Canopus Storm will shutup RT2000?

[Brian Ellis]

Doc

Dumping is not in it. The Japanese prices will include taxes, which are quite high on this kind of goods and the US prices never do. Japan is one of the most expensive places in the world to buy a Japanese camera or camcorder. If you go to Singapore, you can buy the same items for half the price.

Also Japan has an extremely large and complicated vertical distribution system, especially for consumer goods. In the US and most other countries, it is three-tier: importer or manufacturer > wholesaler > retailer. In Japan, it is usually 5 or 6 tier. Each tier makes a smaller profit than elsewhere, but it pushes the price up by 10-20% overall.

I'd therefore consider that, say, $1400 Tokyo street price, taxes included, is very comparable to $1200 NY (or Michigan) street price plus taxes, even taking transport costs into account, for Japanese goods.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[wkulecz]

Big plus -- supports windows 2000
Big minus -- MSRP $1800 :-(

Actually, since the DVpatchII, Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 and my Pyro are working well enough that I'm comming to the conclusion that I need a better (3 CCD) camcorder before I need to upgrade my editing setup.

--wally.

[wkulecz]

"Fighting words" from "the Canopus difference" link on the page Jerry referenced:

------------ begin quote ------------

Our engineers found that the C-Cube DVxpress chip produced a number of limitations. Those limitations made it impossible for us to meet the "Canopus quality standard".

C-Cube DVxpress limitations:

1.No real-time DV output capabilities when adding transitions and titles.

2.Limited real-time functions when outputting to analog.

3.DVxpress's DV CODEC produces poor quality results in DV.

4.MPEG output is poor - captured picture is always too soft, even at high bit rate.

5.The chip design takes an additional step to trans-code the video when outputting to DV.

6.Compression of audio in the MPEG format is not in real-time.


Canopus decided to work with companies like Sony, Panasonic, Canon and Sharp, which produced chip technology specifically made for video. The C-Cube chip DVxpress was developed for MPEG encoding and decoding, not for DV video.

------------- end quote ------------

--wally.

[Elie]

I really like their marketing bull, They say in the comparison chart that the RT2000 only outputs DV and Analong!
They completely forgot about Mpeg-2 IBP and Mpeg-2 I frame

I guess Canopus marketing will do anything to show other manufacturers disadvantages even if means cheating.

Elie

[wkulecz]

I don't want to take sides, but how is the RT2000 Mpeg-2 IBP and Mpeg-2 I frame different than what the MPEG-2 "advanced" options can produce with the Ligos encoder built into Media Studio Pro 6?

These are "file" formats and only count as "outputs" if you write to CD or DVD.

RT2000 does include DVD authoring software but IMHO its pretty useless right now given that few standalone players read CD-R or CD-RW in MPEG-2 and DVD-R costs about the same as a good used car.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

The RT-2000's MPEG-2 I-frame offers better quality for one thing. MPEG-2 I-Frame is also capable of frame accurate cuts, which IBP MPEG is not capable of. MPEG IBP video has to be cut exactly on an I frame to be accurate.

Anyone want to hazard a guess at the price of a Storm MPEG-2 daughter card?

I also want to address this business of DVxpress not being developed for video. That's not correct. It was designed from the ground up for use in a mixed DV and MPEG-2 video editing system. Re-read the whitepaper.

Also I'm not so sure realtime DV output is not possible using the RT-2000. One thing is for sure though: if realtime DV were available it would cut maybe 60 seconds off my sending DV out to the cam on a typical project. Perhaps 3-5 minutes on a VERY complex one.

My life and projects are not on THAT tight a schedule....

There are only two things in the Storm I find interesting: realtime chromakey and realtime color adjustments.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 01 November 2000).]

[Jerry Jones]

It has been kind of crazy on the
Canopus User Forum board since
Storm was officially announced.

Even Canopus President Hiro Yamada
made some rather interesting comments.

It seems to me Canopus are really trying
to market themselves as the *higher quality* solution than everybody else.

First, they dump on C-Cube chips.
Second, they dump on OHCI DV boards.

Even Hiro suggested OHCI DV boards are not "professional" solutions. However, he dodged my question - which was:

"Hiro, if you believe OHCI DV is not a professional solution, then does that mean the Canopus DV codec being marketed with the new AVID Xpress DV software-only package for use on OHCI-compliant laptop computer ports is not a PROFESSIONAL solution???"

Hiro isn't going to answer that question.

:-)

[farid]

Though I'm not pro-Canopus I want to make a statement in their favour : even at $1.800 the DVStorm is a bargain for (semi-)professionals simply because it supports Win2k and Winnt. You can't expect people to be all excited about having to retrofit a professional video-editing solution onto a DOS-based operating system.

If Matrox does not ship Win2k drivers for the RT2000 they gonna loose some professional customers just because of that and not because of video quality.

On the quality issues : I wonder how many professionals requiring say broadcast quality would trust an

[Elie]

Farid , Matrox IS going to ship Win2K drivers soon.
Please stand by.


[This message has been edited by Elie (edited 05 November 2000).]

[CMB]

hi this is a cut and paste from a similar discussion in the rt2000 forums

"I have just bought an RT2000
then after installing the first thing i read about on the web was the Storm card.. and i thought POOP!!!!

but when you read about it.. well it wasnt for me..

As i understand it.. It has no hardware that enables Realtime effects, like the C-Cube chip on the RT2000.

It uses the processor instead.. So it probably could do 24 realtime layers.. if you have a machine running at 2gigahertz

It seems you need a totally stonking pc to even get close to the performance it promises.. I think Canapus are counting on the fact that super fast chips are gonna be here next year..

So not only do you have to buy the card $2,000 ??
but you also have to have the money to equip your pc to exploit it.

So going by all that me and my P3-500 are thrilled with my RT2000"

CMB