As a DVD author, I've come to find there are basically two types of DVD projects. The first is the complex, highly interactive Hollywood-style DVD. For this I spend many days toiling away in DVD Studio Pro, tweaking and testing every last menu and clip. The second type of DVD is when someone walks in with a completed video and wants to dump it to DVD quickly and painlessly. For this purpose, I find DVDSP to be major overkill. Anyone who uses the higher-end authoring programs out there knows it can take hours to author and burn the simplest DVD. Pioneer's PRV-LX1 is squarely aimed to correct this.
The LX1 is a professional broadcast-quality DVD recorder capable of recording from a variety of video input formats. It's perfect for the type of job where the client just wants their video on DVD. There are many users who would greatly benefit from this device-postproduction houses, advertising agencies, event photographers, and corporate production companies to name a few.
The era of DVD dailies for film and television production has also arrived and products like the LX1 will make this kind of work extremely easy. It will allow facilities to reserve their authoring specialists for highly interactive, complex DVD projects while relegating the majority of the grunt work to the skill level of videotape recorder operation. In short, the LX1 fills a hole in DVD authoring that has long separated tape from disc as a storage, archive, and review medium.
Let's take a look at what comes in the box. The first thing you notice about the LX1 is the professional build quality. This unit would look right at home next to a high-end broadcast DigiBeta deck-it's ruggedized and rack-mountable. Similar VCR-style DVD recorders have been available for a while now but they are clearly more on a consumer/prosumer level of build next to the LX1. Also, most of the other VCR-style DVD recorders are limited to s-video and RCA inputs with a few featuring FireWire input. The LX1 has these and adds component input and balanced XLR audio inputs. Optional SDI and AESBU digital inputs are also available. The unit also outputs to these connections as well as DTS digital output (though it doesn't record to DTS).
Another impressive feature that sets the LX1 apart is the included 120 GB hard drive. You have the option to record directly to DVD-R or RW. You can also record to the hard drive. This opens up a world of possibilities. Unlike the previous VCR-style DVD recorders, you can actually do some rudimentary authoring by using the hard drive recorder. You can create a disc with several tracks, each with as many chapters as you want. The LX1 will set chapters automatically at preset intervals, or you can shuttle through the clips and set chapters at will. You can also set chapters on-the-fly as you record by pressing a button.
Along with multiple tracks, you can also create simple menus. You're initially limited to the built-in selections, which are varied and professional looking. You can also use stills from your recorded video as menu backgrounds and you can select your own thumbnails to use for menu buttons. Pioneer promises you'll be able to import your own graphics and use them for menus. This brings up another cool feature of the LXL-an Ethernet port. Initially, this port will be solely meant for adding more menu graphics files onto the hard drive. Pioneer is listening closely to the market to determine what additional network features end users might want.
All this expandability would be worthless without a solid user interface. Users of any broadcast DigiBeta deck will find the hierarchical text menus familiar. They are Spartan and could benefit from more icons, but they do the job. Within an hour I was burning DVDs with the LX1. You can attach a keyboard and mouse through the convenient front USB ports. This makes navigating the menus much easier than pressing buttons on the unit's front panel. The LX1 also has two USB-2 ports on the back. These allow you to attach an external hard drive and offload DVD projects, once the onboard hard drive is full.
Another key expandability feature is the Linux OS at the core of the LX1. By using Linux, Pioneer has insured easy modification via firmware updates. Developers wishing to write their own code for the LX1 will unfortunately be stymied as this is not permitted. Pioneer wanted to ensure that the unit would always create DVDs compliant with the DVD spec and turning over programming control of the LX1 would not insure total accountability.
Testing the unit, I hooked it up to my DSR-11 DVCAM deck and fed it via FireWire and S-Video. I found the video quality to be quite good. The on-board hardware encoder is a single-pass real-time VBR encoder. While not the absolute highest video quality on the market, the ease of use and speed won me over for the kind of DVD project this recorder is meant to handle. You can set the bit rate from 1.4 Mbps all the way up to 9.644 Mbps.
At around 8.1 Mbps the image quality compared favorably with the higher-end PC encoders I typically use though not quite as nice as the super high-end hardware encoders such as the Sonic and Zapex. At 4.1 Mbps, the image was starting to look compressed but still impressive for a single-pass VBR encoder. Even at the absolute lowest bit rate of 1.4 Mbps image quality was around VHS-level and would be very useful for those times when you need to cram as much footage as possible onto a single disc. At this bit rate you can expect to fit up to 6 hours on a DVD-5. Audio can be recorded as PCM or Stereo AC3 at 256 Kbps. Again, it's my opinion that Pioneer has correctly surmised that the vast majority of DVD projects are simple 2-channel stereo, not full-blown 5.1 surround sound.
The LX1 can start recording at the press of a button, making it literally VCR easy to operate. It can also be set up with a simple batch capture list. You scan through a tape and set in and out points. This works with both RS232 and DV timecode. Once the EDL batch list is created you play your tape and the LX1 will automatically capture only the footage you want. It also automatically makes each clip into its own track in sequential order.
When it comes time to burn, the LX1 is up to par with the latest DVD-R recorders on the market. The unit features a ruggedized custom-built 4x DVD-R/2x DVD-RW burner. When you go directly from source to DVD the burning is real-time at 1x. The LX1 ships with the single DVD burner and a 120 GB hard drive. A second DVD burner is available as an option. This makes one-to-one disc copies very easy. Of course, the drive-to-drive dubbing will only function on unprotected discs. So Hollywood doesn't need to worry about the LX1 being used for piracy.
If you want to get large amounts of footage quickly onto DVD with minimal authoring needs, this deck is what you've been waiting for. As a supplement to a more traditional authoring package, the LX1 would be the cornerstone to a full-service DVD authoring bureau. I'd like to see the user interface streamlined and made more intuitive. Also, the Ethernet port hints at great potential. I'd like the ability to move finished projects off the LX1 onto a network server for example. Overall, the PRV-LX1 is the perfect fit for a broad segment of the DVD industry. With its ease-of-use and industrial-quality build, this unit can perform on a daily production-level workload. The DVD medium has matured as an ideal alternative to tape with no compromises.
Noah Kadner moderates the DVD Authoring Forums for 2-pop.com (a sister website of Videography). Kadner's work, such as his award-winning short "Today's Life," was screened at San Diego ComiCon, IFILM, AtomFilms, and the Sci-Fi Channel. He can be contacted at
www.highroadproductions.com.
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