The promised land has been coming closer and closer. So close I can almost taste it. I've had a DV Camera (Sony TRV900) that takes great pictures for quite a while. I've got a mound of DV tape that I've shot. And - guess what - I want to edit them a bit. Mostly I want to do the same thing I do with my digital camera pictures - crop, delete the bad parts, fix the color / darkness problems. Then I want to toss it on a DVD.
I've wanted to do this "simply", with no special hardware. Just give me a 1394 (iLink, whatever) connection and a pile of software. From several years back, Premiere was my choice, the only real cost effective, full featured system. I tried "Video Wave" a bit, and its overly simple editing metaphore made my blood run cold. Premeire would be OK. Get a little MPEG going using the Ligos Premiere system, and I'd be styling. Then the DVD burner.
It hasn't been fine. It's been terrible. First is that the dual-celeron system was still too slow to do all this stuff well. No real upgrades possible with that motherboard, either. So finally I had to plunk for a new motherboard. When that was stylin', I started running into disk problems. Video takes so long to edit that I want to have a couple projects on disk at the same time - and at 20GB an hour, you need quite a few GB to make the system go. That, and my mounting archive of digital still pictures and music crowding around the edges made an 80GB drive all full. So now I've got the 80 for system stuff and pictures and music, and 120GB just for video. So far so good.
So now I can edit fairly well in Premiere. The "Real time preview" function makes Premiere 6.5 worth its weight in gold. So I can make an MPEG file suitable for output to DVD. Next problem: how to get it on DVD? DVDs have menues and everything. I'd like to just let the DVD rip on the video file, making it little other than a high tech VCR, but no one allows that. You need to create menus. DVD-it LE from Sonic Solutions came with the package, and it sucks. No chapter support that I could find, and no variability of the buttons. This week I tried NeroVisionExpress, which is an extra $25 upgrade from regular Nero 9for the DVD compressors only). Not a happy bit of sortfware. The rather great feature of adding chapter marks is nearly non-functional. No multilevel menus. And it crashes on stuff compressed with the Ligos compressor.
Next up is trying Vegas Video and DVD Architect on a friend's system. It makes sense. With Premiere they've split the authoring of the DVD away from the authoring of the video, and that's just stupid. I need lettering and titling in my DVD menu system, and I need it all compressed and burned. It's not that far apart - I hope Vegas that it going on, and a good MPEG compressor.
Another note - the TRV900 has another flaw, which is that the 1394 (iLink) port is flaky. I think the little miniature connector has just been pushed and prodded too many times. A friend's camera works great on my system, so I know the problem's in the camera. I'm lukewarm about the TRV900 after all these years. The 3-chip clooks great, but it needs so much light. Love those manual controls, too. It's really a pro-end prosumer, meaning it's finicky and demands good light.
I've put the dual celeron system out to pasture. It's got a good home now with my friend Ann Knepper. It's really a fine little system, still. I'm impressed with the power of Dual.
That case now has a P4 system. I bought the motherboard and did-it-myself. It's an Asus P4S8X, which I bought partiall based on the Tom's Hardware review of the chipset. Frankly, I'm not happy with it. Sure, it's pretty fast, and was pretty cheap. I got a 2.4Ghz with the 533FSB. It's got 1394 and good audio and the rest, but I didn't see Hyperthreading coming. Hyperthreading is all the power of Dual without the muss and fuss of two CPU packages. If I had only known. The system I've got doesn't overclock so well, either. My smell is that the problem is memory, but if I boost it anything over the normal speeds, I get a crash a day. Blue screen. And it's not noticably faster. The memory I got was whatever was cheap - Samsung or something. If I had it to do over again I would have just waited. I know that's a familiar refrain, but I think Hyperthreading is extra cool, even perhaps worth switching to the also-infernal Windows XP. The only external card in the system is the video card, which is an AGP4 card based on one of the midrange Nvidia chips - GX440, as I remember. I can't see any real difference with the video card, as I don't do much 3D or gaming.
I've upgraded the disk drives. Man, what an infernal hassle. I finally decided to take out the ancient 9GB drive from 3 systems ago, and that took days to get right. I can't even remember now exactly what got me back up and running - I think it was Ghost. I ended up backing up the partitions on that drive to my slightly older 80GB drive, and putting the new 120GB out as video-only.
