[Steve Martin] "When I edited on Media100, I often captured video at 4:1 compression (150kb/frame NTSC) for many corporate jobs shot on BetaSP or DVCAM. Other times, I offlined everything at even lower rates (10:1 or 60kb/frame) to save drive space then recaptured at a higher rate later - up to 2:1 or 300kb/frame. "
Steve,
I know exactly what you're saying. I cut an entire feature once on a pair of 9GB Micropolis AV drives. But today, for that same dollar amount, I've got 1200GB of uncompressed HD capable storage.
To make a long story short CineWave doesn't really have an offline mode for standard def. CineOffline works very well with HD material (for a number of reasons), but it's virtually useless for SD. That being said it's not been a major problem for us or our clients for two reasons 1.) With 1200GB of storage we've got room for almost eighteen hours of uncompressed material, and 2.) Because FCP is a realtime DV editing system when we absolutely have to offline something we transcode to DV25 using our Canopus ADVC100 converter. Timecode and deck control remain the same. DV25 consumes only 11GB per hour so we can fit more than ten hours on a 120GB firewire drive and more than 100 hours on our 1200GB array (if we were so inclined).
Of all the other cards you mentioned the Igniter is the only one with MJPEG hardware codec chips on board, but the Kona card does both DV25 and variable JPEG compression (in realtime) through software. I have to tell you the Kona JPEG offline media looks almost as good as their uncompressed using a fraction of the diskspace.
If you do a lot of SD offline work I'd recommend the Kona, but if realtime capability is more important to your workflow then I'd go with CineWave. There are other issues to consider, but these two are probably key. I really hope this helps !!
Bart
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Build `em right... support `em well... let our customers do the talking !"
Bart Harrison
Multimedia Programming America
The HD Suite
America's VAR
Apple, Shake, CineWave, Kona, & Rorke SAN
http://www.mpa.net 
