Previewing HD on second monitor

[Brian Tori]

You're welcome Oliver. I'm glad you were able to get 5.5 up and running.

[Greg Clark]

The BOB for me is useful for VHS tape. I will be keeping my RT.X2 with CS3 so I will use it whenever I need to capture analogue material. Now for the hard part building the new CS5.5 system. Thanks again everyone for all the clarity on the usage of two screens.

[Vincent Oliver]

At one time the Matrox cards had some great preset filters, i.e. movie effects etc. Most of the filter effects have been dropped and given what Premiere CS5/ CS5.5. can do with a nVidia card, I don't see any point in upgrading the drivers for the Matrox card. RIP RTX2

[Vincent Oliver]

Originally Posted by Greg Clark

The BOB for me is useful for VHS tape. I will be keeping my RT.X2 with CS3 so I will use it whenever I need to capture analogue material. Now for the hard part building the new CS5.5 system. Thanks again everyone for all the clarity on the usage of two screens.

The problem I had was that I had always used a Matrox Sequence and never needed to look at the Playback Settings, and of course when you are working with a Matrox sequence then the Matrox driver replaces the Adobe Playback settings, so I never saw the option to select a second monitor. Thanks to all the tips on this forum I have now found the settings and am now using them without any problem.

Greg, I think you will find your workflow much easier using a Nvidia card - at least I am not getting so many crashes now. With the Matrox card I had a problem doing a multi camera edit. All is well now.

[Jay West]

"The Breakout Box (BOB) is still handy for analogue capture, I use it to capture cameras LCD screens via the video out port on a camera (using a Yellow AV plug). Maybe one day I might also digitize my old VHS tapes. Other than that I have no other use for it."

Here's another reason that you do not need to consider an MXO2 mini. The "mini" also has a BOB which can be used for both timeline monitoring and analogue/hdmi I/O. Since you still will have your old system running --- tho it might get a bit crowded and warm in the editing room with two systems running --- the RT.X2's BOB supplants the other reason to get an MXO2.

One can get a Mini with Matrox's "MAX" accelerated encoding hardware, which basically doubles the price of the Mini. But if all one wants is the accelerated encoding functions, there is a separate small "Comrpess HD" card that Matrox sells.

[Roger Keay]

Remember to check under Edit - Preferences to select the Player. I have Blackmagic Intensity and Cineform on my machine so 3 different players are available under this setting (Adobe is the third). The Edit-Preferences-Player selection is particularly important for the Preview window as it seems to follow the Edit selection while the Program window follows the Sequence setting. You can have a mismatch between your project settings and the Preview window so automatic switching between Preview and Program does not occur properly on an external monitor connected to the second output on the video card.

[Jay West]

Good advice.

And, for those who get an MXO2 Mini to feed monitoring via HDMI to a tv or monitor, you also need to check your audio hardware and playback settings. With HDMI monitoring from a PPro timeline, the Matrox unit defaults to sending audio out throught the hdmi to the tv rather than through the sound card. You go into the playback settings for the source and timeline monitors in PPro, select the audio tab, and check the box for using the system sound card if that is how you want to monitor audio.

[Steve Oakley]

one thing you guys are missing is that when you buy a MXO2 mini, you also get the Matrox Mpeg2 Codec ! thats right - you can access your old captured material on a mac or PC... if you have a lot of material in the Mpeg2 codec, the mini becomes a no brainer.

the MAX h264 encoder really flies and produces very high quality output, especially for its low bit rate. it also has noise reduction, hardware scaling... did I say its really fast ?

[Jay West]

I believe that the Codec is a free download from Matrox and does not require any Matrox hardware to run.

Matrox Video - Support - Matrox VFW Software Codecs Downloads

Also, if you want only the MAX H264 encoding functions, Matrox offers the "Compress HD" card which is still available according to this link from DVinfo sponsor, Videoguys:

Videoguys.com - Matrox CompressHD

While videoguys lists the card as being for Macs, drivers for PCs are available on the Matrox Website. Note they are specific to CS5 Media Encoder (apparently no support for CS 5.5 yet).

http://www.matrox.com/video/en/suppo...resshd/system/

I suspect CS4 drivers must be somewhere on the Matrox site.

[Steve Oakley]

Originally Posted by Jay West

I believe that the Codec is a free download from Matrox and does not require any Matrox hardware to run.
Matrox Video - Support - Matrox VFW Software Codecs Downloads

PC yes, mac no. the hardware basically acts as a dongle.

