<strong>Are you happy with its performance both as a way to watch TV on the Mac and for video capture?
What do you think of the new OS X tevion software?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, I bought a Formac Studio converter over a year ago. The performance of the device is average. When I first bought the Studio, I had some problems. I wrote several emails and talked with Formac on the phone to complain and explain my problems and the trouble shooting i had already performed. Well, the customer service was terrible and it took me a long time and lots of complaining to get a replacement items shipped to my home. The first one had many lines running across the screen when I watched movies/TV. Also, i think it is a little slow. The device is average but i guess it offers a lot of outputs and inputs and that is why i bought it. Also, it works off of firewire.
some of the things i noticed on my Formac Studio:
1. when watching tv, the mouth movement of doesn't match the voice coming for the person speaking. Formac is aware of this problem and give some examples of this problem but was never able to get it fixed. the did offer some suggestions but those changes never worked.
2. Customer service sucks. (some time ago i asked if they will have updated software for osx. at that time they told me they have no plans to support OS X. Now, i see they offer the OS X software).
3. Price is good for a device that offers firewire connection and all the inputs and outputs.
4. In OS 9, the software can be a little buggy. most of the time it works but will sometimes freeze. if you switch from on screen to the other, i suggest you use the floating disply option when watching tv and doing other tasks like writing emails or surfing the web.
5. when watching tv, the color changes on the picture and i have to reset the picture often. i have downloaded the most recent software and reloaded all software and formated my hard drive to try and fix the problem. the problem is still there in os 9 but i have not checked os x. when i perform a reset, the sound volume increases for a short time and blasts a burst of noise and then goes back to normal.
6. sometimes i notice a dely in the picture movement along with the sound delay.
well, i hope this helps. i will try to test the OS X version when i get home but i am in china at this time and not due back to the states until sept.
i don't know of another company that sells something for that price and offers so much but it would be nice to know of a company that offers a similar product with price and features the same. it is possible all the problems are fixed in the new software for osx.
I have used there other tv pro products and they work about the same with the little software bugs or maybe they are hardware.i don't really know. the main complaint i have is customer service....i had a bad experience with their customer service people. maybe the newer models are a little better.
good luck and let me know if you find another device that is about the same in features and price but with better quality.
I bought one at MWSF 2001. I have used it sporadically. Probably now that I have moved back to the US I will use it more. In Japan it wasn't able to decode the English sub-channels. As I bought it in the US I don't fault them for this.
I think it performs OK for what it is mainly intended to do - transfer video over FW in DV format. It has hardware compression to do this so it goes very fast. Display of this signal on your computer depends on the computer. On an iMac DV 400 it was a little choppy. On a Pismo 500 it was better and on my QS 867 G4 it was very good.
Regardless of the computer the DV stream can be saved to disk at without loss (unless you have a very slow system). DV format uses about 200MB a minute so this needs a lot of disk space.
You can select other formats which compress the signal to save disk space. However, the compression is done by your computer so the frame rates will suffer.
The TV tuner worked OK for me. I didn't have much trouble with sound/video sync or color shifting. One thing I disliked about it was that it seems to combine two fields into one frame. The result is that you wind up with artifacts if there is a lot of motion in the video. Where you should see a vertical line you might see a "comb" effect where some motion occured between the fields but now two fields get shown in one image in the DV format.
This might not be totally their fault. It is a problem of blending broadcast video format and DV format. However, one would think they could do a better job of it.
When recording from a VCR I didn't get this effect at all. For this purpose it worked very well.
I haven't tried their most recent version of software for OS X. The previous version worked fine for me but I didn't exercise it a lot. There is an FM tuner on board which is not managed by the OS X software. Not a big deal.
In short, the hardware seems pretty good. The software is OK for the main function but could be improved.
<strong>...now that I have moved back to the...</strong><hr></blockquote>
Good to see you back in the US, neutrino23. I hope you have more space here to deal with the lack of an Apple subnotebook.
Back on topic, I haven't used the Formac Studio myself, so I can't comment directly. But I'm hoping to replace my old Rev.A iMac with a PowerMac to get a TV PCI card. Even though FireWire solutions seem to have improved, I still favor an internal solution. I like to minimize dongles and external accessories for my systems.
I got the Formac Studio yesterday. Viewing TV seems to be O.K, the one gripe I have is that the TV screen has a much larger border around it than necessary, it makes viewing on a 17" monitor a little tight.
A nice touch is being able to float the screen over other applications so you don't have to constantly maneuver the screen.
in the next month or so i'm probably going to buy some sort of mac for video editing, emac or powermac not sure yet...
