The Miro DC1 video capture card brings digital image manipulation within reach of PC users. But if the effects are to keep pace with your imagination, you'll need a muscular hard-drive. Ian Waugh takes a sledgehammer to his home movies...

So where do we go from here? We can create sophisticated musical arrangements using MIDI, we can integrate them with CD quality digital audio, even edit the tiniest parts of the whole caboodle in a sequencer. What's the next challenge?

Graphics. Video. Multimedia. You may be sick of hearing the M word, but tempus fugit and technology waits for no musician. Like it or not, we are rapidly heading towards the integrated media disk — a CD which will contain not just the audio data of an album but accompanying graphics, and perhaps even the MIDI files and sound samples used therein.

Peter Gabriel et al are already heavily involved, and if there's money in it you can bet your last Meg of disk space that the record companies will want a piece of the action. Hell, if they can charge 50 percent more for a CD, when it actually costs less to produce, think how much they can milk out of the CD/video/multimedia market.

Once upon a time, digital audio systems were expensive. Not any more. Once upon a time digital video systems were expensive. Not any more. You will still pay several grand for a pro system, but the amateur, the home musician and the semi-pro now have access to the technology for a few hundred pounds. You can now create and edit your own videos without parting with any limbs.

Spaced out

The first thing you need is a video capture card, to get the visual data onto your hard disk. Enter the DC1 tv. This uses MJPEG for real-time compression and decompression.

The compression process is vital. A single photo-quality image could require up to 20Mb of disc space. Using the PAL standard of 25 frames per second, a one minute film would use up to 30Gb of disk space! At a more sensible level of operation, a raw video clip of reasonable quality lasting one second, may contain around 10Mb of data. This could be compressed to around 500K, that's about 30Mb of disk space per minute.

Apart from the compression process, you can help reduce the amount of data in two other ways. If you are creating a movie for playback on the computer you can use a smaller window, and then reduce the number of frames displayed each second. The actual amount of data generated depends on all these factors, so it's difficult to give a definitive Mb/minute requirement in the manner of digital audio — which is around 10Mb/minute for stereo CD quality.

Incidentally, if you want to record audio, too, you'll need a separate sound card. There are dozens of these on the market, and you can get one capable of handling CD-quality audio for £200 or less.

Large movements

Even with large compression ratios, we still have to move a lot of data, so a fast as well as a large hard disk is essential. I used a Micropolis AV drive which we reviewed last December. It's specially designed to provide large amounts of data throughput, without interruption. And it's fast. A hard disk speed test program lets you check your drive, and use the information to optimise the capture process.

The basic package contains Ulead's VideoStudio 2, which comprises a capture program, a video editor and an image editor. There are several parameters to set up prior to capture, such as the video standard you want to use, the image size, the compression ratio and so on.

The largest image the card can handle is a quarter screen (it calls this Full) which is 384 x 288 pixels. The card has both Composite and S-VHS In and Out sockets, and you can view the image on a TV as well as (or instead of) on your PC's monitor. In many ways it is better to use a TV, as your graphics system will undoubtedly strain to keep up, and if you want to output to video, it will give you a more accurate representation of the image quality.

"This is great fun, but don't underestimate the amount of work involved."

A useful feature is Automatic Quality Control. You set an initial JPEG quality, and the program analyses the data and automatically adjusts the quality if things get a bit frantic, in order to maintain the frame rate.

Drop out

When using a high compression ratio, it may occasionally be necessary to drop some frames. If this happens, the program will tell you how many frames had to be dropped at the end of the capture period. You can lose a few frames without much noticeable difference, but if you lose too many the picture will become jerky, so you may have to readjust the settings.

The card supports three video formats. NTSC runs at 30 frames/second and is used in America. PAL runs at 25 frames/second and is used in much of Europe including the UK. SECAM is used by the French and is similar to PAL. Trust the French to be different.

The capture process requires a certain amount of tweaking in order to get the best quality images into the smallest amount of space, with the equipment you have. It's not terribly difficult, but the manual could be more helpful. It looks nice, but it's not ordered particularly well. Oh, for a hands-on, step-by-step tutorial!

Edit man

The video edit software has three tracks of video and audio, plus an FX track. The frames appear in the video track, and you can zoom in to various resolutions to make the editing process more manageable.

Sections of the video can be cut and pasted, with the accompanying audio track following automatically. This effectively allows you to put the clips in any order you wish. The manual, again, wasn't particularly good at getting you started.

The FX track lets you apply one of 26 Transition effects to overlapping video tracks. You can crossfade between the two, dissolve from one to the other, use one to push the other aside, use a ribbon effect and so on. This is great fun, but don't underestimate the amount of work involved. There are, after all, up to 25 images for each second of video.

When your edits are complete the program creates a finished video file, containing all the clips and effects in the required order. This is a non-real-time process, and a minute's video can take up to 30 minutes to create. To see how things are progressing, you can preview a section of the layout, but this can still take a while to set up. A clip lasting a few seconds could take a few minutes to prepare for preview. Several times the preview process did not even work. I attribute this to lack of memory, even though the machine had 8Mb or RAM. If you want to edit any of the frames, then it's off to the image editor. This is a pretty decent image processor, with lots of edit tools and special effects.

When you're satisfied with the result, you can record it to a VCR. A little care with the capture and compression settings can produce excellent results. I used a camcorder with Composite output, and the resulting edits were often barely indistinguishable from the original material.

Final analysis

In all, I must say I did not find the software as intuitive as it could have been. If you get seriously into video editing, you will probably want something more sophisticated. The weakest part of the package is the software. Not that it's bad, it just doesn't really match the quality of the card. You might like to consider paying the hundred-odd pounds extra for the pack with Adobe Premier. It's a very good deal.

There are several budget-priced video cards on the market, and many are cheaper than the DC1. But most rely on software compression, which really is not good enough for writing to video, and even has limitations when creating files to run under Video for Windows. However, the use of MJPEG is not unique, and you can expect competition in vide capture cards to hot up.

But the DC1 tv is already here, and it performs exceedingly well. Now you can capture and edit video and save it back to video with little appreciable drop in quality. This simply would not have been an option for the average PC user a couple of years ago. It is now, and will enable interested musicians to get involved in quality video production.