Matrox user needs advice from Aja users

[Dave Morrison]

I hope this is the correct forum to post this. If not, please flag this or delete it. This is a problem doing Standard Def editing on my HD system.

I've been using a Matrox MXO2 for almost 5 uneventful years. It has performed flawlessly....mostly. Over the past year or so, I've been handed several batches of VHS and Betamax tapes for digitizing and conversion to DVD. The MXO2 is perfect for this task given all the inputs available. Most of my VHS and Beta decks will have Composite outputs and some of them have S-video outs. My industrial deck also has Component outs, too. But, I've been having terrible problems with the captures going out of sync....sometimes ridiculously out of sync. Some of these captures can run several minutes but most of them are less than one minute but even these short captures can be off by as much as 7 frames. I've tried every capture setting I can think of, used multiple different internal and external drives for capturing and captured through every available video input. Hell, I even had to swap a motherboard (Mac Pro) in the middle of this whole mess, but that was for an unrelated problem (failing USB ports).

Matrox has been wonderful in working with me to solve this issue despite me being WAY out of warranty, so I have no complaints about them (thanks Joe!). But, after a year of fighting with this problem, I'm thinking about "jumping ship".

Can any of you Aja users suggest a solution that will give me all the flexibility of the MXO2? I need to maintain all the analog video/audio inputs I now have but (hopefully) gain some capture stability.

Here are the specs of my system:

Mac Pro 3,1 (early 2008) Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.8GHz
OS 10.8.5
16 gigs RAM
Four internal HD's
Caldigit 8-bay RAID

Using Premiere Pro CS6 for all the captures


Dave

[Andrew Smith]

I'm on a Windows 7 box and it works well for me without having audio going out of sync. Worth a try?

:-P

Andrew

PS. Did you try both broadcast/domestic frame capture options at the input selection stage? The 'domestic' setting allows the MXO2 to be more forgiving of the timing of the video frame delivery from the external device. (I'd be surprised if Joe did not cover this one.)

[Dave Morrison]

Believe me Andrew, if I had a Windows box here I'd try it. ;-)

As to the broadcast/consumer capture option, I've been using it since the option was added to the Matrox control panel. I laughingly call it the "Dave Button" since it appeared after I started trying to solve this issue with the guys at Matrox. The weird part of this whole problem was that, for a while, I could get great captures via the S-video connection but the Composite would be way out of sync. My latest tests now have both inputs going wrong.

I HATE being a corner case. ;-)