🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <41224@sdcc12.ucsd.edu>, ma168faf@imath8.ucsd.edu (Matthew Guarnotta) writes:
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> WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN IN DETAIL WHAT A VIDEO SPIGOT IS AND HOW IT WORKS
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> HOW MUCH DO THEY COST AND WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE DO YOU NEED??????
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> DO VIDEO IMAGES 24 BIT TAKE UP A LOT OF HD SPACE....

CERTAINLY, BUT YOU'LL HAVE TO STOP SHOUTING. WE'RE ALL FAIRLY CIVILIZED
around here. Usually.

(That's better.)

Now, about the Spigot:-

SuperMac's VideoSpigot is the lowest-cost video digitizer you can get for a Mac.
It comes in two main versions: the VideoSpigot LC is specifically for the Mac
LC and LC II, while the VideoSpigot NuBus is for NuBus-based Macs. You might
hear about packages called "VideoSpigot Pro" or "Spigot with Sound", but these
are just NuBus Spigot cards bundled with accelerated video cards and sound input
cards.

The features and performance of the Spigot pretty much reflect its price. The
card has a single composite video input (compatible with NTSC, PAL and SECAM),
and that's it. It comes with a utility called ScreenPlay, which gives you a
live video-in-a-window display, and will let you grab either movie sequences
or single still images. A movie sequence can be saved in QuickTime format (and
read by any application that understands QuickTime movies), while a still
frame can be saved as a PICT file, and loaded into any application that
understands those.

The rate at which a Spigot can grab a sequence of frames is very much
dependent on the speed of your CPU, and the frame size you choose. This is
because most of the work is being done in software, not hardware. I did a
test on my LC once, and I calculated that I could manage about 14 frames
per second at one-sixteenth size (192*144 pixels) from a PAL source, straight
to RAM. Grabbing to disk was slower (5 to 10 frames per second), and fluctuated
a lot, probably because of fragmentation on my hard disk.

More recently, SuperMac released a driver called the SpigotVDIG. This implements
the standard QuickTime digitizer interface, which lets you digitize video
from a Spigot card directly into any application that uses this interface,
such as DiVA VideoShop or version 2 of Adobe Premiere.

Price: last I heard, SuperMac had dropped the suggested retail price of the
VideoSpigot LC to US$299 (I think). The NuBus version was still something like
US$599.

Also, I think you still get a copy of Adobe Premiere bundled with whatever
version of the Spigot you buy. I recall the press release described this as
a "limited edition", which means it might just be version 1.0 of Premiere
under a different name.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro                       fone: +64-7-856-2889
Computer Services Dept                     fax: +64-7-838-4066
University of Waikato            electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz
Hamilton, New Zealand    37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+13:00
History's like a mole; it burrows away unnoticed.     -- Andrei Sakharov