Next upgrade is the case. That case has seen a few changes, and I'd like something smaller and quieter. The fan in the power supply is terribly noisy. I've heard that getting a new case is cheaper than just a power supply.
Past that is probably the screen. I have an ancient Sony monitor
that's still
looking very good, but just doesn't have much in the way of pixels.
At this point, the use for the desktop is as a Serious Repository for data, and for video editing.
My choice was the Inspiron 8200. It's all about the pixels. Dell is still making the highest density screens - 1600x1200 - something few other makers are doing. The industrial design is terrible - it's a black brick. But what a black brick! All those pixels, and a nice 2.0Ghz processor, a 40GB drive, and onboard CD-burner.
The screen is beautiful enough to make the entire system worth the investment. I consider the system cheap at about $1700, given the specs. What I dislike most about it is the keyboard / touchpad combo. The keyboard itself has a clunkiness about it, and I'm always catching my fingers under the keys unless I work hard at lifing them. The Alps touchpad is greatly inferior to the Synaptics of my previous Inspiron. I complained loudly to Dell, and they said "Tough".
Just a note. This system is so big that you just can't use it on an airplane in coach. You can't even open up the darned thing on a standard airplane flight.
Why did I get a new one? Simple. The old Inspiron 5000, which I had for over 3 years, had a screen problem. I drive to work in the rain in December, on the Motorcycle, and rain seeped into the courier bag I use for the laptop. The machine wouldn't boot at first, but after a little coaxing it would. But the screen had a weird problem, with the rightmost part of the screen being snowy and white. I'm sure a few connections got munged inside, and maybe now that I've got a new machine (and the data off my old machine) I can get in and tinker. It was a great system, and great Dell support. I had one failure, and Dell was out within a day and popped in a new motherboard.
The dual celeron is still up and running. What a great, cheap system.
It's not running very cool, and I don't know if the problem is the CPUs or the disks I've packed in there. IDE drives are so cheap, but if you want to do video editing, you'll buy a brace of 30+ gig drives, and another drive as a system drive. Those two video drives throw off a bit of heat, and now my system drive is starting to make that bad noise.
I did finally get a laptop. I'm a freak for screen size, and find the bad old days of 1024x784 just not acceptable. I can't imagine how I ever lived with my poor little Powerbook 165c. But Dell started shipping in quantity 1400x1000 screens, so I bought one. They went up a notch better, the 1600x1200 screens. It's also got a 1394 card, so (supposedly) I can do video editing.
I do like it. Some would say it's too heavy. The runner up was the Sony 505Z, but screen won out. Carrying the beast around Europe, I lost 20 lbs of myself in about a week, then settled down to a nice weight.
Wireless networking! We have 802.11b wireless LAN at work (Lucent
hardware)
and it RULES. That's technology that will change things. I
understand
that really good wireless (like the 128kb Richochet in the bay area) is
on
the way, but not here yet.
People ask me what kind of gear I run. It's an important question in the PC world. Incompatibility, flakiness is all passed by word of mouth. I don't usually like talking gear head nerd stuff, so I thought I'd try to write it all out at once and never have to talk about it again. I do have to update this page every few years, though.
The use of my home computer is writing, web authoring, game playing, surfing, and some work (compile & debug, VC++ and Java). My last box was an Apple Powerbook 165c, and I keep that around to run MIDI and music software, although I'm not doing that yet.
My current machine is a dual processor Celeron system that I built out of parts. The Celeron (300A and later) is a great processor. The core is the Pentium Pro, and it supports all of MMX and multiprocessing. It has only 128 KB of level one cache, but that's on chip, and runs at full processor speed. The new "coppermine" Pentium III chips do that too, but they are 5 times the cost. A great source for information is Tom's Hardware
Basic specs are Celeron 400's overclocked to 450, slightly higher bus speed (72mhz), ASUS P2B-D motherboard, Adaptec 2940AU SCSI card, Adaptec firewire card, Creative Labs AGP TNT video card, Creative Labs Live64 sound card. The extra juice is in the disk drives. All four drives are 7200 RPM. The main drives are the 9GB system drive, and the 2GB Atlas-2 SCSI drive. Right now the SCSI drive just has virtual memory, and sounds kind of nasty (must have overheated sometime). The motherboard is rated to 600Mhz, and I may update my Celerons to 600Mhz when they come down in price. The complete system without monitor or hard drives cost $700 in parts.
