New to digital- Moto DV good place to start?

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Hi I am new to digital video film-making. I want to start editing some stuff I shot on my Cannon ZR-1 Camcorder. Moto DV sells for $399 package with a firewire card (it comes with Adobe premiere 5.1 LE). Does anyone know if this is a good option for editing from Canon DV cameras? I cannot afford mcuh more than this price, but would be interested in similarly priced options, and also if Moto DV is upgradeable when I become a PROFESSIONAL! Thanks in advance....MIKE

-- Michael Winn (mike.winn@westgroup.com), June 13, 1999

Answers

I had a very miserable experience with MotoDV. It is highly incompatible, and just, basically, doesn't work. My experience with their Tech Support department was even worse. You can never get them on the phone, and when you do, they give terrible advice and, basically, accuse you of doing something wrong. The magazines seem to rate it highly, but that was not my experience, at all. It stinks! I suspect the mags are using sooped up multi-processor systems. I have a prosaic 400 mhz Celeron system, and it wouldn't work on that, at all.

Personally, I think that Digital Origin ought to stick to the Mac, because it is clear, having used their program, that they know nothing about writing software for the PC. I've been in touch with other people who have had similar experiences.

DVRaptor is much better. It worked perfectly, right out of the box!

-- Avery Goodman (ABGoodman@cwix.com), June 29, 1999.


I can't say my experience has been too good, either. I suspect it is not the card itself, but the software that is the problem.

I captured and assembeld a 13 minute long video, using QuickTime Pro. I then tried to use the Radius DVPlayer to send it to my camcorder. Every time I tried, I got dropped frames, which the program informed me were _not_ due to a too-slow drive, but to "late interrupts." It then told me to check the manual for fixes. Sorry, but there is _nothing_ in the manual for that, only for slow drives.

However, much, much worse is that it took me about seven or eight tries to get the video dumped out to camcorder, even with dropped frames. Most of the time, the video would play for about ten minutes, then the computer would crash. And when I say "crash," I mean it -- you'd be watching the video play on the camcorder, and the next thing you knew, the computer monitor would be displaying the BIOS boot-up screen and the camcorder would freeze. In other words, not even a crash where you would get any information on what was going wrong. It was like the computer had been turned off and on again. The most frustrating time was when this happened with less than one minute to go in the video! Now, if it is this hard to get a simple 13-minute video to record without crashing the system (even without worrying about the dropped-frame problem), can you imagine the fun trying to record a fully-edited 80-minute feature? AARRGGGHHHH!!!!!

-- James David Walley (jwalley@eskimo.com), July 01, 1999.


Having just flamed Digital Origin for MotoDV's DVPlayer, I think a correction is in order.

I just installed updated drivers for my ATI Rage Fury video card. (Specifically, the new drivers are the "W86076en" release.) Afterwards, I tried DVPlayer again. Whereas before I would only be able to get the 13 minute video to play without crashing the system one out of eleven or twelve tries, I was now able to play it back six times in succession without a single crash -- or, for that matter, any frame drops due to "late interrupts."

Now, I haven't tried the MotoDV _capture_ program (which was also giving me dropped-frame problems earlier) since changing the drivers, so I can't give the whole package a clean bill of health yet. However, it seems as if there was some sort of compatibility problem between DVPlayer and the original ATI drivers that was causing most if not all the problems I was experiencing earlier. I don't know if any of the others reporting problems with MotoDV were using ATI video cards as well, but, if you were, you might want to download the latest drivers from the ATI web site and try it again.

-- James David Walley (jwalley@eskimo.com), July 04, 1999.


I've got the Rage Fury Max (Dual rage 128s) on one system at 600mhz, and the Radeon All in Wonder 32DDr on my 866 with half a gig of 133 ram and 60gig od udma100 drive and still cannot get any DV editing software to work twice the same way. These GUIs are so bad you wonder if they were "written" or picked out of the garbage part way to becoming something else.

I saw your message that DVRaptor and wondered if it turned out better than MotoDV?

-- Stefan Flin (sflin@austin.rr.com), February 20, 2001.


I have had nothing but trouble with the moto dv studio software since I purchased it over two years ago. I am still trying to get it to work. I have spent untold hours restoring my pc to its original condition, upgrading software, downloading updates to software, etc. This company needs to be put out of business.

-- Bill (b2bWiLD@aol.com), June 17, 2001.


I just tried updating my Rage Pro Turbo driver and found that the system now works!

-- bill (b2bWiLD@aol.com), June 17, 2001.

I'm back to the same problem even though it was working the other day! This is not the first time I thought I had it fixed and it went out again.

I tried reloading the new software for the rage pro video board again and it didn't help this time.

Rats.

-- bill (b2bWiLD@aol.com), June 19, 2001.


I,m With you guys,, this crap should be renamed Moto Horse shit ! When I installed this turd to my Asus P4 533MHZ with 1 gig ram Pentium P4 2.4 gig it jacked everything. I am running windows 2000 and what it did was installed a file called RadB something or other to the winnt/system32 folder and when you look at the CPU resources it show this piece of crap using 100% of the CPU's power at machine idle. What I would like to know is why can't you use this card as a capture only with the standard Microsoft 1394 driver and the hell with all thier garbageware and just capture through Premier. I got the DvRaptor also and it is fine. These Aholes that MFG crap like this should stand accountable for the non performance.

Please respond in forum,not email.

Thanks Media Man

-- Media Solutions (beefjery@yahoo.com), May 02, 2003.


Yes, I also had a bad experience with Moto DV, It worked with Win98 but now with 2000. They even sent me a new CD that was supposedly compatible with Win 2k but it didn't work at all. By the time I tried talking to them again, they were out of buisness and the company that owns them now will not support the product in any way. I am a student with little money and I spent almost 500 dollars on somthing that I can't even use now.

-- Christian Hanlon (cphanlon@aol.com), May 19, 2003.

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