Looking for advice on a system.

[Etouffee]

Howdy folks,

This is my first post and although I used the Search and search again method advised in the sticky I did not find exactly what I was looking for.

I am an event photographer and work with digital cameras exclusivly. But now one of the associations I work with have asked me to look at providing video for them also. I don't know much about DV but need to learn pretty quick to find out if I will be able to do this for them.

Here is what I am looking at : I will need at least one camera but I may use up to 3 so I need a system that is flexable. Also I will need a pretty large, either on camera or on computer storage, (not sure which will be better at this point but from camera directly to computer may be best) so we can shoot for about an hour and then be able to sort, split sections and store for viewing pretty quickly.

If possible I would like to be able to import all 3 (if I use that many) camears footage and store them as a split screen image for playback showing 3 angles of the same shot at once.

Right now my computers are all running XP and I would just add this setup to my current system. I want all the gear to be pretty flexable to change or additions and it also needs to be a proven workhorse with a good trackrecord of being sturdy and producing good quality output.

So in short I would be looking at getting Camears, Editing Software, and Capture cards/devices and may add to my current computer setup.

If anyone is running somthing like this or has experience with this I would love to hear from you. I am not looking to spend a ton of money on this setup but would be intrested in hearing High and Low end ideas about what this might cost. Also what brands work well and work well together.

Sorry about the large post but wanted to give you the best idea I could about what I am looking for and at.

Thanks in advance for any reply.

[EricB]

Well, the real basics are you get an IEEE-1394 card and capture the DV video onto your computer.

Then, you could use Adobe Premiere and stack your three views on a timeline (allows up to 99 video tracks). Each track could be assigned to a quadrant (or any size you like) by using the motion video command. This allows motion and scaling of each clip.

The three clips would not be "hard" synchronized but the editing is frame-accurate so you would just need to slide each clip into correct relative position. I'm sure there are a lot more sophisticated setups but this should work.

[tgpo]

If you are wanting to do Video(DV) editing, Mac's can't be beat.