Q: Why do I need to update with the latest driver
Q: What is DMA and How to Enable
Q: How do I check for an available Interrupt (IRQ)?
Q: How do I free up an Interrupt (IRQ)
Q : Why do I need to stripe DV
tapes?
Q : What is a CODEC?
Q : How does MPEG-compression work?
Q : What is DirectX and why do I need it?
Q : Why to install PPE (PCI Performance Enhancer)
Q : Where can I get a glossary about Video or
Video Editing
Q: Why do I need to update with the latest driver
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.
Q: What is DMA and How to Enable
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.
To enable DMA on a Windows 98 / Millennium system:
Q: How do I check for an available Interrupt (IRQ)?
A: CHECK IF YOUR PINNACLE PRODUCT IS SHARING IRQ'S WITH ANOTHER DEVICE. To see what IRQ Studio DV is using, do the following:
If you are sharing IRQ's you can shut down your computer and put your Pinnacle Product in another slot. When you restart, your computer may give your Pinnacle Product a different IRQ assignment. If you continue to share IRQ's, we have some suggestions on how to free up IRQ's in the Setup/Install FAQ section called "How do I free up an Interrupt (IRQ)?"
Q: How do I free up an Interrupt (IRQ)
Make sure you have read the document called "How do I check for an available Interrupt (IRQ)?"
The reason you may want to free up an IRQ is because your system:
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.)
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.
Q : Why do I need to stripe
DV tapes?
I am having problems with scanning in DVTools
or Studio DV. I can manually capture and device control works, but scanning
does not. What is wrong?
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 two types of Overlay and they are called
Primary Surface
and Overlay Surface.
The difference between Primary Surface and Overlay Surface:
Overlay Surface
requires special hardware on the graphics card. You need a graphics card that
supports Overlay Surface along with drivers that support DirectDraw and DirectX
in order to take advantage of the Overlay Surface feature. Cards with Overlay
Surface have an additional video buffer called an Overlay buffer in addition
to the Primary video buffer. Since there is special hardware on these cards
for Overlay they are capable of displaying full screen video at 25/30 FPS.
If you use a graphics card that does not have overlay surface support, you can
use Primary Surface
Overlay. Primary Surface also requires Direct Draw and Direct X support. Since
Primary overlay cards do not have an Overlay buffer, the overlay will be processed
in the primary video buffer. Capture and playback will only appear at a frame
size of quarter of resolution
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.
Q : What is DirectX and
why do I need it?
A : In
very general terms, DirectX is an interface between programs (applications and
games) and the drivers that run your graphics, sound and other computer hardware.
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:
http://support.microsoft.com/Support/DirectX/faq
How can I tell which version of DirectX is currently installed?
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.
Where can I get the latest version of DirectX?
Microsoft maintains a website for DirectX information and downloads.
Visit http://www.microsoft.com/directx
To go directly to the "Home User Downloads" section of the Microsoft DirectX site, follow this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/directx/homeuser/downloads
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:
Q : Why to install PPE (PCI Performance Enhancer)
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.
Video |
VCD
|
SVCD
|
DVD
|
AVI
|
DivX
|
ASF
|
Video Compression | MPEG1 | MPEG2 | MPEG2 | Uncompressed | MPEG4 | MPEG4 |
Audio Compression | MPEG1 | MPEG1 | MPEG2 | Uncompressed | MP3/MPA | MPEG4 |
Size 1 hour video | 600 MB | about 1 GB* | about 2 GB* | several GBs | about 350 MB* | about 120 MB* |
Quality | Good | Great | Excellent | Excellent | Good | Bad |
* = it depends on the audio and video bitrate.
Q : How does MPEG-compression work?
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.
and
record from/to tape. If your DV board has different IEEE1394 connectors, you
can use them
indifferently.
In
Europe, the majority of DV camcorders are shipped with only the DVout enable.
The DVin capability
is
disabled to avoid higher European taxes (the camcorder is then only recognized
as a Player and no
more
as a Recorder). If you buy the same PAL model in the USA, Australia or Asia,
you will get it with
DVin
and DVout enabled.
Products
such as Studio DV or DV200 only support IEEE1394 connections (no analogue connections).
So
if your DV device does not support DVin, then you are not able to export the
data from the hard
disk
to the DV device. And you loose the capability to have a full Digital chain
(capture, edit and
export).
According
to the manufacturer, it is sometimes possible to enable the DVin connection.
You can find
on
Internet several tools to enable the DVin. Be careful regarding the warranty
!
Studio
DV does not provide analogue outputs. If your DV device has a DVin, you can
then use it to
decompress
the DV data and decode them to analogue. Just transfer the data from disk to
the DV device
(without
writing to the tape) and use the analogue output to record to an analogue VCR
or to a TV monitor.
Studio
DV Plus has an analogue output. So if your DV device does not have a Dvin, Studio
DV plus is a good alternative to record to an analogue VCR.
A
product such as DV500 includes a DV hardware CODEC. So you are able to directly
decode the DV
data to an analogue output and you don’t need to connect
a DV device to get an analogue output.
A: Click on Video
Basis link to get more information about video and video editing.
Usefull hints about Video
Editing are also available.
A : You will find at the end of the User’s Manual of your Pinnacle Product
a very complete glossary.
You can also click on the Glossary link to get it online.