Q: Video Basis

A: Pinnacle Systems is always working to improve the quality of the drivers. They will fix known problems (see the update description in the Driver section) or will bring new functionalities (compatibility improvement, additional functions, new languages etc.). We recommend you to regularly check the Pinnacle Web sites for the availability of updates (also check in the beta section). We also recommend you to download the latest manual available, to get all the information regarding installation and use of the new software.

A: DMA is an abbreviation of direct memory access, a technique for transferring data from main memory to a device without passing it through the CPU.

Enabling DMA for a hard drive can significantly improve data transfer rates and improve system performance.

Under the Windows 2000 operating system DMA is enabled by default. This is not the case with Windows 98 / Millennium edition.

1. Go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel and open the System icon.
2. Click to the next tab called Device Manager.
3. Open the Disk drives category.
4. There should be an item called GENERIC IDE DISK TYPExx (xx can be any number)
5. Highlight this item and click on Properties.
6. Click on the Settings tab and locate a checkbox called DMA.
7. Check this option and press OK on the warning box that follows.
8. Press OK on the Properties box and close the device manager.
9. Restart the system.

1. Go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel.
2. Double-click on System
3. Select the Device Manager tab.
4. Double-click on Computer, it is the top entry in Device Manager.
5. The next screen lists all of the devices and the IRQ assigned for that device. The list is in numerical order and starts with 00 and ends with 15. Locate the 1394 Host Controller on this list and to the left of it is the IRQ assignment. Determine how many times that IRQ number is listed and what devices are also assigned to this IRQ. An entry that says, "IRQ Holder for PCI steering" is not a device and can be ignored.

The reason you may want to free up an IRQ is because your system:

1. Will not detect the Pinnacle product.
2. Will not detect the 1394 camcorder.
3. The software becomes unstable.

In these cases, we recommend you try to get the Pinnacle product on its own IRQ. There are many ways to free up IRQ's. Some are easier than others to perform and some may cost you money. Below is some general advice on freeing up IRQ's. Performing the steps below may require the assistance of the vendor of the device that you are trying to configure (i.e. motherboard, computer, sound card, etc.)

1. First you have to realize that the "IRQ Holder for PCI steering" is not a device. Any IRQ that is assigned to JUST the "IRQ Holder for PCI steering" is an available IRQ.
2. By putting Studio DV into a different PCI slot, most computers typically will reconfigure the IRQ assigned to the various PCI peripheral cards in your computer. This may not free up any resources, but there is the possibility that the computer may assign the Pinnacle product card to its own IRQ and eliminate IRQ sharing with another device.
3. Disable any unused devices. Many users do not use devices such as the USB port (universal serial bus), 2nd IDE port, IDE port on a sound card, etc. The USB and 2nd IDE port are usually devices that are on the motherboard and can be disabled in the motherboard BIOS. Call your sound card vendor if it has an IDE port on it that is not disabled. If you have a modem, 2nd serial port or any other device that you are not using, it could also be disabled to free up resources.
4. Reconfigure your sound card to use less resources if it is using 2 or more IRQ's. In Device Manager, go to Sound, Video and Game Controllers. Find your sound card driver and double-click on it. Select the Resources tab. Uncheck the box marked "Automatic Settings". The "Settings based on" will then activate and you can choose a different configuration such as Basic configuration 0001, 0002, etc. Contact your sound card vendor if you require assistance.
5. If your graphics card is assigned an IRQ, see if you motherboard BIOS supports turning off the IRQ assigned to it. If it does, turn off the IRQ assignment. Not all motherboards support this. Please contact your motherboard or computer vendor for assistance with this.
6. If you have an unused com port and are using a PS/2 mouse, connect a serial mouse and disconnect the PS/2 mouse. Then disable the PS/2 mouse in the motherboard BIOS. Please contact your motherboard or computer vendor for assistance with this.
7. There may be other ways to reconfigure resources on the cards you have in your system. You may want to consider calling the computer manufacturer if there are many devices on the motherboard that you are not using.

A : Check for the proper line input selection on your VCR. Most VCRs are set to bring video in from the SCART (Peritel) connector. Use a Cinch to SCART cable. We recommend you to use a cable with 6 Cinch/RCA connectors. Connectors are generally labelled In or OUT. Use the IN connectors to connect to the Pinnacle product analogue video output and to the Sound board Line out connector (you might need a RCA to Jack adaptator. A VCR can be placed in the line in mode usually though a button on the remote labelled as Line In or Aux In. In some instances it can be a channel selection. To confirm that the proper selection is being made, connect a source device (camcorder) directly to the VCR via the composite connection, and have a television monitor connected via the coax/antenna port. Play a tape from the source device; the video should show on the monitor. If the tape is not viewable on the television monitor then the proper input selection has not been made.

