Digital directors need hardware with grunt

What do you need to be a digital director?

The computer

These days computers are so powerful it doesn't matter much whether you buy PC or Mac - just make sure it has a lot of grunt. Apple has gone out of its way to make it easy. It has bundled iMovie 2 on all its current hardware, or you can download it for US$49 ($98). iMovie 2 requires a 300MHz Power Macintosh G3 or faster, Mac OS 9.04 or above, at least 128 MB or memory, QuickTime and FireWire.

You will want at least 40Gb of spare hard disk - video is a space eater.

The G3 iMac starts at about $2000 plus gst. The G4 eMac with a 17-inch flat screen can be bought for $2800, while iBook prices start at about $2600. One with a CD burner will cost at least $3300.

For PCs you need to be thinking a very fast Pentium IV, at least 512MB of memory, a good quality video card and the biggest hard drive (80-100Gb) that you can afford. As we said, video hogs disk space - 10 minutes of video chewed up more than 500MB when we transferred it to a PC hard drive.

The camera

iMovie works with most popular DV camcorders. The camera used for the Digital Director day was the Canon MV550i, which costs about $2000. Sony models start from about $1300. Sony uses its Digital 8 tape format, other brands use the Mini DV tapes.

Stuart Barnaby, the managing director of Digital Video technology, says although the entry level machines will be fine for home use and perhaps for programmes for community access television, for serious broadcasting you will need to spend $5000 plus for a three chip camera.

"Those cameras have a prism in the lens which splits the colour out to three different chips, so the colour resolution is dramatically better," Barnaby says.

Accessories

Blair Witch Project notwithstanding, shaky action can make viewers nauseous and can take more processing, so a tripod is essential. A $100 tripod can cover locked off shots, but if you want to pan or tilt the camera you will want to spend $600 plus on a tripod with a fluid head.

Sound

There is a limit to the quality of sound you can get from the microphone in your camera. Sound Techniques in Mt Albert has kits to improve the quality of audio captured on your digital video camera. Manager Stephen Buckland says a good microphone with windshield will probably cost about $1500.

Software

If you want to get serious, Apple's Final Cut Pro is popular with professional video editors, at a professional price, about $2400. It allows you to manage large amounts of data. Another heavy hitter is Adobe Premiere - available for PCs and Macs - which is popular for corporate videos and training films which incorporate other multimedia.

DVDs and CDs

Once you have your masterpiece, you'll want to burn it to CD or DVD so you need a CD or DVD writer and some burning software. DVDs have the advantage of the disks' superior sound and visual quality and their huge capacity (4.7GB for a typical single-sided disk or enough to hold a feature-length film). Internal DVD burners for PCs cost between $1000 and $1500.

Ulead's DVD Workshop ($749 plus GST) is a good example of DVD writing software for PCs. As well as the ability to add all sorts of effects, subtitles and captions and edit out the jerky camera pans, the software has nice "wizard" to take you through the three easy steps: capture (transfer the video), edit and burn.