PC Market Set for Boom In Desktop Video Editing
Workman, Will 06/01/98 Computer Shopper Page 091
(COPYRIGHT 1998 Ziff Davis Publishing Company) Copyright 1998 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
Vendors Race to Turn Living Rooms Into Digital Movie Studios
"This market is just beginning to explode," says Sanders, whose company is one of more than a dozen--including Iomega Corp., Dazzle Multimedia, Matrox Graphics, AverMedia, FutureTel, Play, and Videonics--offering consumers a new crop of video-capture and-editing solutions that promise unprecedented quality, flexibility, and simplicity at prices under $400 (in some cases under $200).
If these products can attract just 10 percent of the potential PC/camcorder-owning audience, Sanders predicts, "the lid will blow off this whole thing."
Anyone charting technology and price curves could have foreseen today's trend: The processing and graphics power of under-$2,000 PCs has risen to record highs, while the cost of memory and high-capacity hard drive storage has reached record lows.
As for today's average camcorder, Sanders says, it "outperforms the color studio camera of 12 years ago, and anyone can use it. When we do the same thing with video editing, the mass market will go for it."
To that end, vendors are promoting scores of pocket-size peripherals designed to deliver good-looking edited videos at half the price, and with a fraction of the complexity, of last year's products.
Many of these devices allow home videographers to capture and edit content from numerous sources--camcorders, VCRs, DVD players, and CD-Rewritable drives--with plug-in parallel-port installation that sidesteps consumer phobia about cracking open their computers.
Users less faint of heart can take advantage of the higher throughput of video peripherals that connect to SCSI controllers or daughtercards for their graphics accelerators, although Dazzle's Jeff Johnstone says parallel-port solutions' ease-of-use advantage can't be underestimated: "You're not going to bring a technology to the mass market, truly, with a PCI card."
Anything that reduces complexity is key to consumer video editing, agrees Sujata Ramnarayan, a multimedia analyst with Dataquest: "The easier it is to use, the more readily people will adopt it. Clearly, right now the market is still in the early-adopter stage."
To that end, vendors are rethinking every step of the editing process--including alternatives to the software that dominates the professional video-editing market, Adobe Premiere. "My God, [Premiere] is an awesome program, but man, is it hard to learn," sighs Erich Flynn, senior product manager with Iomega's professional products division. Iomega's Buz Multimedia Producer kit ($199 estimated) ships with a simpler software editor, MGI's VideoWave SE Plus.
While the new generation of entry-level video-editing products are all quite easy to install and use, technical issues involving output quality, editing, and storage flexibility wait to snare unsuspecting consumers.
Most products, for instance, use the MPEG -1 video format, which excels in data compression-- MPEG movies take relatively little hard drive space because the format analyzes changes from frame to frame and takes advantage of redundancy in slower-moving shots.
MPEG 's critics, however, say that although the format is certainly more efficient for storage, it makes editing more difficult and lowers video quality because of generational loss from source copying. "Because your data files are already compressed in MPEG , you lose some of the flexibility you get in Motion JPEG," contends Flynn.
Motion JPEG (M-JPEG), as used by Iomega's Buz, is easier to work with because it captures each frame of video separately; Flynn adds that it also offers users more precise editing control, sophisticated special effects such as animated credit text, and even the ability to darken or brighten the picture and add CD-quality audio.
On the other hand, M-JPEG files require more storage space, and rendering M-JPEG files for final output can take time--lots of it, if users have more than a few minutes of video. For those reasons, companies like Dazzle and Pinnacle say, they're sticking with MPEG , claiming to have resolved that format's inherent editing problems without any loss in output quality.
For users who wish to create multimedia CDs, Dazzle is selling a Video CD-ReWriter kit including its Snazzi MPEG video-capture card, a Philips 2x write/6x read CD-RW drive, and software for an estimated $599. The company says users can edit and store up to 72 minutes of full-motion video, 8.5 hours of CD-quality audio, or 20,000 color snapshots on a single CD-RW disc.
Pinnacle's Studio 400, scheduled for an April debut at $199, stresses simplicity--it just plugs into the back of a PC, and minimizes disk-space requirements by capturing and compressing "thumbnail" versions of source videos. According to Sanders, users can capture one hour of full-motion video in only 150MB of disk space.
That's a level of storage efficiency Iomega's Buz can't match, Sanders claims: "They're using M-JPEG because they want to sell Jaz drives. If you edit a lot of video, you're going to need a lot of storage with [Buz]."
Flynn responds that M-JPEG editing is the approach that best preserves original quality. "When you're done [with Iomega Buz editing], you have a high-quality source you can render down to MPEG format," he says. "If MPEG is so much better, why is broadcast TV [done] using M-JPEG?"
Another technical concern puts PC-based video editing on a collision course with another mass-market trend: the increasing popularity of under-$1,000 PCs. Iomega's Web site lists a number of desktop computers--mostly inexpensive ones such as Compaq's Presario 4850, Packard Bell's Platinum and Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion 7000 series, and IBM Aptivas built before August 1997--that don't support some new video-editing technologies used by Buz and similar products, specifically those that rely on PCI-to-PCI bridge chips.
This lack of support has Iomega's Flynn fuming. "In my view, [the manufacturers are] running a real risk of alienating people from [their] PCs," he says. You would be pretty ticked off if you bought a new PC and found out later it didn't have enough slots, enough IRQs, and couldn't support video editing. These are the things that could kill this move [to mass-market video editing] and hurt our company's ability to bring products like this to market."
In fact, Ramnarayan points out, Intel and its PC vendor partners desperately need a processor- and memory-intensive application such as video editing to take off if they want to keep selling high-end PCs.
Though "there's no doubt that the under-$1,000 PC has made it into homes," she says, a boom in digital video editing "would provide a market for high-end computers--at this time, there's no mass-market application that requires that much processing speed."
Meanwhile, the debate over which capture and editing solution works best could fizzle within a year as the digital video (DV) standard becomes dominant and digital video cameras fall to mass-market price levels. (See the sidebar below.) "With a digital camera, you would not need these capture cards," Ramnarayan says.
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