Dual processors are great. Best thing since sliced bread. You have to run a dual processor capable OS, which limits you to one of the unix flavors (Solaris for Intel, Linux, etc), or Windows NT (now Windows 2000). I run NT 4.0, which is what we use at work. Post Service Pack 3, it's a great system.
I've become interested in digital video, and bought a Sony TRV900 3chip camera. After doing a little editing on my 9GB drive, it became obvious that I needed more space. Then, mid 1999, cheap 30GB drives came available. $300 street price for ATA66, 7200 RPM, 30GB drives (Jan 2000 -- price now $230). I bought two, and striped them for my video capture array. Goodbye to latency problems and space problems.
Just a word about printers. I bought an Epson Stylus Color 800, and am quite unhappy with it. It seems that the ink changing protocol must be followed in great detail, or the print heads will get clogged. I made an honest mistake in pulling out the ink resevoir to get a look at the actual amount of ink left, and that clogged the ink head permanently. No amount of cleaning will make it better. It seems like a design that allows this is flawed, and I think I'll be buying HP inkjet printers for a while.
Now back to ancient history. This computer replaced the old Pentium 133, which was a great machine. That machine is sitting in a pile, waiting for Linux installation. Here's my description of the system circa 1998. I'm still using the same monitor (Sony Multiscan 17sfII).
My home computer is an aging Pentium 133. The motherboard's an Intel Endevour-II with onboard sound. The motherboard's a rock. The P133 is starting to show its age, but I can still do compiles on my main work project that take just a few minutes more than the PPro 200 at work. I've got 48M of memory, which make a big difference.
I installed a ROM burner a few months ago, and I'm not entirely happy with it. It's an HP 6020i. I had lots of problems with under runs until I put in a SCSI drive. I've had more and more SCSI chain problems, to the point now where I can't burn disks. I don't know if the problem is the hardware or the software; I tend to think software (Adapec). I still believe in CD-ROM, because it's the one format that I think will be readable 10 years from now. I've got old 9-track tape that I can't read, I've got CPM floppies in 8 inch and 5 inch that I can't read, I've got a macintosh that I never got a backup system for and finally the disk crashed. I don't have any data older than about 3 years, and that's all on 3.5" DOS floppies. There's a serious problem of lack of permanence in electronic communication, and I hope CD will solve some of it. Even the new DVD internals are CD-ROM compliant.
I recently upgraded from a US Robotics modem (Winmodem 33.6, internal) to a Motorola VoiceSURFR. I'm fairly happy with it. The box doesn't make it clear that it's a 56 Flex modem, but it is, and my ISP and work support 56 Flex. I'm now getting about 4.5 to 5.0 KB/sec of actual download speed, instead of 3.0 that I got before. $100 is worth an extra 25% speed, in my book. The old USR was great, though. Very good setup and software. If you want to buy it, I'll make you a good deal - $40. The VoiceSURFR software sucks rocks though. Not worth it. Crashes constantly. Make sure you get the Flash upgrade to the SURFR from www.mot.com.
When I got the burner, I went SCSI. After my experience with Wide SCSI at work, (hard to find cables), I shied off, and went narrow SCSI. Big mistake. The whole world is wide now, and all the proper wide-to-narrow cables are easy to find. I'm a believer in Adaptec SCSI cards, and got a 2940AU. I've used all manner of Adaptec cards (1520 to 3985), and the benefit is that the drivers are well written. The hardware is decent, but the drivers are what you pay for.
Finally, I decided to get a new hard drive, because with the burner you really need to keep about 600MB free to do solid burns. I went with the Quantum 7200RPM SCSI AtlasII 2.1MB, and I'm happy with it. For the price (common street of $360), I got something quite fast, and quite quiet. Not as fast as the new Seagates, but fast enough for me. With all my swap space on the new drive, everything seems faster. If I had an up-to-date motherboard with bus mastering IDE and all that, I'd likely go IDE. But I don't, so SCSI seemed like the way.
