Non-linear editing !!????

[director666]

I'm new to all this non-linear editing stuff and I'm bloody confused. I am shooting on S-VHS and using a G3 Mac with Adobe Premier. Where does a capture card come into it??? what do I need it for? What about the SCSI drive???? what do I need it for/what does it do??????
could someone please explain the whole non-linear editing set-up please cause I'm damn confused??? what I need and how it connects etc etc

[titoo]

for non linear editing, you need a PC with a fast write access hard drive in order to capture the video in real time and record it to the hard drive. therefore the bigger and faster hard drive the better.
Your video playback (with your camcorder) has to be linked to the PC by mean of a firewire card: It s a component (IEEE )that proceed the fast input of videodatas and is provided with several kind of videoinput(S-vhs, vhs, DV,..) in order to let you plug your video source to the PC.
The videocapture is driven by a software supplied with the firewire card. Premiere is the most famous but you ll probably get something else with your card.
SCSI technology is the process used in your harddrive to get a fast input rate in order to record video datas in realtime.(25 high definition frames per second). The better the graphic definition the larger, the data bulk, the faster the drive has to be.
You ll probably need to have a good video card on your PC (the firewire is only for capture) in order to have a efficient display. Latest PCs (one or two years I guess) have quite a good video card. This card handles with the graphic display and has his own memory chip to store screen datas. therefore it s faster and better quality. Although you can do non linear editing with a shitty little image aspect in the middle of your screen. It doesn t really has something to do with your final picture quality.

The non linear editing soft will help you to set in which order to playback the different footages and to add effects or simply transitions in between those.

Once it s done (as you can check by playing back the video datas the way you ve edited those), you have to playback the final cut and record it back to a tape (VHS DV SVHS..) in linking the output of the firewire to a camcorder or a VCR that s recording.

Basically this is the all process.
Ask to a shop keeper who sells firewire or computer or camcorder
read "Computer Arts" (Sept or Oct or Nov issue, don t remember.)
read the guide provided with the firewire.
seek a good book about that in a bookshop!

hope it helps. let me know.

[director666]

Thanks for the advice, it's much appreciated.

[mattias]

correct, except you can't capture s-vhs with a fire wire card without using a "media converter". a better way to go about it if you shoot on analog video is to get an analog capture card that will digitize the footage to your hard drive. i don't know of any such cards for the mac, but the miro/pinnacle cards are great if you have a pc.

/mattias