Otteau Christiansen, executive producer of VideoSyncrasies in Minnetonka, considers D-Vision Online a better deal than any other non-linear editor on the market, including Avid's Media Composer 1000. "For me, a good place to start is price," he says. "What's a Media Composer 1000 cost with a 36-gig disk array? About $100,000. D-Vision 3.0, with that same disk array and the Targa RTX card, costs less than $40,000."

Christiansen (a confessed career-long PCophile) adds that he prefers the D-Vision interface to Avid's--"it looks nicer, it's easier to use, it's a bit more intuitive in the way the timeline and bins are laid out"--and is impressed by the program's array of plug-ins, which include Boris Effects, Vortex 3D Effects and Ultimatte.

Sophisticated features and economics were also deciding factors for Triad Communications, a video and multimedia production house in Bloomington. Over the past five years the company has consolidated its non-linear editing and 3D animation on NT, running In:synch Speed-Razor and Lightwave 3D on a network of five DEC Alpha and two Pentium Pro machines. Charles Meyer, director of Triad's digital studios division, says that Speed-Razor's picture quality equals that of the Avid Media Composer 8000, a system that costs more than three times as much. He also appreciates Speed-Razor's ability to lay down 25 to 30 layers of video, audio and graphics, without the "nesting" requirements of the Avid system. Lightwave 3D, a $12,000 animation package that was used to create special effects in the movies Titanic and The Fifth Element, "has been fabulous" on NT, he says. A feature called Screamernet renders animations at warp speed by harnessing all seven machines on the network, distributing frames to the correct CPUs in sequence as processing power becomes available. Meanwhile, other programs such as Photoshop and Digital Fusion continue to run the foreground.

Both Christiansen and Meyer approve of NT's open architecture, which allows producers to buy CPUs, capture boards, hard drives and other vital components from a variety of sources. An open environment vests control in the user, permitting a greater degree of customization, Christiansen says. And buying off the shelf saves money, Meyer says: "I don't have to buy it from DPS or from In:synch. We can pick and choose and shop around in warehouses across the country to see who's got the best deal." Alpha Video & Audio (www.alphavideo.com) in Edina assembled Triad's system, incorporating hardware from more than 30 different vendors.