With the advent of cool new digital cameras, we saw the potential for getting broadcast quality images for a low price. We also used all kinds of low end cameras for a bunch of different looks.

We also used some film... how about that?

Our favorite digital camera was the Sony dvx-1000. This thing gives a great image and has lots of manual control. Watch out for cheap tape though, drop out is a pain.

Another camera we thought was real cool, and used a lot was the JVC DV1 digital camera. It's so small, that nobody gets nervous when you're near them with it.

Three words...

-Non

-Linear

-Editing.

This is now a tool that is in the hands of the common man.

The software we use and swear by is Adobe Premiere and In-Sync's Speed Razor.

Basically this software lets you edit in ways that you never would have thought possible.

In order to make use of this amazing way to post produce a movie, you need to have the right computer... and a video capture card.

So... from the ground up, here is what we built.

Asus p/i-xp55t2p4 motherboard/ w512 cache ram (atx board)
Cyrix (166+)
32 megs of Edo Ram
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller card.
Micropolis 3243AV Hard drive as video/audio capture drive.
1 gig Western Digital system drive
Diamond stealth 3d 2000 video card

We've tried lots of different types of Video capture cards.

The one we liked the best for under $1000 is the Truevision Bravado 1000. For onlining, we use the DPS Perception

When we edited the film initially, we offlined it... low quality image, sound. Then we went back and onlined it (great image, etc) using the offline as the reference. It works...

but it's lots of work.

Once we got to the online stage what we used was...
The same computer system, but we replaced the Bravado card with a DPS PERCEPTION card. This is a "no screwing around" broadcast quality video card. We also changed our operating system over to Windows NT. The 9 gig hard drive (of which we had three by this time) was attached directly to the capture card. Incidentally, the hard drives that we use now are Seagate Cheetah drives. As long as you keep a good fan on these puppies, they are excellent - unlike the micropolis drives. As is now a well known fact, those drives vaporized in front of your face at a rate that caused the company to go belly up. We continued to use Premiere, and also used Adobe After Effects and Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge.

Once twenty minute sections of the movie were mixed and tweaked to perfection, we used In-Sync's Speed Razor to output to BetaSP and Digital Beta. This program is a completely professional NLE editor, and among lots of other things allows you do do frame accurate assembly and insert editing to video tape... Over a period of two months, we put twenty minute bits to Beta tape with this software. For something like this, you gotta trust the software, and thankfully, Speed Razor can be trusted...And that in brief is how it was done.