I will elaborate a bit more on this soon but as a summary, I bought the Pinnacle basic DV card last week and after trying to get it to work for more than 6 hours I gave up and decided to try to return it to Dixons on Oxford Street. Guess what, the shop changed name and is now called Curry. The DV card was bought 18 days ago which would normally exclude it from the Refund/return scheme. Surprisingly it was very easy to have it swapped for a Pyro DV card, I just said the product was faulty when it was probably a problem with shitty drivers. Since 95% of PC World/Dixons/Currys staff has no clue about the stuff they sell (except expensive Insurance covers), they just accepted the return. No clue about what they sell? Ask them if their DV camera can shoot full frame or if there Tape player do NTSC playback.

Don’t be fooled and buy a Pinnacle product thinking that with the forum they have if you run into a problem it will be quickly sorted out. I plugged the Pyro card and XP recognised it righaway, no drivers needed. Altogether that was 8 hours wasted instead of 8 hours of animation.

for those of you wondering what kind of equipment you need for Animation Mentor, here is a picture of my current computer. Yes it is fancy but not really in a cosmetic kind of way 😉

What you need is basically a motherboard and CPU for less than £100. £50 worth of Ram, a £50 Gforce graphic card, a £40 HD, a £15 power supply and let’s go a bit crazy with a £25 DVD burner dual layer 😉

You might want to get a trolley to be able to move the pc around without disturbing the layout! For the people with very sharp eyes, yes it is resting on an old VCR and a piece of cardboard for insulation and yes the MOBO is a bit big so the DVD burner is laid over the PCI port…..

behold the fancy equipment