Software
The software package is rather small but provides what you need to get started in using the AiW. Pinnacle Studio is a nice program that provides a time-line or video based approach to video editing, depending on what you prefer. Of course there is the ever present ATi Multimedia Center which provides TV, DVD, Audio CD, Video CD, and assorted other small features with it. One other program included with the card is the GemStar TV guide program, which allows you to check on the shows for an entire week and pick which ones you want to record, though I didn't find this program to be extremely useful as it didn't work all that well for me. But lest now look at ATi's Multimedia Center.
Multimedia Center is broken down into multiple smaller, specific programs, such as the DVD player, the CD Audio player, the File player, the TV player (only with TV Tuners), and the Library. Overall these programs all work well with the AiW 9000 as its hardware decoding supported by the the DVD player is a bonus. Lets just take a brief look at the TV part of the Multimedia Center.
Some of the features of this part of the ATi software are that it can have full screen video or a video desktop; it also has the nice Thruview display mode as well, where you can watch TV while still doing other things right over top of the video. The AiW 9000 Pro, unlike the TV Wonder products, can capture in this program at 720*480 which is DVD resolution. Capturing in MPEG-2 with the DVD preset gave good quality video which didn't have any dropped frames on a Barton 2500+. Closed captions are also a big plus in this program as other TV viewing software doesn't show the closed captions, which I personally like to watch, especially if the volume is turned down, or I'm using a different computing for sound. Another very interesting feature is MulTView, which is basically your standard PiP on many TV's today. As we can see in the picture above this allows for watching of multiple shows at once, though you will only hear the audio for the window that has the focus on it. So you can watch a show and check the listings for what's on next. The only downside to MulTView is that, when I tested it with the WinTV Go it didn't work, however it did with the TV Wonder.
How about the video editing software, Pinnicle Studio? The program itself is fairly easy to use, and capturing is simple to do with the AiW 9000 Pro. Once you get into the editing you have a choice of a timeline based editing or a storyboard based editing style. I myself am partial to the timeline based approach so most of the screenshots will show this.
An interesting feature of the software is that with any video you import, or even capture, you can have the program try and detect the changes in scene and create a new start frame, based on this. However if you have video that is constantly changing like in the picture above, then this can be a problem with over 49 pages of what it believes is scene changes in a half hour of video. Another sore point about this package is that it is limited to a maximum resolution of 1024*768, even if the screen has a higher resolution.
The following picture is a sample of the final rendering as well as the maximum resolution of the program.
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ATI All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro: ATi has been making the AiW series for the last several years. Today's review will look at one of ATi's latest but not necessarily fastest All-in-Wonder video card.
