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n DO9itai video at your fi ngortips with %fl ab Motion
full review of MacroSystem's
I AV masterpiece
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AMIGA COMPUTING
MARCH 1996
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the scene, something which simply
redefines your thinking regarding
0 what's t's not often possible a milestone with a particular appears plat- on
form. Products like the Video Toaster, Scala
LightWave and the PAR animation recorder have,
in turn, marked the Amiga as a unique machine
in the eyes of creative media professionals
everywhere.
Needless to say, the Draco fits, if not breaks,
this mould by adding a completely new level of
power to the traditional equation of Amigabased
desktop video. However, as you're probably
well aware, the Draco isn't actually an Amiga
at all. In fact, it's a completely new machine
which takes the Amiga basics and expands upon
them, exploiting the talents of the Amiga OS
whilst adding a unique blend of CD quality
sound, digital off-line encoding, editing and playback
with state-of-the-art OVEs and a true 24-bit
display.
Thanks to their efforts as the Amiga's most
prolific third•party supporter, MacroSystem
Germany have built all the principle elements of
a standalone machine, the keys to this being the
Retina 24-bit display board, which in the Draw
ships with 4Mb of RAM and CyberVision drivers,
the Toccata sound card, offering stereo 16-bit
audio direct to disk recording and lastly, the allimportant
digital video skills of a VLab Motion
digital video recorder/player.
MANAGEMENT
With sound, vision and system management all
taken care of, there is, of course, still the small
matter of the CPU, not to mention the all-important
I/O connections that make up any modem
machine. The solution to this is a •Draco direct'
plug-in motherboard with all the necessary I/O
connections - such as HD floppy drives, parallel
and serial ports - combined with an 040 or 060
CPU, on-board SCSI II controller and space for up
to 128Mb of RAM - via standard 72-pin SIMMS.
Throw in a few QuickLogic chips for Kkkstart and
other OS essentials and... Robert's your mother's
brother - an Amiga on a card!
Fire-up the new machine and on the face of it
the Draco looks every inch an Amiga - but with
one major difference. The Draco does riot have
AGA, or in fact any part of the Amiga's custom
chipset, even though a whopping 4Mb of chip
memory does appear on the menu bar courtesy
of the Retina's on-board memory.
Obviously, the lack of AGA does preclude
13 0 K AND
During the evolution of the system it must be
said reliability and crash resistance has been
an issue regarding the VLM and Mavieshop
compendium on normal Amigos. But thanks
to version3.0of the MovieShop software, the
system is now rock solid even at the highest
possible image quaky.
In the case of the KM card tested, th'
translated to on attained and more important')'
maintained,90per cent Jpeg compression,
which in real terms means virtually
identical image quality between the encoded
and original material.
This evolution of the MovieShop software
is a testament to Macrosystems• growl
awareness of what the market demands. In