ATI Rage Fury Pro (Rage 128 Pro)

The Rage Theater handles the TV-output and video capture functions of the Rage Fury Pro board. The board specifically features S-Video and Composite outputs and a Composite input port. The video capture options are identical to the All-in-Wonder 128 so we've included an excerpt from our All-in-Wonder 128 review below.

The card itself supports capturing in raw (uncompressed) YUV9, ATI VCR 1.0, ATI VCR 2.0, MPEG-1, or MPEG-2 video formats. The capture format that should be used varies depending on the intended use of the video and how much CPU power is available. Everyone can, of course, play raw uncompressed video, but the file sizes are simply unreasonable. In all cases, a hard drive capable of keeping up with the data being written is necessary. Raw video does require quite a bit of sustained hard drive performance.

The VCR 1.0 and 2.0 formats are proprietary ATI formats, but may be playable on other systems using AVI extensions. However, it is difficult (ie not possible with most software, including ATI's) to edit MPEG-1 or 2 video streams, making the VCR formats still very useful. According to ATI, this may change as MPEG formats increase in popularity. For distribution purposes, the final edited video can be saved in either of the two MPEG formats.

The best format for distributing video is most likely MPEG-1 since it is widely accepted and almost everyone has the appropriate CODEC for playback (it is now included in Microsoft's Windows Media Player). MPEG-1 provides approximately VHS level quality and is used in Video-CD's. The compression level is better than the ATI VCR formats and is more universally accepted. MPEG-2 is gaining popularity and will play using just about any software DVD player since DVD is just MPEG-2 video. Compression and quality levels are higher than that of MPEG-1, but of course require the most CPU power.

Of course, the available formats are heavily dependent on what CPU is in use. The following table, provided by ATI, gives the estimated CPU requirements for capture at 30 fps with CD quality 16-bit 44kHz audio using the various formats:

At the default 320 x 240 resolution, a 30 second capture from TV resulted in 0 dropped frames and ended up in a file of about 16MB in size. At full D1 resolution (704 x 480 @ 30 fps NTSC) the same 30 second capture resulted in 10% of the frames being dropped in a file totaling around 64MB in size. This was on our Pentium III 450 test bed system with a standard Ultra ATA 33 HDD.

At this price, we still prefer the hardware MJPEG of the Matrox Marvel series for real video editing , but if all you're interested in is putting together a few quick AVIs for internet publication or any other type of production where image quality isn't your top concern then the software capture provided by the Rage Theater is just right since you can capture to a lower quality format than the MJPEG (aka disk space monster) of the Marvel cards.