Also, if you want only the MAX H264 encoding functions, Matrox offers the "Compress HD" card which still seems to be available ]

the compress HD is $500. a mini max is $859 so its cheaper to get one with it built in. You also can put a PCie card into a laptop where you can use the speed boost the most.

[Jay West]

"PC yes, mac no. the hardware basically acts as a dongle."

Oh, joy. What a pain for Mac owners. Missed that because I'm using the Mini on a PC and didn't check the Mac software downloads before posting.

"the compress HD is $500. a mini max is $859 so its cheaper to get one with it built in. You also can put a PCie card into a laptop where you can use the speed boost the most."

All true if you also want the "Mini" for external monitoring display. Note that most of the folks posted in this thread want only to feed a second computer monitor on a PC rather than what the Mini excels at, which is feeding a third monitor or providing a YUV display. I got the Mini for running third screen monitoring from PPro and Avid MC5 timelines on a YUV display which, with the built-in screem calibration utility, allows me to do reasonably good color matching. (I do multi-cam event shoots with up to seven cameras some of which require matching in post). The color matching I do is good enough for my customers but I have no illusions that this would be suitable for the likes of PBS or theatrical releases.

For those who do very much H.264 encoding, the Max functions will be very useful. In my case, the Max functions go largely unused. My customers all still want DVDs. So far, I've only done BluRay versions for myself. I have yet to receive even an inquiry about putting video into the mobile formats that the Max functions offer. The few folks hereabouts who want mobile-device video seem to want only downloadable stuff from commercial sources and others.

[Steve Oakley]

I'm generating h264 just about every day. the quality of the h264 encoding is really good, better then the slower software options :)... way better. DVD's have simply almost completely gone away. if I burn a DVD disc, its to put a really large h264 file on it, including stuff like HD TC burns for clients to log their shots. I get modest amounts of mobile, but huge amounts of web including often making 2 or 3 versions of everything. with this sort of volume the MAX encoder has become a critical part of gear for me.

[Neil Grubb]

Just to say, thanks for the information on this thread. I have bought a 27 inch Samsung UE27D5000 HDTV as a playback monitor connected via the HDMI output of my graphics card, and have assigned it on the playback settings of my program monitor as recommended. The image quality is excellent, far superior to maximising the monitor window on the second monitor of a dual monitor system. I suspect many graphics cards will allow this. Mine is a ATI Radeon 5800 HD series card.

Editing is really sped up by the ability to see the edited segments in HD in real time.

Neil

[Andrew Smith]

Always glad to hear from someone when things have gone well. Too many times (in other threads) you never hear back and wonder if they ever saw your answers.

Andrew

[Jay West]

Originally Posted by Neil Grubb

Just to say, thanks for the information on this thread. I have bought a 27 inch Samsung UE27D5000 HDTV as a playback monitor connected via the HDMI output of my graphics card, and have assigned it on the playback settings of my program monitor as recommended. The image quality is excellent, far superior to maximising the monitor window on the second monitor of a dual monitor system. I suspect many graphics cards will allow this. Mine is a ATI Radeon 5800 HD series card.

Editing is really sped up by the ability to see the edited segments in HD in real time.

Neil

Good to hear of your success. A couple of extra suggestions:

First, in Encore, you have playback settings similar to those in PPro. If you enable playback to the other card output, so you can display Encore timelines and disk previews to your HDTV as well. This may depend on your graphics display card, but I am able to do this on my system with an nVidia GTX260 graphics card as well as through my MXO2 mini.

Second, you mentioned "editing is really sped up . . ." If you are using CS 5 or 5.5 and have any money left in the equipment budget, you may want to replace the ATI 5800 card with a "CUDA" based nVidia card in order to get the very significant benefits of the hardware accelerated Mercury Playback Engine (MPE). When I checked a couple of weeks ago, the 1 gig nVidia GTS450 chipset cards (a basic CUDA/MPE card) were running between $110 and $120 ($US @ newegg.com), so not terribly expensive as cards go. I believe the GTS450 cards are roughly the same size as the ATI 5800 series PCIe cards, so they should fit in your case. To make a GTS450 work with CS5 and 5.5, you will have to add the card name to a text file. (This is the so called "hack" which is nothing more than typing an additional name into a plain text list.) Hardware MPE makes a big difference in playback of HD video from PPro timelines. In making this suggestion, I am assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that you are running a desktop editing computer and not a laptop with a mobile 5800 graphics card/chipset. Obviously, if you are using a laptop, this suggestion is not relevant to your situation.