Hardware

As anyone who has digital video experience will immediately see, we have opted to work with a very basic, low-end system. Things we could have added are: a PCI hardware-accelerated video board, a PCI SCSI-3 accelerator card, a SCSI-3 RAID system, even a higher-end workstation such as an SGI. Digital video can be very hardware-intense work and no matter how powerful your system is, you can easily max it out. You need to know the limits of your system and work within those boundaries. There are many tricks to getting animations to look good and play smoothly on a less-than-perfect system. I have been able to achieve some fairly professional quality output on this basic system. I would not advise going very much lower-end than this system if you want to do any serious video recording.

The 80mb of RAM in our system has been an huge benefit. All graphics, animation and video work is extremely RAM hungry. Complex 3D models require large amounts of RAM to work with, and even more to render. Morphing usually has only moderate memory requirements, but when working with complex morphs or large image files, the memory requirements increase dramatically. Often, my video projects begin with very large image files collected on microscopes or scanners and I must manipulate them in Photoshop before they are ready to be incorporated into the video. Everyone knows the memory hog that Photoshop is. The final reason to have a large amount of RAM is that the ultimate goal of all your work is to create the best quality movie file that will play smoothly on your system. The more RAM you have the more of your movie file will be able to be loaded into memory, thus resulting in smoother playback. For a discussion of tricks for getting your movie to look as good as possible and playback as smoothly as possible, see the section on printing to video.

The 4mb of VRAM in our system enables it to drive two monitors: a 17" AppleVision, and a small TV monitor. With only 2mb of VRAM (standard configuration), only one monitor can be driven at a time. This is very useful because TV monitors don't provide the precise color values and pixel discrimination that even low-quality computer monitors do. The appearance of images can be quite surprising when you view them on a TV monitor. You don't want the surprise to occur after you've done all your work and you believe you have a stunning finished product. Also, when recording the video, if you have only 2mb of VRAM, you need to disconnect the computer monitor and connect the TV monitor and disconnect and reconnect when you're finished - a major hassle.

Hard drive space is absolutely necessary. I would not attempt to do any serious video work with any less than 1gb of free hard drive space (devoted to video work, does not include space taken up by system software, applications, etc.). I have found that the best situation is to partition your drive with a large space which will be devoted to digital video work. This allows you to isolate and contain all your data so that you can fix drive errors, defrag the drive, etc. The faster your drive is, the better. Unless you have enough RAM to load your entire movie file into memory (which is rarely the case), you will have to spool your movie off the hard drive. You want a drive with a large data "burst" rate, or the maximum amount of data that can be read from the drive at one time. Normal SCSI buses have a 5mb/sec maximum data throughput, SCSI-2 can do 10mb/sec or 20mb/sec, and SCSI-3 can do 40mb/sec. All powermac models 7500, 7600, 8500, and 9500 have a 10mb/sec SCSI-2 internal bus. In order to give a computer a faster SCSI bus, you need to install a SCSI card. Then you need to buy a hard drive that is fast enough to keep up with the bus.

Normal video cards do nothing but put pixels on a display to form an image. In order to do video work, you need a card that will do this, but you also need to be able to convert a video signal to NTSC and send it out to a video input device such as a VCR. The powermac 8500's built-in video card comes with high-quality video in and out capabilities. Other AV mac's also have video in and/or out capabilities as well, but not all are very high quality. The output produced by a powermac 6100av for instance, is not nearly as high-quality as an 8500. There are many third party video cards that provide video in and out as well (the most popular in the mac world are made by Radius, Inc. and SuperMac). The other video capability that is extremely useful for digital video work is QuickTime hardware acceleration. There are also many third party QuickTime accelerator boards. Many digital video boards combine high-quality video in and out with QuickTime acceleration. Our first digital video computer, a Quadra 950, had a SuperMac video board that provided both video in/out and hardware acceleration. Such a video card enables you to do much faster and higher quality video capture as well as playback. For example, the old Quadra 950 with the SuperMac video card could playback 640x480 movies at 30 frames per second (fps) in 24 bit color using jpeg compression. Our present system, despite having a much faster CPU and SCSI bus and more RAM, cannot achieve this level of playback. If the budget allows, I would highly recommend purchasing a video card with QuickTime acceleration as well as video in/out.

Software

Image Manipulation Software:

Morphing Software:

3D Modeling/Rendering Software:

2D Animation:

Effects and Transitions, Video Compilation:

General Tools: