Product Reviews

Desktop video is a fraught business for the average Mac. A full-on digital video stream puts incredible stress on processor, RAM, and hard disk. While QuickTime is a perfectly stable backbone for the production and delivery of video, a small glitch or lesser component in the hardware of your Mac can turn an expensive video editing system into a low-performance dud.

With this in mind, Computer Warehouse has launched another of its custom turnkey systems, Tokyo. It joins Hollywood, Cannes and Manhattan as machines pitched at the 'prosumer' creators of multimedia, intensive graphics, and digital video, who crave stability and want to avoid the minefield of peripheral buying. Tokyo is targeted at those dabbling in Sony's digital video format (known variously at DV-CAM or DVC), which, in the next two years, looks set to replace S-VHS and Hi-8 consumer formats and Betacam in the broadcast arena as the video standard.

There are two flavours of Tokyo - a more expensive Apple G3 minitower, and a cheaper 200MHz 604e clone-based variant. Both share similar core specifications. Each ships with 64Mb RAM, a fast 6.4Gb Ultra SCSI video drive, and a 6.4Gb Enhanced IDE system drive (2.1Gb in the 604e). To bring the machines into the video realm, a Radius MotoDV Firewire capture card is installed and, bizarrely but pleasantly, the package includes a Sony SR-PD1P DV camcorder.

The two versions of Tokyo have different software bundles. While both come with FreeHand Graphics Studio and Painter 4, the G3 version is packaged with Radius Edit software, a video editing alternative to Adobe Premiere. The 604e is bundled with LE versions of Premiere and Photoshop, and, lacking the AV ports of the G3, is equipped with a miroMotion DC30 for the capturing of analogue footage.

We tested the Tokyo G3, on which the capturing of video proved effortless. The Moto DV is not much to look at, but hooked up to any authorised digital DV device - be it camera or VCR - it turns its host Mac into a potential broadcast video-editing suite. It has its own capture applet which controls the bundled Sony camera (and any other Firewire device), allowing you to fast forward, pause and locate the exact footage you require.

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Then, simply click on Record and the stream of DV video is downloaded in realtime onto your hard disk. DV has a fixed data rate (3.6Mb/sec) which means on a fast, well-made machine, the dreaded spectre of dropped frames or lost sync which plagues other digital video systems is non-existent.

Once the footage is on your disk, you can either play back to a video monitor (a bit of a hassle, as it involves re-routing the Firewire output through the camcorder and into a monitor), or you can preview footage on the desktop. This is where the G3 shows its strength over the clone model. The ultra-fast 266MHz processor, twinned with the 512K of backside cache and (limited) floating point capabilities, means it barely breaks its stride as it number-crunches the horrific swathes of data digital video throws up. The G3 will happily play quarter-frame DV previews in Adobe Premiere at full frame rate. The clone struggles to play 15 frames per second.

The processing and speed extends beyond the video editing environment. The G3 machine feels powerful and exudes confidence.

The Tokyo G3 also comes with a Zip drive, which is great for an everyday office Mac, but if you're thinking of backing up video files, forget it. You could just about squeeze 30 seconds of DV on a Zip cartridge. On a lossy analogue-based video system, this would demand a separate backup solution. But with DV, you can back up your DV projects to DV tape with no loss.

The open case design on the G3 is another plus, meaning you can easily reach into the innards of the machine to change hard disks or upgrade RAM to a maximum of 384Mb in the three DIMM sockets. You may have to, given that the G3 Tokyo comes with a minimal 64Mb of RAM.

The capabilities of the Tokyo machines don't come cheaply, especially since there is no monitor supplied, although if you already have a DV camera, you can drop the Sony from the bundle, saving £1699. You could probably also source the components yourself more cheaply and attempt to build your own custom system. But here you're paying for reliability, stability and support - three absolute musts when you're playing with this kind of data.

With space for 28 minutes of pristine broadcast-quality footage on the hard drive, the Tokyo G3 is pretty much capable of handling any video task you throw at it: multimedia production, content finishing for Internet use, short bursts of creative video, corporate presentations, showreels, or even just cutting up your home video.

There is room for more innovation in this market (DAT-style DV drives, Betacam-compatible component inputs, a more seamless way of playing DV to TV screens), but while the Tokyo G3 is not cheap, it's a credible, future-proofed, and worthwhile investment for anyone serious about video production.