VIDI AMIGA 12 VIDEO DIGITISER REVIEW  by T.Le   ¿? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿? The Vidi Amiga 12 is a low cost, real-time video digitser (Framegrabber to be exact) which has been produced by a Scottish company called Rombo.  WHAT YOU GET: - A box 25.5 cm by 21 cm by 7.5 cm, which has lots of pictures achieved by the V.A. 12. - A cream coloured box (the actual digitiser) which fits into the parallel port. - A 48 page manual. - A disk entitled "Vidi Amiga 12". - A Phono to Phono Cable. - A Registration card.  SETTING THE UNIT UP: Setting up the Video digitising unit was simple. All it involved was plugging in the unit into the parallel port, plugging in the cable connected to the digitiser into the disk drive port (or external drive pass through) in which the unit derives it power from, and finally the phono cable into the hole in the back of the digitiser which connects to your VCR or Video Camera. The manual gives you enough information to set it up, although it is unlikely you will need it, but there's nothing wrong with being on the safe side.  DIGITISING: Once everything is set up correctly, you can start digitising. The manual explains everything you need to know about the software such as how to start digitising, the control panels and features to name a few. When you load up the software, you are given a Workbench 2.0 look- alike (on the WB2.0 version) which has a window which is overlayed onto the screen. The window contains buttons which allow you to choose which section of the program you wish to enter. I was very anxious to get digitising, so I clicked the Grab grab button (I didn't worry about Grab or Display preferences buttons). Next you will see a blank screen which at the bottom, has a control panel containing options and draggable switches for controlling colour, contrast and brightness among others. Buttons allowing options of Mono, Red, Green, Blue, Colour, Auto, Manual, Continous, Loop, Grab, View, Store, Undo, Mix, Edit, Carousel, Load and Save are also along the neat panel. The other parts of the program, Mix, Edit and Carousel are of the same neatness and set out, but with different options contrasting them. After adjustments of colour, contrast and brightness, I was soon producing High Quality results using my HQ standard VCR. A trip down to the Edit menu allowed me to to Weird and wonderful effects to my nicely digitised pictures. The effects include Soft Focus, Blur, Smooth, Silk, Negative, Psychedelic, Sharpen, Quantize, Emboss, Edge Detect, Threshold and Mosaic.  FEATURES: The Vidi Amiga 12 has many features both on the hardware and software. The hardware unit has a composite jack for use with a standard VCR or camera which also uses the same type of connector. There is also a jack for using S-VHS (Super VHS) standard VCR or cameras, which gives higher picture quality (according to the techno-people who know everything about different standards of video equipment, I haven't personally tested this feature since I don't own a S-VHS VCR). There is also another mysterious hole on the back of the unit, which the manual explains is for the version of Vidi Amiga which comes with a built in sound sampler! On the software side of features, there are a lot of then as described before. The ability to be Hard drive installable is one that quite a few Amigans will appreciate (it doesn't make any difference to me- yet. I liked the Grey scale animation feature, which explains why it is called a "realtime digitiser". With my 2 Mb of Ram, I managed to digitise an animation of 31 frames (about 10 seconds unrepeated) of full screen, 16 grey shade animation, the only problem with this is that it doesn't fit onto a disk. With Carousel, it allows you to control which frames of animation to delete and display. The image processing in the Edit menu as decribed before has some good effects, but it takes quite a while to do the effect.  THE RESULTS AND PERFORMANCE: Vidi's nearest rival (in price range) is Digiview. Compared to my friend's Digiview, this kicks...(no, I'm not allowed to say that word), especially when digitising from VCR. The grabbing is a lot faster than Digiview's slow scanning of the input. Digiview has it's own 21-bit mode, but it didn't perform as well as my Vidi, maybe it was just my tests and my friend's rather old, Digiview (not to mention cables), but I think I can safely say that the Vidi kicks you know what in terms of the speed of Grabbing.  THE BAD SIDE: You probably thought there was no bad side to Vidi Amiga 12, but sadly there is. The first and the most noticable is how intrusive it is to your Amiga setup. The unit is 9 cm wide which means that it covers the serial port. That means if you have a device connected to the serial port for example a Modem, you will have to unplug this as well as anything in the parallel port which it hogs due to no pass through port. In the software, it takes AGES to save HAM pictures and EONS to save animations. To save a 20 odd frame animation, it took over 10 MINUTES to save!!! Worse is the fact that when it saves, it sounds like it's loading a game with serious copy protection, it constantly grinds the disk drive and runs shivers down my spine just listening to it (a little music can cure that). As mentioned before, the image processing is SLOW, A dedicated Image processing program would be better, but if you have an accellerator, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. My final complaint is the tacky looking manual comprising of a non-glossy paper cover, and the black and white non-glossy pages within the cover. This is a COLOUR digitiser, not a black and white one, so it would have been nice it the manual was colour. This may have raised the price a little though.  THE VERDICT: Despite the above mentioned bad side of the package, Vidi Amiga 12 is probably the best video digitiser in it's price range. If you have a Hard Drive and/or accellerator- ENJOY!  ¿? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿?