FutureTel's Video Sphinx Pro

Emedia Professional, August, 1998 by Jan Ozer

The MPEG-I market has seen a flurry of new products, consisting primarily of external units that connect to your system's parallel port. At $399, FutureTel's Video Sphinx Pro is the most expensive unit on the market, but it packs a lot of punch under its sleek, purple hood. Sphinx produces excellent quality MPEG-I files and includes a highly functional MPEG-I cut-and-paste editor. The only negative is a new wave interface that's cool, but unintuitive, with some surprising feature gaps.

Sphinx is slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, with S-Video and composite video inputs, stereo audio inputs and outputs, and composite video output. Like most other MPEG-I parallel port adapters, Sphinx is powered by C-Cube's MVP encoder chipset, but it is the only external unit with on-board audio capture. Sphinx is also one of the few products requiring an ECP parallel port, so check your hardware setup to make sure you have ECP capabilities before buying.

FutureTel ships the unit with a short parallel port cable, S-Video and composite video cables, and two RCA-to-stereo audio cables that let you capture video right out of the box. Sphinx's control software enables MPEG-I capture, still frame capture, and frame-accurate MPEG-I cut-and-paste editing. It also includes a searchable media database and a multimedia presentation program that doubles as an OLE server. FutureTel bundles the unit with Kai's Photo Soap SE, an image-editing program from MetaCreations, and Macromedia Backstage, a Web authoring program.

Sphinx's parallel port design pays dividends during installation, which took less than 15 minutes with the aid of a competent QuickStart guide. After installation, a configuration utility tests the Sphinx hardware and parallel port, alerting the user to any problems.

RIDDLE ME THIS: SPHINX'S PUZZLING INTERFACE AND SOFTWARE

Sphinx's software features a Map Room that looks just like Kai's Photo Soap interface and serves as home base for accessing each function. Kai's philosophy, which works well in Photo Soap, is to minimize the use of menus in favor of specialized tools for cropping, color correction, and similar functions. However, the analogy is awkward for Sphinx since each function--like video and still image capture--requires access to multiple controls.

For example, in the MPEG-I capture window, there are no menu items for controls to adjust the brightness, hue, contrast, and saturation of the incoming video, or the audio volume. Searching the "help" files lets you know that these controls do, in fact, exist, but they are embedded under the preview/playback window and are accessed by clicking on a barely noticeable bar on the left side of the window.

Similarly, after capturing a video, there are no menu commands for saving the captured file to disk--a fairly important operation for an MPEG-I encoder. In fact, I actually had to call tech support to learn that I could save the file from another embedded control without a corresponding menu item--the Trim Window.

Capturing is hindered by a missing precapture preview--probably the most significant shortcoming of the product. Adding insult to injury, when you push the "record" button, you are forced to press "preview" to give the capture hardware time to set up. Then, when you press "preview," you get a blank screen. Fortunately, you can preview in still frame capture mode, make the necessary adjustments to color and brightness, and the setting will carry over to video capture.

The program also fails to prompt the user before overwriting a previously captured file, guaranteeing that you'll destroy one or two captures each session. When you rename a file after capture, the program doesn't just rename the file, it stores it to disk under the new name, which can take several minutes for longer files. Renaming the file manually in Windows Explorer will prove much faster.

These cumulative interface deficits give the product a distinct rookie feel, which is particularly disappointing given FutureTel's years of producing MPEG encoders.

MUZZLING THE MONSTER: THE GOOD NEWS

Fortunately, the product's faults don't detract too much from its many strengths. One primary strength is the Video Sphinx's ability to capture in both square pixel (320 x 240) and rectangular pixel (352 x 240) resolutions. Square pixel resolutions are ideal for computer presentations, while rectangular pixel resolutions enhance VideoCD and CD-i videos displayed on an NTSC monitor. Also supported are 176 x 112 and 160 x 112 resolutions for clips intended for Internet distribution.

The audio and video data rates are set separately--the video via a slider bar ranging from 200kbps for 160 x 112 video to 3mbps for 352 x 240 video. Audio data rates include six stops between 32kbps and 224kbps. In short, the program gives the user all the flexibility he or she needs for most publishing, but lacks a VideoCD preset, which would have been helpful.

Sphinx was flawless in capture tests, storing up to 30 minutes of video with perfect synchronization throughout. Strangely--and despite the on-board audio chip--Sphinx captures the audio and video files separately and interleaves them on the computer after capture. While this obviously didn't affect audio synchronization, it took about five minutes to interleave the 30-minute test clip after capture, tying up the capture computer.