Dell Video Workstation

 Staying on top of the technology curve can be difficult, especially if you. re competing with an established leader, or 2. Or 3 . You get the picture. At this writing, Micheal Dell has managed to bring his Austin-based Dell Computing into the forefront of the meleé, besting Compaq and taking the Number 1 slot for PC sales in North America. Dell has sold 3.2 million machines this quarter worldwide, and Compaq 3.8 million, so the international market is still elusive. But, a look around at many of the effects and animation studios in Southern California shows that Dell workstations are ubiquitous. This is most likely due to the fact that Dell has provided a very easy method of configuring and purchasing workstations on the Web, together with attractive lease programs, reliable hardware and excellent support. Enough with the Wall Street words, already, let. s talk workstations! First, let me mention that I. ve had a bittersweet relationship with video on the PC in a studio situation; outputting dailies to ¾" Umatic, DigiBeta, S/VHS, configuring pencil-test stations, etc. - trying to get the bugs out under extreme pressure makes for real drama. The basic problem is this, that often a particular video capture card may conflict with the BIOS, OS, IRQs, or memory allocation and hardware (even disk drives) present in your system. So, you can see the high probability of an arduous configuration process, just trying to get your video in to or out of a machine.

The Dell 610 Precision Video Workstation is meant to alleviate the headaches by collecting compatible hardware and software in package with enough power and flexibility to both author content and edit/output video data. The basics for our test station begin with dual 550Mhz Pentium III Xeon processors (512K cache), channeled through a 100MHz system bus. For memory, we have 512MB SDRAM, expandable to 2GB, which should satisfy the rendering loads of most heavy-duty apps. On the storage side, dual 18GB Ultra2/Wide (10,000 RPM) SCSI drives compliment the 610. s speed and capacity. A 40x CDROM drive and 3 ½ " floppy drive complete the standard device list. Also, besides the USB, parallel, and serial ports, there is an onboard 3Com 3C905 10/100Mbit network interface and a 16-bit Crystal Ware (Sound Blaster Pro compatible, SRS 3D) chipset. In our case, sound flows through a pair of harman/kardon speakers. Those who need more sophisticated sound options can go for the optional 34-watt AC295 3-piece speaker setup with subwoofer.

For display, a Diamond Viper 770D pipes the visuals into your eyes. The 770 card uses nVIDIA. s Riva TNT2 graphics chipset, and supports 32-bit rendering and Z-buffering, Gouraud shading, ansiotropic filtering, AGP textures, alpha-blending, and antialiasing. The 4x AGP can pipe the graphics quickly from the main bus, though the 32MB of onboard SDRAM, on to the 128-bit TNT2 processor, and out to your screen. The board supports up to 1920x1440 resolution in true color (@60Hz) and has OpenGL support as well. There is hardware MPEG-1 and 2 support and the MPEGs we tried were free of chop and frame drop, even when played from the CD-ROM drive. While it failed our "Mirai test" (Mirai can be finnecky about drivers), it seems to work fine with 3D Studio MAX R3 and Maya 2.0 . For more demanding 3D work, one could opt for Intense 3D. s Wildcat 4000, factory installed by Dell.

Our Dell 610 came with a 1700FP 17" (viewable) LCD flat panel that gives you back your much-needed desktop space. With a footprint of about 5"x20", this monitor is a boon to anyone who is in need of a quality picture, low heat/noise output, and a bit of elbow room. The LCD screen gives you plenty of space for your working windows and toolbars with supports a maximum of 1280 x 1024 resolution at true (32-bit) color and a dot pitch of .26 - quite respectable.

As for the video capture, Miro. s Pinnacle DC 1000 can deal with video of resolutions of 720x576 (PAL) or 720x480 (NTSC), 48Khz 16-bit audio input at a constant or variable rate. MPEG-2 comes out IBP format, just the thing for DVD and CD authors and a widely-adopted standard at present. A handy extension cable places the S-video and RCA I/O ports conveniently on your desktop where you can access them easily, rather than having to fumble around underneath a desk. The card provides hardware-accelerated rendering and multi-file playback. Attesting to the recent advances in technology, there is also dual-stream playback (MiroInstant RT) for mixing effects in realtime and freeing up the workstation. s CPU from so much time-consuming software-based rendering.

To further take advantage of the video throughput of the DC 1000, one can set up the SCSI drives (80MB/sec transfer) striped to hardware-based RAID 0 for double the speed with the optional Adaptec RAIDport Ultra2/Wide adapter. If you can do without the speed and would rather have fault-tolerance, RAID 1 is an option. Of course, you could add up to 2 more internal drives, or if you want a lot of storage, and insane network speeds, get the optional Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller piping up to 1 gigabit per second to a PowerVault network attached storage (NAS) device.

The Video Workstation configuration also gets you a large amount of bundled software, such as Adobe Premiere 5.1a RT , a realtime-optimized version of the most popular non-linear editor on the PC platform, the RealProducer bundle for streaming audio and video content across the internet, Sonic Foundry's acclaimed ACID music, sound mixing and editing suite, and Minerva Impression Pro , which helps you create interactive CDs. Premier 5.1a is significantly plus. d by the tighter integration of its interface to the other Adobe products and the RT makes it hard to believe you. re working on a machine costing less than $12k! We have also been experimenting with the new Adobe After Effects 4.1 on this system, and have been very pleased with the results . rendering is superb, the RAM player is sweet, and of course the tracking and new effects are neat too - look here for an article soon!

Animation software vendors Kinetix, Alias | Wavefront , NewTek, and Softimage have certified the 610 and we can attest that it likes to sling polygon and NURBS objects like a champ. The Xeon chips really are nice for that extra number-crunching that 3D apps require and the 512M SDRAM and large SCSI drives mean you. re not hungry for resources when the time comes to push your scenes out.

Additionally, for connectivity in the increasingly hybrid network environment, the Dell Precision 610 is designed to support Windows 2000 (you can order it with an upgrade certificate at present), Novell, and with Dell. s OpenManage 4.2, you can run UNIX, Linux, and other OS implementations. Its NIC allows for wake-on capability and unattended installation (as per Win2k), making the sysadmin. s life much easier!

Suffice it to say, for a SOHO (small office/home office) application, this machine is all that you need to crank out video content in a wide variety of media. In a larger pipeline, a unit like this could switch roles as needed to reduce costs or secure redundancy while providing a functioning platform of hi-powered production apps suitable for just about any department. s needs.