Review: VideoCanvas DV-7 Digital Video Workstation
9 September 2002, 13:04gmt, by , Contributing Journalist
From the digital-video-goodness department...

Now you can have fantastic picture quality. The DV-7 is a digital video and audio editing system - complete set of professional tools - made easy.

I was recently in London to try out the one-box dedicated video editor Edirol DV-7R. The system runs on BeOS, and can now be bought in several European countries, Japan and United States. The demostration was held by Simon Lowther, the Business Development Manager, and one of the first things he mentioned was the stability and the userfriendliness that the system had. First of all, it comes ready to use. No installation work is required. It's just a matter of turning on the power and waiting a half minute for the editing interface to appear on the screen.

Edirol will be attending some expos with the system in the near future. First out will be PHOTOKINA in Cologne, Germany, September 25th - 30th, Hall 11.1 Stand G040. Next is the The Media Show in Cardiff, Wales, 8-9 October 2002, and last is SATIS in Paris, France, the 22-24 of October 2002.

High quality and Reliability
Pursuing zero loss in source image quality, the DV-/ Digital Video Workstation uses the same native DV format used by digital video cameras. For input, the DV-7 is equipped with two DV terminals (front and rear), two analog video terminals, two audio terminals, and a microphone terminal as standard equipment, and for output, it has two DV terminals and two analog video terminals. It is, of course, compatible with a wide range of video sources including home-use camcorders such as Hi-8, and of course, camcorders equipped with FireWire (IEEE1394).

The DV-7 also records analog audio and video in DV format, and after editing there is little discernible difference in quality. The DV-7 uses dedicated hardware for high-speed processing. It is very stable because the software is dedicated to a single task, and not to run a large variety of complex processes. The DV-7 provides a marked improvement in stability over software-based systems on your personal computer. BeOS automatically loads Edirol's DV-7R v1.6.2 editing software, so there's no need to find and click on program icons. No OS and system settings are accessible by default.

Real-time processing
The DV-7 was built to be a highly productive machine. Edits, titles and effects used to require rendering time, slowing your projects down. Since the DV-7 is dedicated to audio and video editing, you can eliminate the wait, avoid unnecessary compression and immediately view the results.

Easy to use
Just switch the power on and you have the video-editing environment at your fingertips after a half minute's boot time. The DV-7 provides all of the tools for loading video and audio, creating titles, editing, processing, and output of the finished job in one integrated package.

The editing interface is easy to understand and use. After a 10 minutes lesson, I was capable of doing some editing on my own.

Proprietary Controller for DV-7
All of the basic operations can be performed using the mouse and keyboard, but for the real feel that more closely approaches that of analog video editing equipment, Edirol delivers an optional controller (DV-7C). The controller is equipped with a job/shuttle dial, operation buttons, a T-bar, and sliders for audio level control, and all inputs are processed in real time so it feels just like an analog device.

The DM-5 Loudspeakers
The video editing system can be delivered with Edirol's own produced 2-Way, Bi-amplified digital speakers, (LF 30W, 19cm woofer, HF 20W, 12cm tweeter). These speakers had the most crispy sound, that I ever heard from speakers produced for a computer, and they support 96kHz sampling rate and 24-bit digital audio through S/P DIF coaxial and optical ports.

DV-HD60 and 120 - extra slot-in harddisks for DV-7
If the capacity of the 60GB internal hard disk proves inadequate, you can easily add a 60GB or 120GB removable hard disk unit. The internal 60GB drive has approximately 270 minutes of recording time, and you find it a bit to small. With an extra 60GB drive, you will double the possible recording time, and a 120GB drive will add approximately 550 minutes of recording time. This is the maximum amount of video that can fit on a hard disk calculated based on the DV data rate of 3.648MB/sec. It may be shorter in actual practice.

The workspace
Edirol has chosen to keep DV-7 to one workspace and disabled the Deskbar and the multiple workspaces. The default screen resolution is set to 1024x768. Instead of using the Deskbar, they have made their own bar placed on top of the workspace. Their Deskbar contains a shutdown button, menus for Project, Sequence, Material and Settings, shortcuts to Titler, Capture, Output, Library and Audio CD, and there is also a bar showing space left on the hard disk. In the Settings you can choose the language you want to work with, at the moment DV-7 is translated to English, French, German and Italian (Doesn't it exist also an Japanese version? I have seen webpages showing it in shops in Japan), and Edirol has also developed their own About window that shows that DV-7 is based on BeOS 5 Pro.

The Tracker is fully operating, and Edirol has developed it further, by adding shade to the buttons. They have chosen the Amiga-look for the windows that pops up during the editing, so the classic BeOS tab is gone.

