Installing the Spark couldn't have been any easier. It took less than 5 minutes to plug the board in, and be up and running. No configuration required, no jumpers, no IRQ conflicts. This is rare, because my system is already maxed out on slot usage, and I have very few free addresses. I installed the software, and another 5 minutes later, I was capturing and playing back DV clips from my VX-1000! Truly incredible.  

In comparison my Quadrant Q-motion PCI (aka Truevision Bravado 1000) took 3 months of tweaking and adjusting before it worked, and this was in the Win95 Plug and Play environment! (NT 4.0 currently is NOT Plug and Play).  

A Few Things annoy me right now about using the Spark, but it really has more do with the current solutions provided by Adobe and Microsoft. The Spark uses the AVI format which limits you to 2GB clips. So the longest single DV Edit you can do is 10 minutes or about 2GB. (The DV 5:1 compression is about 200MB/minute.) Another thing that bugs me, is that Premiere only supports 16 bit 11,22, or 44.1kHz audio, not the DV standard 12bit 32, 44, or 48kHz. Remember that DV allows 2 tracks of 16 bit audio or 4 tracks of 12 bit audio. If I want to compile and organize raw DV footage by dumping it into the Spark and transferring it to a new blank tape, all the clips will be converted to 16 bit 44.1Khz audio. This becomes a problem when the DV tape has a mixture of edited and raw clips, because the Spark has trouble capturing clips that change midway to another audio sample rate. It results in lost audio. DPS therefore recommends dividing the capture session into two clips rather than one long one. I just wish the data would transfer intact eliminating this problem. Are you listening Adobe?  

Rendering Speed- How does using my P-133 compare to a PPro 200 with the Spark? Well lets see the famous Bertel Crossfade takes about 35 sec. on my P-133 and about 17 sec on a PPro200 which is pretty dramatic. On the other hand, a multilayered edit of 4 clips using the Super Tracks in Premiere resulted in times of 2min 30sec on the PPro while my P-133 required 3 min. That's only a 20% difference which isn't all that significant. MMX should significantly increase this performance, as well as DPS/Adaptec's further optimization of the DVSoft Codec.  

MMX Pentium Pro- I'm waiting for the Klamath (Pentium II) prices to drop a bit, and for DPS to come out with the MMX capable PPro drivers before I get my new machine. It'll probably be a dual 266Mhz Klamath, with 3- 9GB drives, and 128MB RAM. Then I'll let you know how fast it is! The 300Mhz chips should be available later this summer.  

Nice Trick- Remember that the DV format requires about 12GB per 60 minutes of video which is a lot of HD storage, but that also means that each miniDV tape holds 12GB. That's an incredibly affordable backup method of 12GB for $12 and a 3.5MB/s transfer rate as well.  

DVSoft Proof- The two images below were captured from the Spark, and output as a TGA file from Premiere. The first image is a straight transfer of DV data to TGA. The second image was recompressed using the DVSoft codec in Premiere, and output as a TGA. These files are large---about 1.3MB each and will take several minutes for download. I intentionally avoided any JPEG compression for the sake of clarity. The DVSoft compressed image was created by Superimposing in Premiere the DVSoft Codec title created in Adobe Photoshop and re-rendering the clip. 

1.) The Bravado 1000 uses 640x480 pixels instead of 720x480 which results in some artifacting in the scaling up of the clip. This could be solved by using another capture board that originates in 720x480. This artifacting is most noticeable on scenes that have a lots of movement.  

2.) Converting an MJPEG clip to the DVSoft Codec isn't real time, and is pretty slow on my P-133. This time consuming process is the same for conversion of ANY software codec, but especially so in this case, because it is not only converting between Codecs, but also changing resolution.  

3.) The NT drivers from Quadrant International have been beta for the last year, and are not bug free which makes it difficult to test this board with the Spark under NT. The Spark Win95 drivers should be available later this year.  

I think both 1 and 2 can be solved with an external VTR like the Sony DHR-1000 or DSR-30 which could dump the analog output of the Bravado 1000 to DV. But this then defeats the purpose of using the Bravado 1000 for analog input to the Spark.  

Reality Check- In its current state, the Spark isn't perfect. I still have link problems where the Firewire connection is lost and refuses to relink without having to reboot the system. There are certain Premiere settings that will constantly crash itself. Hint -- Don't attempt to change the Spark Presets. Outputting animations or creating motion graphics where audio may not be a part of the creation process will cause corrupt DVSoft files. The DV format requires that audio be decoded with the video. I.e., you cannot play back DV clips without DV audio in it. The current solution requires you to capture a DV clip from your camcorder with the lens cap on resulting in a black clip with DV audio. By extracting one frame of audio from this clip, you can insert this into the last frame of your animation. This is usually accomplished by outputting sequential image files from your renderer, and combining the images in Premiere along with the DV audio. Note, this prevents you from rendering directly to a DVSoft AVI file, even if your renderer allows it, unless you can also embed the DV audio into your animation.  

I hope you find this article to be useful and informative. The Spark in its present form works very well. I think many of these problems will be solved in the next release of the drivers.  

Richard Lin 
E.S.P. Video & Graphics