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Pinnacle Edition 5:
Первый взгляд
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 When
Pinnacle bought Fast in September of 2001, it was looking to bolster its
software technology. One of the best assets of Fast was the German
company's nonlinear editing software, Fast Studio. About a year later,
it re-released the software, changing a scant few of its features while
re-naming it Pinnacle Edition. Alas, even though Fast Studio was a fine
piece of software when it was first released in the late 90s, it had
fallen behind the rest of the pack of nonlinear editing software, and I
gave it a negative review here on Digital Media Net. But it did have one
major strength: Background rendering. Wait 'til you see what Pinnacle's
done with that feature, making the next incarnation of Edition, version
5, one to watch. I take it back, Pinnacle. Here's a first look.
 It's
not that Fast Studio/Pinnacle Edition was a bad piece of software, or
that Pinnacle didn't try to improve it before its re-emergence.
Pinnacle's addition of its Hollywood FX package with its numerous (and
sometimes whimsical) effects was a plus. Its inclusion of a fine CG
package in TitleDeko, and the second thought of making it work with the
venerable Pinnacle DV500 acceleration card also helped. But still, there
was a major feature missing, one that is now in version 5 in a very
special way: Real time software previews. What's special about it? Well,
for one thing, it's fast (no pun intended), able to stack up at least
five real time layers when I first saw it here at the Midwest Test
Facility last week, more than two months before Pinnacle says it will be
ready for release. And, when it's passed its limit of layers, it goes
into what Pinnacle calls "graceful degradation."
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| Click for enlargement -- Check
out the layers you can create and preview in real time with
Edition 5 -- and look at that CPU usage meter -- it's hardly
working hard at all. |
At this early date, I saw the software
smoothly playing back multiple unrendered layers of DVEs where one DVE
was 3D and three were 2D. Not until there were 4 DVEs on screen with
lots of filters did it scale back to Draft Mode, although it was still
playing at 30fps. Graceful degradation, indeed -- I once knew a girl
like that. Anyway, that was a total of five streams, four of them with
color correction and borders -- that's nine filters altogether. Better
yet, Pinnacle is saying when the software ships at the end of Q2 that
we'll be able to preview eight layers in real time. And that's eight
layers of 3D effects (in quatrter-size mode, or draft mode), all fully
keyframeable, along with a couple of channels of color correction, and
DVD authoring from the timeline, too. This represents the next level of
real time performance for Edition, one that its competitors will have to
stretch to equal. Specifically, Product Manager Patrick Beaulieu told
Digital Media Net, "Our expectations for the final release is to
preview a combination of 5 layers of video using the full DV resolution
preview or 8 layers of video using the quarter size (a la Adobe Premiere)
preview on a fast system -- all these layers with 3D effects and color
correction on each layer." From what I've seen so far, I think they
just might make it.
Here's why I think that: It's a new idea that Pinnacle is trying here,
and from what I've seen so far, it works. The trick is that Edition is
using the power of the computer's processor (CPU) and it's also able to
use the graphics card's processor (the graphics processing unit, or GPU)
to make all these effects happen at the same time, immediately. Pinnacle
is using this CPU/GPU duo through the AGP bus, which provides up to 16
times more bandwidth than equivalent PCI-based cards. And, that
background rendering feature is still there, too, so anything that can't
be played back in real time is rendering all the while you're doing
other things. And, with a fast chip like the 3.06GHz P4 I used to test
Edition 5, the rendering in the background happens so quickly that it's
hardly noticeable. If the two-pronged acceleration of the CPU and the
GPU doesn't work, and if the background rendering hasn't finished,
Edition engages in that graceful degradation mentioned earlier, where
the resolution is slowly lessened to make it so you can still see what
you'll get after the render. Only after that is exhausted will it start
to drop frames. And, if you have a dual processor system, or one of the
new Intel P4 hyperthreaded chips, Edition is fully optimized for those,
too. Because of this new-found multi-threaded nature, Edition now lets
you zoom in and out on the timeline, change track size, toggle to a full
size window -- all while playing your timeline. Welcome to the 21st
century, Edition!
Another plus is Edition's ability to play back your video in native DV
resolution, 720x480, where you see every pixel on your computer screen
-- not quarter-screen doubled video if you enlarge the frame in, say,
Premiere. Even so, when the time comes that this new software is
available, I think I would prefer Edition Pro which includes an adaptor
that lets you see all your real time effects in an NTSC or PAL monitor.
That's especially helpful when you want to see the results of your color
correction interactively, a crucial capability for serious color
correction. This is something even more compelling since Edition has
beefed up primary and secondary color correction controls as another one
of its new features. Not only that, but Pinnacle's added real time
chromakeying as well, and it's effective and easy to use.
You get the software only, which still lets you see your video in an
NTSC or PAL monitor by taking S-Video looped through your DV camcorder
or DV VTR, but your unrendered real time effects won't show up in your
NTSC or PAL monitor unless you have that Pinnacle card. But even then,
you'll still be able to see these effects on your computer monitor. That
AGP graphics adaptor with the Pro Version has an S-Video out and 1394
port on it, and also includes a breakout box with another 1394 port and
analog I/O.
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