Anybody have any experience with DV Rack??

[Bryce Whiteside]

Unless something has changed, I thought it was a WinTEL notebook PC application. I guess you know that, since you tested some clips.

DV Rack would make a great video assist screen, since it has waveform/vector scopes which you don’t see too much in the field.

https://www.seriousmagic.com/dvrcompatibility.cfm

DV is DV is DV so pretty much the optics and CCD on the camera are the variables as far as quality.

If you are running and gunning, being tethered to a notebook might be somewhat limiting as opposed to something like Focus FireStore FS4 & FS-4 Pro that mount to the camera.

Most notebook drives are 40 to 100 GB which would limit the amount recording capacity you would have. I think that you can get 100 GB that are 5400 rpm, but most 7200 rpm notebook drives are 60 GB. The general rule of thumb, if I remember correctly, is 100 GB per 7 hours of DV footage. If you get an external firewire drive, now you have two things tethered to your camera. I would guess, however, you could create a light weight cart or platform for the notebook and external drive.

Some points to ponder,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Jim Vastola]

Thanks Bryce,

Good notes.

Jim V.

[Mitchji]

Hi,

Heres the link (need to register):
https://www.dv.com/news/news_item.jhtml?LookupId=/xml/review/johnson1204

Heres the text:

DV Rack
Serious Magic, $495
Monitor and Scope Software

DV Score: Very Good

Pros: Thousands of dollars of hardware in a $500 software package. Video monitor with real bars, blue only, and more. Digital video recorder built in. Components can be arranged almost any way you want.

Cons: Most components can’t be resized. Audio Spectrum Analyzer seems half-baked. IEEE 1394 input only.

Bottom Line DV Rack makes your laptop an essential tool on shoots.

Serious Magic: DV Rack

Isn’t the auto mode great? I mean, really. I’m gonna be the next Tarantino, the next Rodriguez, the next Lucas-and as long as I engage auto on the camera, the pictures and sound will just magically get recorded! Yeah, right.

Sarcasm aside, the fact is that no one ever got to greatness riding the auto switch. You really have to know how that assembly of titanium, plastic, lithium, and glass perched on your hand works, in order to get the best out of it. Many of the higher-priced cameras make it possible, even easy, to override the auto modes. They even provide rudimentary tools, such as audio meters and viewfinder zebras, to help diagnose and avoid problems.
Serious Magic DV Rack puts a virtual rack of video monitoring tools on your PC. Although an LCD screen might not be the most ideal monitor, DV Rack on a laptop will allow you to greatly improve your video wherever you shoot.

Yet, for really high quality work, this isn’t enough. Virtually all EFP (electronic field production) shooters will carry a video monitor along to check white balance, watch for overscan problems, and the like.

A smaller number will carry a waveform monitor and vectorscope, which in essence are to video what a thermometer is to a house: they measure and tell you how hot your video is. And virtually none will carry an audio spectrum analyzer, a video quality monitor, a shot clock, a camera setup utility, and, just for the heck of it, let’s throw in a DV still grabber and digital video recorder.

You may have guessed by now that Serious Magic (www.seriousmagic.com) has done it again. Instead of creating another me-too product, it created a new category that I think of as the Laptop Quality Control Department. The DV Rack is as amazing and revolutionary in its space as Serious Magic’s previous products, Visual Communicator and Ultra, are in theirs.

Although DV Rack can run on just about any contemporary PC (sorry, no Mac version), it is abundantly clear that the right home for this program is on a laptop. DV Rack wants to be in the field, and with the costs of high-powered laptops falling every week, there’s really no reason to skimp on one. Just be sure the laptop comes with an IEEE 1394 port because that’s how DV Rack gets its signals. My test bed is a two-year-old Toshiba Satellite 1905-S303 Pentium 4 2.4 GHz laptop.

On the rack
Let’s step through what you get in DV Rack. Of course, the most important piece of gear is the video monitor, and DV Rack provides one with all of the buttons pros expect to see. First is the Bars button, which in conjunction with Blue Only, is used to adjust the color response of your computer screen to match video standards. Adjustable zebras for both white and black can be activated on the monitor, along with safe action/safe title area markers and ticks along the sides that correspond to the rule of thirds. A very nice feature is the Split button, which allows you to see and compare either two recorded clips or a clip and the live camera at the same time. I’m still not 100 percent sure if the color rendition of a laptop screen can be tweaked to exactly emulate a TV tube-for one thing, view angle is critical on an LCD in a way it never is on a tube-but for the time being, I’m going to give DV Rack the benefit of the doubt. The most objectionable thing I saw on the monitor was rescaling jaggies when the monitor was blown up to full-screen size, but that’s understandable-stretching 720 x 480 to 1024 x 768 will do that. Still, it’s nice that the full-screen option is available to make noncritical viewing from a distance possible.