A : For scanning and batch capture to work, your DV tapes should always be striped.

Striping (also known as blacking or formatting) insures correct time codes when DV Tools scans your DV tapes. Striping will also cause DV Tools to "see" a black frame between each separate video recording. This will allow for better recognition of individual clips or "shots" within the capture gallery.

To stripe a tape, insert a new DV tape in your camera. Turn down or disable audio recording and place the lens cap on the camera. Set the camera in Record mode and record the entire length of the tape. Once completed, the tape has been striped and is ready for recording. If you do not stripe your tapes, the "Scan DV tape" function in DV Tools may not work correctly.

A : An .AVI file is a type of file that contains both Audio and Video that is Interleaved. This file type allows for many different types of CODEC’s.

CODEC is short for compressor/decompressor. Any technology for compressing and decompressing data is a CODEC. CODEC’s can be implemented in software, hardware, or a combination of both. Some popular CODEC’s for computer video include MPEG, Indeo and Cinepak. Popular CODEC’s for professional and broadcast video include DV, MJPEG, and MPEG2.

When a the video board is using a hardware CODEC (such as DV500 or Studio DC10plus), you need to have the hardware installed to playback the captured clips.

A : A simple definition of Overlay is the ability to view full motion video in the capture and playback window on your PC monitor. So while you are capturing, editing or printing to tape, you can see the video playing back at 25 (PAL) or 30 (NTSC) frames per second on your PC monitor. Overlay is not an actual representation of the video quality captured. Video output to a television or PAL/NTSC monitor will provide an accurate sample of the video quality

There are two main requirements necessary to make Overlay work.
First is a capture card like the DV500 that support Overlay. Next is a graphics card that also supports this feature. Without both of these items, Overlay is not possible.

There are a few advantages of Overlay Surface compared to Primary Surface. The most obvious is that Overlay Surface can provide larger capture and playback windows (full screen vs. quarter). The other issues are related to performance due to the fact that Overlay Surface has it's own Overlay buffer and Primary Surface does not. If you move the capture or playback window while using Primary Surface the entire computer screen will refresh as the window is moved. This does not cause any functional problems but to some users the refreshing of the screen may be annoying. The other issue is that Primary Overlay may not work at the higher screen resolutions and color depths that your graphics card may allow.

When an application or game is written for DirectX, the programmer does not have to worry about exactly which sound card or graphics adapter might be installed in the end-user's machine. DirectX takes care of that for him.

DirectX plays a role in many functions, including 3D rendering, video playback, still and motion capture, TV Viewing applications, joystick and mouse interfaces, networking for multi-player games and lots more.

As a result, most Windows 98 and Windows 95 users should consider DirectX as a REQUIREMENT. Without it, you are missing out on a huge amount of compatibility and functionality.

To learn more about the nature of DirectX, read Microsoft's "Home User FAQ" at the following location:

Recent versions of DirectX include a tool called "DXDiag", which will display the version of DirectX on the system.

Click START - RUN, type DXDIAG and click OK

When the DirectX Diagnostic Tool appears, read the DirectX version information near the bottom of the display.

Microsoft maintains a website for DirectX information and downloads.

To go directly to the "Home User Downloads" section of the Microsoft DirectX site, follow this link:

On some systems, Windows 2000 ACPI support may freeze the DV500PLUS driver during boot-up, locking the system. To disable ACPI support, follow the procedure below:

1. Go to Device Manager (click Start, Settings, Control Panel, System, Hardware tab, Device Manager).
2. Double-click on Computer. Your computer's type will be displayed. The type will be one of the following:

1. ACPI Uniprocessor [ACPI-compliant dual-processor-capable computer with only one processor installed.]
2. ACPI Multiprocessor [ACPI-compliant dual-processor-capable computer with two processors installed.]
3. Advanced Configuration and Power Interface [ACPI-compliant computer that is limited to one processor.]
4. MPS Uniprocessor [non-ACPI dual-processor-capable computer with only one processor installed.]
5. MPS Multiprocessor [non-ACPI dual-processor-capable computer with two processors installed.]
6. Standard PC [non-ACPI computer that is limited to one processor.]

