Targa 1000/2000 Pro cards

[Ken McNamara]

My first NLE was based on a Windoze system with a Targa 1000 Pro.  A
surprisingly great combination.  I still have the editor - 133Mhz
Pentium, 65MB of Ram, and striped SCSI 7200 RPM drives.  The Targa card
could take in analog video (Hi8 res, maybe component) and compress it to
a 5MB per second stream.  Very dependent on having a hard drive
subsystem that could sock away 5MB per second without ANY glitches.  The
striped NT351 drives in this box could do about 7 to 8 MB per second.

The Targas had a proprietary file format that had to be converted to AVI
(on the PC they had a file conversion program).  I think at one point in
time they were supposed to run native in Premiere, but I don't ever
remember seeing that - might have been in NT40 which I didn't upgrade
to.   But even the AVI file requires their hardware to play (although
there was a a British firm who produced a software codec).

The famous 2GB AVI limit forced me to work the 60 minute project in 5
minute chunks.

When I was finished with the project I had to take it to a professional
shop and have it edited together and output to Digabeta.  But it was
rock solid and virtually no generation loss.

The Hi8 output was too hot for the standard Hi8 equipment (a problem I
never did figure out) but worked fine with the new Sony DV cameras.

-- 
     KenMc - conmara at grandcanyonhiker.com
       http://www.grandcanyonhiker.com
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