On the workspace DV-7 has a Preview Monitor window, so that the editor easily can see the results of his work. The preview window is necessary, cause not all work is rendered in real-time. The video editing system has a Celeron 433 MHz processor, which is more then enough, as long as all the work rendered on the hardware that Edirol has developed for it. In fact, I would say that adding the latest P4 processor would only make it slightly faster!

There is next a Material Window where the editor get access to the files placed in sub-directories under the Home directory. The files are categorised as Video, Audio, Title and Effect. This design makes it really fast to choose the files that you want to add to your work.

Then there is a window for choosing effects. In a pop down menu, you can choose in between Transition Effects, Filter Effects, Composing Effects and Audio Effects. The editor can control flexible transition effects, frame by frame on the level graph, and Edirol has developed a wide range of effects (for instance disolve, six different types of basic wipes, hundred types of alpha wipes and page turn). The transition effects are set in an own window, and are one of the few effects that are not done in real-time. But here Edirol has done a brilliant move, by putting the editor in charge of the rendering. The rendering can be done as you choose an effect, when the editor has finished his project or in the background as the editor continue working with the project. The last option is one of the benefits that Edirol got by choosing BeOS: True multi-tasking!

The last window in the workspace is the Editing Window, which is designed with both a timeline and a storyboard view. In both views, the editor has access to a range of editing buttons as shortcuts. The Storyboard is built up by 8 tracks. The two first tracks, T1 and T2, are for texts/titles. Any title on T2 (which is placed above T1) automatically overlays a title placed in the same position on T1. Then there are two video tracks. The first one is for insert video compositing, as picture-in-picture and chroma keying. The second video track is the main one, and works in-sync with audio track T-1. Below the video tracks, there is an effect track and then three sound tracks. At the very bottom of this window, there are two counters: The first is for total edit-length and the present position of the timeline cursor bar. The second one is icons for overwrite/insert editing modes and for expanding and shrinking the timeline scale.

The editor can drag and drop the files chosen in the Material Window on to the Storyboard, and then set the chosen material in the prefered sequence and view clips back to back. The timeline view shows the video and audio clips in bars proportionated to the lengh of the material. Timeline editing allows multi-track editing using effects, audio, and video tracks, and the bars on the material the editor adds, will have a red or green footage. The red footage indicates that the material needs rendering and green footage that the material is ready for real-time playback.

FV-7R supports all basic editing actions - assemble, insert, split, overlay, copy and paste. Clips can be edited before added to the timeline, or from the timeline, by simply double-clicking the clips. Brightness, contrast, saturation and the RGB levels of a clip can also be adjusted in real-time. Clips can be rough edited on the timeline by simply placing the mouse on the start or the end of a clip, and then dragging it to the left or the right.

DV-7 also allows the editor to do an audio based editing. With the DV-7 it is a simple matter to match video cuts with the beat of an audio soundtrack or a narration soundtrack. This allows quick and easy editing for jobs such as music videos and explanatory videos where the soundtrack is put in first and video added later.

DV-7's text editor
DV-7 has it's own advanced text editor, where the editor can create text with a monochrome or gradation fill, or apply a texture such as wood grain using the paint function. It has standard font set, but Edirol has also made another 50 fonts that can be bought and added to the system, called DV-F1E. With this part of DV-7, the editor can independently set the text body, edge, and shadow transparency.

The text editor is a full-screen workspace with a default background of the current frame of timeline video in a grid. Another background can be selected from a video still, or from one of the 45 pre-stored bitmaps. JPEG, uncompressed bitmap and TGA images can be imported through the CD-ROM (maximum resolution is 640x480).

Audio Effects
One of the things that this system handles best, is audio editing. DV-7 makes full use of the technology that Roland has developed for their audio recorders. It has a mixer function that the editor can use to control the volume of the three stereo tracks in real-time, and is also equipped with audio effects such as reverb, and a 4-band equalizer. In Voice Arranger, you can control the time, pitch and formant of narrations and other soundtracks, and freely create original audio effects.

The future of the system
I was very pleased to hear that Edirol has 30+ developers hired to continue the development of software their video editing system, and that they had just relased another video editing system called DV-7PR. Edirol has been building it up arround the DV-7 and added presentation features. The DV-7PR is a unique real-time visual performance system. Edirol has just started selling this system, and their London office is still waiting for it to arrive. It is presented as ideal for use in concerts, churches, convention centers and seminars, as it integrates a MIDI based control device, such as a MIDI Keyboard, to allow the user to combine DV clips, digital audio, and still images into a synchronized presentation. The DV-7PR can play and loop indefinitely drawing from up to 13 hours of unique content.

Related links:
- http://www.edirol.com
- http://www.edirol.co.uk

Other reviews:
- http://www.videomaker.com/scripts/article.cfm?id=8825&GU=le929