1. If your computer type is among the last three types, close the Device Manager; your computer is either not ACPI-compliant, or already has ACPI disabled. Otherwise, double-click on the computer type listing.
2. Click on the Driver tab, and then click the Update Driver button.
3. Select the Display a list option in the Driver Wizard.
4. The Wizard will ask you to select a device driver. Click the button labeled Show all hardware of this device class.
5. In the Manufacturers window, select Standard Computers. The Models window will now display a list of the six computer types described above.
6. Select the non-ACPI computer type that corresponds to your system's current computer type (for example, if your computer was listed in Device Manager as an ACPI Multiprocessor PC, you should choose MPS Multiprocessor PC). Click Next and install this driver.

A : Pinnacle video editing boards like DC30 or DV500PLUS require a certain bandwidth on the PCI bus to transfer video and audio data. Without that, problems like dropped frames or bad frames may occur during video capture or video output.

Such problems are typically caused by other PCI devices consuming too much bandwidth, and/or by wrong PCI settings within the BIOS setup.

The PPE tool attempts to improve the data bandwidth by changing some BIOS PCI settings. In most cases it cures the dropped frames / bad frames problem, in some cases it does not help, and in some cases it makes the PC work worse than before.

A : Uncompressed video data is a tremendous amount of data. PAL video for example has a resolution of 720 x 576 pixels and is transmitted with 25 frames per second. One second of an PAL video needs 720 x 576 x 25 pixels of 16 bits, that is over 20 MBytes per second. This amount of data would fill a CD-ROM (650 Mbytes) in only 32 seconds.

Even if the video resolution is reduced to one quarter (SIF) or to a sixteenth, the result is still a data stream of more than one MByte/s. The data is compressed with the help of so called CODECs (compressor / decompressor). There are two different types of CODECs: hardware CODECs and software CODECs. Hardware CODECs are usually the more powerful ones. Pinnacle DV500PLUS is equipped with a dynamically loadable processor (RISC-CPU), which combines the advantages of a hardware CODEC (performance) and a software CODEC (variable).

A : Originally, MPEG is a work group within the ISO (International Standards Organization) / IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), which develops standards for digital video and audio compression. The abbreviation "MPEG", however, is more often used for the compression standard itself, developed by this group.

In general, the different types of MPEG compression are:

*.MPV MPEG-Video,

*.MPA MPEG-Audio

*.MPS MPEG-System (also abbreviated as *.MPG) (a combination of
both).

The MPEG video and audio compression schemes differ completely, as they are adapted to the vastly different human ways of perceiving audio and video.

Q : Video format

A : In MPEG compression the data stream is first divided into different sections, the so called GOPs (Group of Pictures), each containing several frames. One GOP may consist of three types of frames: I-Frames, P-Frames and B-Frames. A typical GOP structure as you may find it on a DVD looks as follows:

IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB

The following diagram shows a closed GOP:

GOP size of 9
P distance of 2

The first and the last frame of each group is a so called intra frame or I-frame. I-frames consist of compressed data that reflects the entire video image without regard to previous or subsequent frames. If only I-frames were used, MPEG would be very similar to other compression formats such as MJPEG or DV.

What makes MPEG special compared to these are the other two frames types: P and B.

P-frames do not encode the entire image. Rather, they only contain the differences between the frame content and the previous I-frame. Think of a video clip where a car moves across a static background: a P-frame would only consist of the information "car has moved right", since nothing else has changed from the previous I-frame. This is called a "motion compensation".

Since information about motion is a lot less data than re-encoding the entire image, a P-frame requires—on the average—only approximately 30% of the amount of data needed by an I-frame.

The B- or bi-directional frames are calculated from the previous and the following I- or P-frames - they make use of motion that happens backwards or forwards in time. Because of this, the B-frames require only 12.5 % of the amount of data needed by an I-frame.

MPEG takes - in contrast to less advanced CODECs such as MJPEG or DV - advantage of the fact that many times, subsequent frames of a video are not all that different. This makes MPEG much more efficient, meaning less data to reach a given quality level.

The GOP structure in the MPEG2 AVI files used by DC1000 or DC2000 (DCx000) is IPPP. Note that no B-frames are used within the AVI files, as this would make frame-accurate editing slow and cumbersome. But just by using P-frames instead of only I-frames, DCx000 can reach a given quality level at only half the data rate that other editing systems need. Or, viewed another way, DCx000 provides twice the video quality at a selected data rate - while still allowing edits at any arbitrary frame with full accuracy.

For the export of MPEG2 files, DCx000 allows you to select the GOP structure that is most appropriate for your application: from I-frame-only up to IBP with a GOP length of 15 that are optimized for DVD or MPEG2-CD production.