The Pro box
The supplied breakout box looks great. It's compact and stylish (finished in silver and black gunmetal), with a silver stand, and has plenty of inputs and outputs. As well as the expected composite and S-video connections, it offers component video in/out. Analogue audio input is stereo, via two RCA phonos, and five audio output (phonos, again) are provided for surround-sound monitoring.There are in/out sockets for optical audio, along with a single six-pin FireWire port and a headphone socket. What could be said to be missing is balanced audio support but we wouldn’t feel hard done-by given the price of the package. We connected the box to a USB 2.0 port on our test PC – that’s the only link required – and found that it installed easily along with the Liquid Edition 6 software.
The Pro box has plenty of sockets, includingcomponent in/out and 5.1 output
Our first captures were of DV fed into the box's FireWire port and worked well - five sessions, each of 30 minutes, with no dropped frames. But, initially, playback was a very different story. Whether using composite or S-video outputs, playback became slow and choppy – dropping to between six and eight frames per second.
But, switching to output from the PC’s own FireWire port and feeding the signal to our DV deck gave us the fluid playback of clips. Something was wrong when going out via USB 2 through the Pro hardware.
Looking for causes, we checked some spec sheets on Pinnacle's website, and found a list of approved and incompatible USB 2.0 chipsets – missing the fact that our motherboard’s chipset (an Nvidia nForce2) was listed as approved!
So, we installed the only USB 2.0 PCI card on the recommended list, Adaptec's AUA-3100LP (be warned, Adaptec’s AUA-5100 is said to be incompatible) – only to find that playback through analogue channels was somewhat worse.
Video speed had increased slightly, now approaching a normal frame rate, but it was erratic, with broken audio. And the image displayed on our connected TV set was almost entirely black with only a thin band of flickering picture at the top.
Advice on Pinnacle's forums suggested we should disable the motherboard’s USB ports, since they might be conflicting with those on the Adaptec card - but the situation didn't improve after we’d done that.
Then we alighted on another list of compatible and incompatible hardware - for graphics cards. LE Pro 6 needs a graphics card compatible with DirectX 9.0c. It's a fundamental requirement. It’s also the reason why users of the Pro 5 combi card will have to replace it if buying the Edition Pro 6 box.
Our PC’s Nvidia FX5600 card didn’t appear on the list, but a couple of relatively cheap cards did – the FX5700, and ATI’s Radeon 9600 – and Paul Dutton who bestrides DVdoctor and HEXUS.net (which can’t be easy for someone who’s even smaller than myself) just happened to have a spare 128MByte ATI Radeon 9600 Pro All In Wonder card about his person.
With this installed in place of the FX5600, the problem was banished whether using the Adaptec card or the motherboard’s USB 2.0 chipset – so we pulled out the Adaptec to save it for a rainy day.
Analogue video capture via S-video worked well, even while there was a feed going out to a connected TV set for monitoring. Video isn't being cloned during analogue capture the way it is with digital, so a lot of useful controls are available for adjusting what’s coming in. Audio levels can be monitored, too, and adjusted with slider controls, and there's a choice of file format for the captured media - including DV, MPEG-2 and DVCPro 25.
A further option, uncompressed, is also available but only if using the Pro box. MPEG capture options are the same as we've seen for rendering - with a choice of constant or variable bitrates as well as full control over data rates and GOP structure.
Capture to uncompressed, DV, and DVCPro formats worked well, but we experienced some dropped frames when capturing to high-quality MPEG-2 but reducing the MPEG encoding quality sorted that out.
We experienced some choppy playback of files captured from analogue sources, while native DV captured worked fine. Scrubbing through the problem files frame-by-frame indicated that no frames had been dropped on capture, but the file viewer still struggled to play them fluidly.
On another, very well-spec’d, PC newly built by Paul Dutton and based on an Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, we had severe lip-sync problems with all analogue captures, irrespective of the type of file produced .
Pinnacle was unable to come up with an explanation of why this might be – but the problem looks to have been addressed to some extent in the 6.1 updater, judging by tests carried out by Bob Crabtree with the 6.1 beta.
Video looked good on a TV set when played out of the box’s composite and S-video ports. Analogue audio output sounded good, too. For general playback of captured files and simple edits with no effects applied, the output video was crisp, smooth and stable.
Possibly the biggest advantage over FireWire output at this stage, however, came with multi-cam editing, as the entire multi-cam window with all sources is sent in a full-screen window – though playback was still choppy as on the computer monitor, but the larger scale allows users to get through the process without booking an appointment with the optician.
However, when 5.1 surround panning was enabled in the mixer, only one audio track could then be heard coming from the timeline - all became active again when we switched back to stereo.
The surround-sound mix was fine on a finished AC-3 file burned to disc and played back on a set-top DVD player, but surround-sound monitoring through the Pro box at the edit stage was practically impossible. Something else for Pinnacle to fix.
The Liquid Edition Pro breakout box sends out video overlay through analogue channels. So, whatever appears on the computer monitor can be sent out via S-video, composite or component connections, too.
But system speed is a deciding factor in real-time performance and, on our main test system, frame rates reduced gradually as effects were applied.
As an example, we found that a single picture-in-picture overlay created in Edition's real-time 2D editor played back immediately at 25fps whether the overlay had been given a border, transparency or drop shadow. However, playback dropped to 22fps when a second picture-in-picture overlay was added, and fell to 14fps when there were four inset pictures.
Even so, audio was still fluid and the picture was still sharp. Playback, though, is more fluid with effects applied to a single video stream. A lens flare filter, title overlays, sphere distortion, and even HSL colour-correction played back with no dropped frames. Even at reduced frame rates, the analogue output from Liquid Edition Pro was useful - particularly for processes such as colour correction.
