Any news on a new version of Media 100 software?

[Marcus Warren]

Wow! I always wanted a DraCo. What were some of the other things that you liked about? Did you use ImageFX with it? Imagemaster?

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

DraCo has very nice image quality and its MovieShop NLE software was ahead of its time.

The basic system is powered by a 50mhz Motorola 68060 processor and RAM topped out at 128MB. You could play 720×486 24bit video with 48.1 stereo audio in real-time. You could have up to 99 layers of audio/video. Once you got into layering though, you needed to render things out.

MovieShop has a multicam feature that allows you to work with up to 6 synced clips. When you would done making you edit selections, it built a new timeline for you.

I liked the ability to nest timelines. I could drag a complicated timeline into the bin and that use that as a single video track in a new timeline.

On the I/O side, the basic DraCo has composite and y/c video and rca stereo audio in/out. You could add on a firewire card and an optical audio card. You can shoot with an HD camera, downconvert to SD via firewire to the DraCo and get really good looking image quality.

Remember the Media100 P6000 boards? It turns out that they used the same Sony DVBK firewire cards as the DraCo. Pinnacle used those cards too. DraCo only supports a/v i/o through firewire though, not device control.

There was an add-on card for serial device control & a jog/shuttle controller.

DraCo uses a SCSI-II bus. With SCSI bridge cards you can use SATA drives. I have a few 120GB drives in mine. I’ve been meaning to try an SSD at aome point. If you can speed up the drive access, render times will improve. Every little bit helps on a 50mhz system.

If I burn data DVDs in ISO9660 format, I can read them on the DraCo. I’ve transferred data back & forth between the DraCo and Mac that way.

I do have a 10mbit ethernet card and USB1 card installed too. I’ve used VNC from the DraCo to control my mac.

I have ImageMasterRT and ImageFX. These are the PhotoShop-like apps for the AmigaOS. DraCo will run AmigaOS 3.9 and ProDad’s p.OS. I mostly use ImageFX but I like ImageMaster’s morphing better. I also have Imagine3D, Lightwave, and Aladdin 4D.

My DraCo is 16 years old, a dinosaur NLE, but it still works and I’ll use it now and again for nostalgic reasons.

[Marcus Warren]

Sounds nice. I was a real Amiga fanatic. I own several and have OpalVision and GVP ImpactVision 24 cards. Loved ImageFX, ImagemasterRT, Art Department Pro, Brilliance, Deluxe Paint, Scala, MediaPoint, various proDAD Amiga products, and on and on.I did a lot of stuff in Imagine. I hated to see that product go away, even when it was just really being developed for Windows. I have Aladdin 4D as well, but the present owners of it seem to be goofballs.

I don’t use the Amigas at this time but i have kept EVERYTHING. I wanted the Applied Magic’s Broadcaster Elite NLE but it was so expensive. I went so far as to purchase the audio card, but never got around to installing it.

I’m glad to hear that the MovieShop DraCo combo was/is so formidable. Keep it going for as long as you can. Kinda like a ’57 Chevy.

I want one of the “Amiga” X1000s but the market is so…uncertain. I don’t even know if they are available

Yeah, nesting would be a great feature for M100. You know, I guess you can get around that to a certain degree by building multilayer compositions in RED, but it’s not quite the same thing that you are talking about.

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

I also have a VLabMotion/Toccata setup, DraCo’s predecessor. It’s a decent NLE for the big box Amigas. The cards are Z-II so the video quality is limited by Z-II bottleneck. Composite & Y/C in/out only, no firewire option for VLM. Also, it can only use 4GB partitions and only the 1st 4GB of a drive. Going beyond that with another partition will overwrite the first one. There’s no patch available since MovieShop bypasses the normal AmigaOS for drive access and uses custom format partitions. When I get my A4000 reassembled, I’ll try using 4GB CF cards.

Broadcaster Elite was the only NLE for Amiga with component video. There was a prototype add-on for DraCo but it didn’t get released. But the DraCo firewire more than makes up for that shortcoming. An you can pick up an old M100 card to harvest its firewire board for the DraCo at a reasonable price, compared to what MacroSystems charged when they sold it.

MovieShop has two editing modes for timelines, basic a/b with an fx/transition track & 1 title track (like the older M100) and an RPN mode (reverse polish notation) that offered unlimited layers. The multiple layers are processed in RPN order. With nesting, you can mix & match timeline types in the same project.

Some timeline editing features are insert/move/replace, auto-length, snap to position. Window tabs are nice. You could add meta-data to the clips in your bin. Save multiple custom window arrangements. It also supports arexx scripting so you could simplify complex functions with custom scripts.

Sample MovieShop5 screen:

For a few projects, I used M100/RED for more complex composites & rendering, transferred the 24bit frames to DraCo via data-DVD.