I was thinking of probably buying an ADVC-100 from canopous and was wondering what the quality of the different devices (price-performance) for video in-out devices.
I know of the hollywood dv bridge, advc-100, and formac studio, are there any others, and which owuld be the best for the money? cards, or external solutions....
Comments
<strong>Are you happy with its performance both as a way to watch TV on the Mac and for video capture?
What do you think of the new OS X tevion software?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, I bought a Formac Studio converter over a year ago. The performance of the device is average. When I first bought the Studio, I had some problems. I wrote several emails and talked with Formac on the phone to complain and explain my problems and the trouble shooting i had already performed. Well, the customer service was terrible and it took me a long time and lots of complaining to get a replacement items shipped to my home. The first one had many lines running across the screen when I watched movies/TV. Also, i think it is a little slow. The device is average but i guess it offers a lot of outputs and inputs and that is why i bought it. Also, it works off of firewire.
some of the things i noticed on my Formac Studio:
1. when watching tv, the mouth movement of doesn't match the voice coming for the person speaking. Formac is aware of this problem and give some examples of this problem but was never able to get it fixed. the did offer some suggestions but those changes never worked.
2. Customer service sucks. (some time ago i asked if they will have updated software for osx. at that time they told me they have no plans to support OS X. Now, i see they offer the OS X software).
3. Price is good for a device that offers firewire connection and all the inputs and outputs.
4. In OS 9, the software can be a little buggy. most of the time it works but will sometimes freeze. if you switch from on screen to the other, i suggest you use the floating disply option when watching tv and doing other tasks like writing emails or surfing the web.
5. when watching tv, the color changes on the picture and i have to reset the picture often. i have downloaded the most recent software and reloaded all software and formated my hard drive to try and fix the problem. the problem is still there in os 9 but i have not checked os x. when i perform a reset, the sound volume increases for a short time and blasts a burst of noise and then goes back to normal.
6. sometimes i notice a dely in the picture movement along with the sound delay.
well, i hope this helps. i will try to test the OS X version when i get home but i am in china at this time and not due back to the states until sept.
i don't know of another company that sells something for that price and offers so much but it would be nice to know of a company that offers a similar product with price and features the same. it is possible all the problems are fixed in the new software for osx.
I have used there other tv pro products and they work about the same with the little software bugs or maybe they are hardware.i don't really know. the main complaint i have is customer service....i had a bad experience with their customer service people. maybe the newer models are a little better.
good luck and let me know if you find another device that is about the same in features and price but with better quality.
I think it performs OK for what it is mainly intended to do - transfer video over FW in DV format. It has hardware compression to do this so it goes very fast. Display of this signal on your computer depends on the computer. On an iMac DV 400 it was a little choppy. On a Pismo 500 it was better and on my QS 867 G4 it was very good.
Regardless of the computer the DV stream can be saved to disk at without loss (unless you have a very slow system). DV format uses about 200MB a minute so this needs a lot of disk space.
You can select other formats which compress the signal to save disk space. However, the compression is done by your computer so the frame rates will suffer.
The TV tuner worked OK for me. I didn't have much trouble with sound/video sync or color shifting. One thing I disliked about it was that it seems to combine two fields into one frame. The result is that you wind up with artifacts if there is a lot of motion in the video. Where you should see a vertical line you might see a "comb" effect where some motion occured between the fields but now two fields get shown in one image in the DV format.
This might not be totally their fault. It is a problem of blending broadcast video format and DV format. However, one would think they could do a better job of it.
When recording from a VCR I didn't get this effect at all. For this purpose it worked very well.
I haven't tried their most recent version of software for OS X. The previous version worked fine for me but I didn't exercise it a lot. There is an FM tuner on board which is not managed by the OS X software. Not a big deal.
In short, the hardware seems pretty good. The software is OK for the main function but could be improved.
<strong>...now that I have moved back to the...</strong><hr></blockquote>
Good to see you back in the US, neutrino23. I hope you have more space here to deal with the lack of an Apple subnotebook.
Back on topic, I haven't used the Formac Studio myself, so I can't comment directly. But I'm hoping to replace my old Rev.A iMac with a PowerMac to get a TV PCI card. Even though FireWire solutions seem to have improved, I still favor an internal solution. I like to minimize dongles and external accessories for my systems.
Escher
A nice touch is being able to float the screen over other applications so you don't have to constantly maneuver the screen.
I was thinking of probably buying an ADVC-100 from canopous and was wondering what the quality of the different devices (price-performance) for video in-out devices.
I know of the hollywood dv bridge, advc-100, and formac studio, are there any others, and which owuld be the best for the money? cards, or external solutions....