DVGear Pro-ONE. (Editing Computers).

 
$4,060 
 
DVGear 
10634 East Riverside Drive 
Suite 130 
Bothell, WA 98011-3758 
(877) 415-0628 
www.dvgear.com 

The first thing you'll notice when you uncrate this DVGear Pro-ONE turnkey system is the contrast between the monolithic cubic black case and the lithe 17-inch LCD fiat panel. This is a very distinctive machine. We were excited about getting our hands on the latest Pinnacle Pro-ONE real-time card in a fully configured Windows XP system. If you want to use Adobe Premiere as your primary video editing tool and are in search of real-time previews, this is one system you should seriously consider.

Peripherals

The 17-inch ViewSonic LCD monitor was the first panel we've seen that made us believe the hype that LCDs may eventually replace our bulky CRT monitors. LCDs can have significant redraw issues, which is important if you need to refresh the screen very quickly, like when playing games or, say, watching video. We used the Pro-ONE breakout box to connect the S-video output to an NTSC television monitor for previews. In this arrangement, we enjoyed taking advantage of the easy-on-the-eyes LCD monitor as our editing workspace next to the reference monitor for previews.

Another thoughtful extra was the EZ-302-P Premiere keyboard with color-coded shortcut keys. We are big fans of learning and using shortcut keys and this keyboard made that process much easier than trying to reference and memorize a shortcut key list.

Capture

The Pinnacle Pro-ONE came with a standard breakout box on the end of a very stiff cord. The breakout box has input/output ports for analog S-video and composite video, but no FireWire port (typical for this style breakout). Analog capture worked well, transcoding composite and S-video sources to DV Pinnacle's DVTools capture utility was excellent, with useful tape scanning and scene detection features that made up for the competent-but-now-feature-poor Premiere 6.0 capture application. The system worked well with the newer camcorders we tried. We discovered one DV camcorder that the Pro-ONE did not like: an ancient (six-year-old) Sony PC7.