Vine Micros News Page

May, 2003
by Nigel Cooper

Managing Director of Monroe Video Productions
gives his opinion on Vine products...

Nigel Cooper in his studio...

"I have been an independent video producer for several years now making educational and instructional programmes. Part of what my production company does involves recording straight off the computer screen for tutorial purposes i.e. computer programme learning videos - these scenes are then edited into the final programme.

In the past we have tried several methods, none of which gave us the quality we required. These involved, literally, placing a DV camera on a tripod and filming straight off the computer's flat-screen monitor as well as trying various screen motion capturing programmes, none of which gave us satisfactory results.

Then we found out about 'Scan-Converters'. We had a very expensive (£4,000) model demonstrated to us at our premises. This scan converter was manufactured by an alternative supplier to the highest standards, giving the best possible quality output from the computer to digital tape (or so we thought!).

We were about to part with our hard-earned money when, by chance after doing a search on the web, we discovered the British company 'Vine Micros' and their CORIO range of scan converters. The first thing we noticed was that their entry level model came in at around the £160 mark (ex.VAT) and their top end model cost around £765 (ex.VAT)! Naturally, we assumed these scan converters wouldn't give us the quality that we had seen with our £4,000 model. However, we decided to give one a try - after all, at their prices we had nothing to lose!

Vine Micros despatched their CORIOscan Select model (£255.28 ex.VAT) that day. Upon its arrival the next morning we unpacked the compact little scan converter. Our first impressions were very good and the neat little padded case it came in was a nice surprise as it would make it easy to transport around with all our other equipment. Better still - all the appropriate leads were included so we wouldn't have to go down to our local audio shop and spend another £30 on leads (good thinking Vine Micros)!

Generally, this complete little ensemble looked very impressive - though we still couldn't help looking at each other with a "how can this little box possibly give us top quality pictures?" look on our faces - time will tell. Well - about 3 minutes actually! That's all it took to plug in the power and computer leads and switch on the device. Then we simply hit the little 'AutoSet' button on the remote control which came with it. This automatically sets the horizontals and verticals to match the monitor (or TV set), then away we went.

After making a quick 2 minute tutorial using Adobe Photoshop and editing it onto the timeline of our digital non-linear editing suite, we compared it alongside a tutorial made on the £4,000 scan converter the week before - we just couldn't believe our eyes! On a £2,000 19-inch Sony monitor, not only did the CORIOscan Select match the quality of the very expensive scan converter, it was much sharper too, with better colour saturation and gamut levels. The blacks where nice and black and the whites were - well - white (as opposed to cream or some other colour that poorer quality scan converters interpret as being white)! This makes a very big difference in our kind of work as we don't want to spend another 3 days in post-production adjusting colour and gamut levels, then sitting around all day waiting for them to render out.

Obviously we phoned the rep that kindly demonstrated the £4,000 scan converter and told him we wouldn't be buying it after all. This huge saving has just paid for a new DVD authoring system! So, thanks to Vine Micros we can now deliver interactive DVD productions to our clients."

At Vine, we are always grateful for feedback of any sort. If you have anything to say, good or bad, we would like to hear from you!

We would be particularly interested in publishing ways in which one (or more) of our products has helped your business save time and money, just as the CORIOscan Select did for Nigel Cooper...

Thank you Nigel for letting us know and for
allowing us to publish your story!

We would love to hear from you, so if you have any comments or an application to tell us about, please e-mail Kyla or Alan at:
kyla@vinemicros.com
alan@vinemicros.com