It is magnificent, and a steal at the price they charge.

I agree with all the above. The setup makes shooting foolproof. You just calibrate their monitor on your LCD, go through the 4 step process of Framing, Focus. Exposure, & White Balance using the included cards and you’re good to go. Having the live waveform monitor is just great. So it doesn’t matter if you are recording to hard drive or not (heck you can record direct to hard disk just using Vegas capture). DV Rack is so much more. It is a definite BUY!

~jr

I agree it is a wonderful tool with one caveat-that is on long captures, the audio and video begin to drift. A technician there acknowledged that fact and suggested changing the capture type preference to AVI type 1. He went on to suggest that all avi type 2 files tend to drift after an hour or so which has not been my experience using the Vegas capture or Scenealyzer.

For shorter captures however, the product is an exceptional tool.

Mike

... on long captures, the audio and video begin to drift...

That isn't good! What's causing this?

I'm not sure Jay, I was using DV Rack for Depositions until I discovered this (fortunately had a tape backup too). I haven't used the product in that application since (several months ago) and it may very well be resolved by now.

Mike

Another problem with long captures is that the display gets slower and slower, and eventually all the scopes stop responding, even though it's still capturing to hard disk. The solution is to break long recordings into 10-minute segments. Serious Magic knows it is a problem but has yet to provide a fix for it. It has something to do with how they display the waveform showing the audio levels in the capture display.

DV Rack is a good idea in theory, but i would warn you about serious issues for me:
(i got the version 1.1)

1.You can't review clips recorded in an other capture app. , so you can't compare a live take with anything else than current capture project takes (this is realy dumb!).

2.DV Rack is hard on cpu ressources. On my P4 2.8 laptop, it is sluggish and unresponsive, and force the cpu fan to run continously at a high level (wich can be borring in a sound take perspective).

3.Altough you can usefully apply a live gamma correction, preview resolution of the video monitor is truly poor (what's the purpose of a low resolution video monitor?...)

For all of these reasons, i switched to Scenalyser about every time i tried DV-Rack in a real word situation... I would say at least test before buying anything if these flaws haven't been addressed.

Thanks for the replies...

I d/l the trial version last night. Will give it a 30 day test drive. I'm more interested in the tools it offers versus the dvr (although that is nice - seems there are issues with long captures though)

logiquem: "1.You can't review clips recorded in an other capture app. , so you can't compare a live take with anything else than current capture project takes (this is realy dumb!)."

- So you could not use dvrack to look at footage you shot previously (say the day before)? I'm not sure I follow you on that.

- So you could not use dvrack to look at footage you shot previously (say the day before)? I'm not sure I follow you on that.

I'm sorry if was not very clear on that (my bad english again...)

Yes, you can review previously captured clips if they have been actually captured in the same project file (at any time before, as long as it's the same saved project).

But if they have been captured in another capture project or in another application or by another person not using DV Rack, or simply edited clips, you are done...

hmmm...thanks for the clarification. I'll keep that in mind.

KB

Just being able to have your clips on a hard drive and labeled without real-time capturing from tape later on is a HUGE factor to me. DV RACK has its annoyances, but I shot 13 hours of raw footage for a recent feature and didn't have to go back to the tapes for a single thing. Dumping 13 tapes and labeling all of the clips would have taken at least a full week, but probably more. The time saving alone makes it worth the price.