Product: DV Rack
Version: 1.0
Manufacturer: Serious Magic
Price: $295 (+$195 for HDV PowerPak); $195 for DV Rack Express

Performance & stability: 9/10
Features: 7/10
Expected return on investment: 9/10
Support: 9/10
Longevity: 8/10
Flexibility: 7/10

Pros: Worth the price for the DVR alone

Cons: Requires a different mind-set towards shooting; would like to see support for high-end HD

Bottom line: A must-have for anyone using a DV camcorder

DV Rack 1.0

DV Rack. What an amazing, simple, indispensable piece of software. Keep your expensive, heavy, medieval flight-cases of equipment. I don’t need it; I have DV Rack on my laptop.

Serious Magic’s DV Rack has been around for a couple of years, and I’ve been trying it out over the last couple of months. Basically, you plug a DV camera to the firewire port of your laptop (or desktop computer) and open up the program. DV Rack opens in a long narrow window (a little awkward for my widescreen display if I’m honest), to which you can add numerous "components", modules that act as virtual video equipment racks. These range from a "field monitor" for previewing footage, through a ubiquitous spectrum analyser and a waveform monitor  for examining incoming the video signal to more esoteric things such as the "shot clock", for timed recordings, and the "DVR" (digital video recorder).

The DVR is used to record incoming footage directly to a hard disk. This itself is an astonishing time-saver, as it means you can start editing immediately after recording, without needing to transfer material from tape. Recording with the DVR still allows you to record simultaneously to tape, essentially it means that rather than your tapes being the original master, they’re now a backup. In most cases, you can put them in a box and forget about them. Simple, but the real beauty of this particular component is in its subtleties. There is a "pre-roll buffer", which means the recording actually pre-determined amount time before you tell it to start (up to 29 seconds), which is like having a time-travel button. So when you’re waiting for the Loch Ness monster to rear its head, it’s ok to blink once in a while (the pre-roll recording won’t be on the tape as well though). With the DVR, you can quickly scrub through recorded footage, to check for problems. But even the notion of checking the footage receives a boost by using DV Rack. The DVR can be configured to automatically check for video and audio faults during recording, which are then flagged in the display as "clip alerts". These alerts include things like potential audio pops, or clipped highlights in the image.

Support is excellent, there are regular software updates (in-fact if you are connected to the Internet when you start DV Rack, the software checks for updates automatically. If you run into problems, there are a number of support options, which all seem thoroughly efficient in the limited dealings I’ve had with them. Limited because the program is rock-solid as it is, and performance is pretty good (depending on your laptop set-up, presumably). It works with every DV camera I’ve thrown at it (I should also point out that “DV” here also includes formats such as DVCAM).

But this is one area where I’d like to see DV Rack expand: it currently doesn’t support high-end HD formats such as D5 or HDCam. There’s an "HDV PowerPak" that can be bought optionally, and this will allow it to work with HDV formats (apparently future support for DVC Pro HD formats may be possible). Another minor gripe is that the field monitor doesn’t seem to display a 1:1 image, but scales it down slightly, which means you need to zoom it to get a 1:1 image. There are a few practical issues: trailing a firewire cable out the back of a camera to a laptop limits freedom of movement somewhat, and it’s only when using it that you realise how difficult it is to read an LCD display in direct sunlight. But that’s not so bad. There are firewire cables available that stretch to around 15m without much problem, and you can cover greater distances using one or more “repeater” units. For working outdoors, you can buy hoods to shade your laptop from sunlight. To allow the benefits of DV Rack to really shine, you’ll have to change the way you think about shooting a little.

Personally, my single biggest problem is that when I use DV Rack, I can’t help thinking about all the things that could be included that would make it even better. Here’s what I want to see: the technology spreading through the video (and film?) industry faster than the Sasser worm gets through emails. I want to be able to use DV Rack’s functionality throughout my pipeline. I want to load up my finished footage and use the Digital Video Recorder to check for problems, like an automatic QC check. I want to be able to generate slates for my footage, and I want my footage converted to still image sequences on capture. I want to be able to make notes as stuff is being recorded, or place markers or comments in recorded footage. I’d like to be able to generate reports of the recorded footage, and, oh well, the list goes on.

For now though, I think Serious Magic should be chasing after the HDCam and D5 crowds. This is a product that could benefit news gathering organisations immensely, for starters. Laptops are powerful enough for HD playback, and there is portable storage space aplenty these days. For me, well, I plan to be using DV Rack, along with a number of other tools, to design, implement and test an all-digital production workflow later this year, so look out for the results of that. Meanwhile, there is a stripped-down version of the software, “DV Rack Express”, which is a little too minimalist in my opinion, but may be ideal for certain types of productions.

For more information on DV Rack, see the Serious Magic website

UPDATE: We are planning to use HDV Rack in the digital production of “The Toilet Guy“. Stay tuned for more on that.

The reviwer’s opinions are his own, and not affiliated with any third-party.