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Fuse
Video Card
11/2/98
Low-cost,
high-quality analog video digitizing card
for the Mac.
by
Michael
D. Murie
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Every now and again I am reminded of how far the
computer industry has come. Just the other day,
while installing the Aurora Fuse video card, I
couldn't help notice that the card was only 4
inches long and had only four major chips and very
little other circuitry. Yet it's capable of full
frame (640 x 480), full frame rate (30fps) video
capture at rates up to 9 MB/s (2:1 compression). I
have a NuBus card that's about five years old, is
twice the size and can't do half the job. And it
cost more too.
We tested the
board with a 266 G3. The card also works with 604
computers. According to the company a recent update
to the driver improves performance with 603 based
machines though performance will be lower on those
machines.
Installation
of the card itself is very simple; pop open the
case and slide it in. Documentation is included in
PDF format (we didn't read it!) A testing
application called "Rocker" and an installer for
the software drivers is included. There's also a
Premiere presets file that is copied to Premiere's
plugins directory. On launching Premiere a list of
possible formats appears (NTSC 640 x 480, 320 x 240
and 160 x 120) as well as PAL equivalents. The
choices are labeled as Full frame, Half frame and
Quarter frame. While we used the board with
Premiere, we also tried the board briefly with
Strata Videoshop, and it seemed to work
fine.
We did
encounter a couple of problems getting going, one
of which was related to the board, while the other
wasn't. The Fuse card has just four plugs on the
back; two pairs of S-Video and RCA plugs. One pair
is for video-in and the other for video-out. We
used the S-Video connection, but had trouble
plugging our S-video cable into the S-Video jack of
the board. The shape of the plug did not match the
metal around the jack in the card. We had to use a
pair of needle-nose pliers to "adjust" the S-Video
plug and then ease it into the board. While the
board and cable worked just fine afterwards, when
it came time to remove the cable it was impossible
to do so. I've had similar problems with a miroDC30
card and the same kind of cable (the cable came
with a Hi-8 video camera.) In that case I bought a
Monster S-Video cable which worked fine with the
miro, and would have worked with the Fuse (if I'd
had it.) The Monster cable is a nice piece of wire;
thick and pricy (I think it was $40.) Aurora
acknowledged the problem, but they didn't seem
exactly sure of where the fault lies. They are
thinking of changing the jack to another
supplier.
Our second
problem was caused by the G3 machine we were using.
Fuse doesn't include audio circuitry; you use the
audio circuitry of the Mac. We found that when we
went to select the sound input in Premiere, it
didn't stay chosen. As soon as the dialog was
closed the sound stopped playing. Kent, who's
machine I was using, said "Wasn't that a problem
with the G3? I seem to remember something on
Macintouch about that." After a fair bit of
searching jumping from Macintouch to
Altavista to Adode to Apple and back to Macintouch
we finally located AudioTuneUp 2.0. Of course
later, while looking through Aurora's website, we
found the exact same information!
To test the
card we used a DV camera and first captured a clip
using Firewire and Radius Edit DV. We then used the
same clip and the S-Video output from the camera
connected to the Fuse card. We captured the clip
using the default setting (average compression
factor) and then adjusted to Highest quality and
captured the clip again. The results were
enlightening. The Fuse card's video was actually
brighter and a little more saturated than that from
the DV card. At the average setting there were some
visible jpeg artifacts in the still frames -- the
card uses MJPEG-A compression -- though they aren't
visible during playback of the video itself. These
were gone at the highest setting. Though the
Highest setting is impressive, for most work the
high setting (about 6 MB/s) should be good
enough.
<sample image are on a second page "Aurora
Fuse Video Card Sample Images">
We then tried
digitizing a long sequence with the Fuse card. We
digitzed almost ten minutes at the average
compression setting (the resulting file was 800
MB.) In the first test that we tried the sound was
badly out of sync. But we were using the 1.2
version of the software driver. Connecting to
Aurora's website we downloaded version 1.4 of the
driver, and tried the same test again. This time
after 10 minutes the sound was still in synch. At
least, this was from observation of a clip of
someone talking, unfortunately we didn't have a
tape that was slated at the end.
Fuse comes
with Premiere 4.2 LE (we tested using the full
version of Premiere as Aurora only provided us with
the board.) According to Adobe's site, the LE
version of Premiere limits the number of audio and
video tracks you can have, and lacks capture or
reading of SMPTE [Society of Motion Picture and
Television Engineers] time code or Edit Decision
Lists in industry-standard. These features would be
missed by very few users. Perhaps most troubling,
according to a page at Adobe's website the LE
version does not support 60-field processing and
29.97 frames-per-second time base. Aurora however
tells us that the LE version does support 60-field
processing. Note that Adobe let's you upgrade from
4.2 to Premiere 5.0 for $199.
The Fuse card
will output to the computer monitor and to the
video out jack simultaneously, making it possible
to preview work on a tv monitor at the same time as
you work with it on the computer screen. It also
comes with a two year warranty. While it isn't
official, I've seen mention that Aurora is working
on a professional version of the board that will
feature component inputs.
Conclusion: I
wish I'd had this board three years ago. It's
simple to use and does a very high quality job.
Given that you have to use a PCI Mac I don't think
the lack of audio circuitry is a serious problem
and it saves you a couple of hundred bucks compared
to boards that include audio and offer quality as
good as this.
And this is
no Buz box; as long as you have the hard disk space
you'll be able to output stuff that looks as good
as the original. The board would also be perfect
for CD-ROM and Internet video production.
Thanks to
Kent Borg for his assistance in preparing this
review
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