Backing up what you see on the video monitor are the waveform monitor, for brightness measurements, and the vectorscope, for color measurements. They work as expected and give accurate readings, which feature selectivity between whole-raster and individual line readings. But it was here that I encountered my greatest frustration with DV Rack: Other than going full screen with the monitor, DV Rack devices can’t be resized. I can easily imagine wanting to use the waveform monitor as a full-screen display, but it just isn’t available. You can zoom in and out of the waveform and vectorscope, but they are sized to nestle nicely beside the monitor and don’t quite fill the entire width of the screen when side by side.

The same is true of the Spectra 60 Video Analyzer and the Automated Quality Monitor (DV-QM). The Spectra 60 uses the laptop cursor to isolate the color and luma values of any selected pixel in the raster. You get both numeric readouts and bar graph indicators, and the readout can be displayed in RGB, YUV, HSV, HSL, and CMYK color space values. The DV-QM allows you to set maximum levels for video and audio, and will alert you when either exceed those values. Even better is its ability to warn when the talent has popped a /p/ on a take, something that can be a real hassle to fix in the edit bay.
(Top to Bottom) The Audio Spectrum Analyzer, Digital Video Recorder, and Shot Clock can only be seen in this DV Rack screen shot. It’s a bit frustrating to have so many tools, yet be constrained by screen size.

Several other modules fill the entire width of the screen, not unlike the way real gear is mounted in an actual rack. First in the usefulness parade is the Digital Video Recorder, which can start and stop in sync with the roll button on the camera. Files can be saved in many formats, including Canopus and Matrox AVI, and QuickTime, among others. This allows clips to be instantly editable. You will want a really big hard drive for this trick, though, as DV consumes 13 GB per hour. Also, an automatic prerecord buffer will grab that shot even before you hit the roll button.

Another great module is the DV Grabber, which will save a JPEG, PNG, or bitmap still of whatever is on the screen when you hit the button. The Shot Clock displays both running time of clips being captured and time of day, which is controlled by your Windows clock and can be updated from the U.S. Naval Atomic Clock at the click of a mouse. Although camera timecode can be seen in the Digital Video Recorder, I thought it odd that it couldn’t also be displayed as an option in the Shot Clock, which has a visible red LED-style display. This would be a real asset for field logging.

One of the most ambitious modules is the Audio Spectrum Analyzer. An impressive collection of leaping red bars and active waveforms, the Audio Spectrum Analyzer purports to let you know where your audio is thick and where it is thin. Unfortunately, there isn’t any detail on what specific frequencies of the spectrum any of the bars covers-and even the generally excellent manual glosses over this important info with terms like “low bass” and “highest treble.” This is an unfortunate lapse on an otherwise excellent attempt at a spectrum analyzer. Maybe in version 2?

The extras
Finally, there is the SureShot camera calibration application. Along with the included chip chart and convergence card, SureShot offers a semiautomatic way to help ensure proper focus and exposure on any given shot. Problem is, this is a four-step process, and not many shooters I know would go through all of that to set up a single shot. The help it gives might be good for new shooters, but anyone with any experience will get the needed info from the waveform and video monitors.

But the negatives I cite are mere quibbles. Overall, Serious Magic DV Rack is a knockout application that holds the promise of better video for all kinds of shooters. I can easily see DV Rack giving laptops indispensable status on EFP shoots of all types.

System Requirements: Intel Pentium 4, Celeron, or AMD Athlon XP processor 1.4 GHz or faster; Windows XP or 2000; 256 MB RAM; 20 MB hard drive space for app; 180 MB per minute of recorded video; 32 MB AGP graphics card with 3D acceleration (64 MB recommended), Nvidia GeForce or ATI Radeon recommended; Ethernet card or IDE hard drive; IEEE 1394 input.

Bruce A. Johnson has been torturing cameras, editors, and all kinds of other television gear for over 20 years now. You can reach him at bruce@dv.com or in the DV.com Cameras Forum.

Best Wishes,

Mitch