Any Digital Broadcaster 32 or Elite and Vlab Motion owners out there

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Norm01

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If there any DB32/Elite owners out there it would be really good to hear from you to discuss set ups etc….
Also interested to chat to Vlab Motion owners too.
 
Hello!

I’m a recently new Vlab Motion owner and still piecing together a setup in my Vampire V2 powered A2000.
I also own an A4000, but that’s my Video Toaster Flyer machine. Would be great to see what I could do with Vlab and Movieshop in that one, but rather keep it as in and continue on the A2000. It’s been an interesting journey so far.
 
Hello,
So what drives are you intending using in the 2000, the faster the better really? I wouldn’t recommend using IDE but a good scsi controller should do the trick, although I don’t own a 2000 so don’t know which would be the best to use.
I use the internal scsi in my A4000T and I’m going to try out a Zulu scsi in it, hope it’s fast enough.
Be interesting to see how the VLM compares to the Toaster Flyer combination too.
 
I’m using the older SCSI2SD V6 cards on my A4000 Flyer. Working great (for me) so far especially after updating to the most recent firmware but I’ve also upgraded to some faster SD cards which also seemed to help.

I’m only using the on-board SD card slot of the Vampire for my Vlab Video Drive. I’m able to capture at quality of about 65% compression quality with the Vlab, but that’s about it. I really need something faster, but to be honest I probably won’t push it any further. Sometimes there’s only so much I’m willing to spend on this stuff when I’m just ‘playing’ with it. :). Who knows - I might change my mind at some point, but it’s fine for now.

My main goal is to have non-mechanical drives for media. I really don’t want to go back to external scsi towers like we had back in the 90’s.
 
I’m also trying to avoid mechanical drives where possible too.

How does the capture quality differ between the VLM and the Flyer set up?
I also have a Digital Broadcaster 32 card and use it with a Cyberstorm MK 3 board with UW SCSI drives, I’m trying to find an UW set up that avoids mechanical drives but it’s difficult to find UW to IDE adapter cards.

I did manage to find a company that makes UW SCSI SSD’s but the price of these is quite high I believe.
 
I haven’t reached peak quality level with my Vlab captures yet. I’ve been testing mostly on an A2000 and y drive speeds are average (about 2mb/s) so it’s been fine, but still seeing dancing pixels in the JPEG compression which is to the expected.

I can capture HQ5 on my Flyer which I think is considered to be BetaSP quality. I’ve captured numerous test clips (of old tape based projects) with it and I really can’t see any drop in quality. Their compression (I think the name is called VTASC) looks amazing and my understanding is the picture only degrades to look like a lower format of tape like VHS. Maybe I should run some tests to see the differences.
 
The biggest weakness (in my view) of the VLM is the fact that it is a Zorro II card which creates a bit of a bottle neck. You can have the fastest hard drives and processor but once you hit the ZII limit then you’ve gone as far as you can.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this article but it may offer a few tips on adjusting contrast and smoothing to help achieve a higher capture quality :
It’s in French but the site does have a link to translate the text.
 
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