher for quality, no lower for fitting more material onto your drives.

• There is currently NO way to copy video from such a source to standard DV so that the DV dub includes the original’s timecode. Even with studio-level DVCPRO decks this can be accomplished only in DVCPRO format, which at present is a format with NO "cheap" firewire-capable deck or camcorder available.

• If analog material is present on the editor's timeline (along with DV material) "Instant DV" won't work... instead the movie must be rendered, which is a SLOW process (several minutes per second of analog video) and prone to nasty artifacting. A better solution is to convert all material to DV using a hard codec, but this REQUIRES either a hard codec DV card or a DV deck (NOT a camcorder - see above).

• Although in theory any DV codec treats video the same as any other, in reality it is becoming clear that they are not, in fact, identical. In situations where codecs from a more than one manufacturer deal with the video during the production process it is possible that noticeable artifacting may be picked up. This is at least as true of MJPEG systems, of course, but everyone already knows that....

  My thanks to Cesare A. Galtieri for his input into this article.