The other attachment I have is a scanner. I like my scanner. Can't have web graphics without it. I started out with a Logitech PageScan Color with parallel interface. I thought it was cool, but I hate it now. It's a small package desktop, instead of a flatbed, and runs at only 200dpi. The parallel interface is a problem, and somehow it never quite clicked with my system. Logitech tech support was a disaster, and I hope they rot in hell. The Xerox OCR software was a joke, and never was able to decently recognize even magazine text. Recently I bought a cheap Microtek E3, at the unbelievable price of $130 from ISN. What makes me especially happy is that it's SCSI, so I don't have to worry about Parallel. My current problem is that it tends to stack-overflow under NT 4.0 and Photoshop 4.0, and always in the kernel (whoa!). I'm up-to-date on everything (E3 drivers, SCSI drivers, photoshop, NT service pack 3). Constructive ideas welcome, but for now I'm scanning in W95 under Photoshop 3.0, which works great.
My monitor is a Sony 17sf-II. It's a good beastie, but the resolution isn't that great, when compared to the 17se-II. I'm one of those guys who cranks down the fonts till my eyes hurt, the comes back one point size. I like as many dots as possible. The 17sf will run (realistically) only to about 1024x786. The 17se is a dream, and I can run that at 1600x1200 (no shit) and not hurt my eyes. I got a 21" Sony 300, and couldn't get any more dots out of it. The dots were bigger and fuzzier, and I got a headache, so I went back to the 17. Now I'm using a Hitachi 21" at work, and it's great. I still run it at the same rez as the old 17sf, though, so I haven't gained much.
At work an at home I'm using Matrox video cards. The beauty of the Matrox is (again) the drivers. Those guys seem to get right on the ball. Perhaps it's mostly because they do their own chips, and have a small product line. I've had terrible luck with ATI cards, and my next-most trusted brand is Diamond. Their problem is that they put a new card out every 10 minutes, and you're lucky to get quality drivers.
If I was going to buy a computer now I'd start with NT 4.0. My work system runs very well with that. At this exact moment P166-MMX's are very good bargains, as are AMD K6's. All the flaky problems I've had in life are motherboards, and I'm still tempted to go with Intel brand (not just chipset) motherboards.
I still pine after my first computer, by which I mean the first computer that was mine. It sat on my desk, all of it, and no one else could use it. It was a Xerox 820, the first mass-produced single board computer. Z-80, CPM machine. Xerox stole the design from the "big board" design that was happening in the homebrew groups down in the valley. The thing was a brick, and ran WordStar and Kermit like a champ. I also had a compiler for it, TurboPascal, and wrote a few games. Couldn't even trade them, because I never met anyone else who had a 820. I bought it with a Xerox 620 printer, aka the Diablo 620, a fantastic workhorse of a proportional daisywheel that still looks better than laser printers. The beast took a fatal shock when I ran it during a summer brownout in Providence, RI in 1986. I finally just through it in a dumpster. Oh, the ignominy.
After that shock, my little Apple Powerbook 165c was the next leap of ownership, nearly 8 years later. The idea of a Real Computer that I could take to bed, take to the park, take on airplanes. It was good at the time, because I had two apartments and was never in the same place for more than a few hours. It was great for a couple of years (all I expected), but I got burned by Apple. After I dropped the wee beastie from my motorcycle at 65MPH (damn caltrans and I-80), I had a few fixed at a local shop and it was back in operation. Never quite the same, though. Finally I had a reproducible fault, and knew the problem was in a particular sub-board, so I sent it to Apple Repair, which I had recommended to my friends. Apple proceeded to reformat my hard-drive without asking me, replaced the main board and mouse without asking, and charged me about what the box was worth. This was unacceptable, but since I had no written work order (all over the phone, don't you know), they called me a liar and told me to get lost. I decided from that day forward never to buy Apple hardware, or develop any software for their box alone. Cross-platform or Win32, maybe, but no Apple-specific software. The repairs did hold, but with a reformatted drive I've barely recovered.
My favorite work computers were the Apple IIci that I got on my
first day
at Novell and kept for 4 years there, and the Compaq 386-16 that I ran
non-stop
for nearly 3 years on the same job. When I left the IIci had a great
120dpi
monocrome, 21" monitor side-by-side with a color 14". Nothing like that
ability
to do massive code writing on one side, and still see the graphics on
the
other. The only time I powered it off was when I made a mistake
juggling,
and the ball hit the power button. At the job after that it was all
generic
PCs; nothing to get emotional about.
