Matrox Mini question

[Jay West]

I cannot answer Bart's question about the 3d card.

For Steve:

If I recall correctly, you tried out the MXO2-Mini at version 1 (maybe 1.5) of the MatroxUtils software back in 2009. The software is now up to version 5.5 and the calibration capabilities have been considerably improved. Is it as good as your Eizo/Dreamcolor setup (the one proposed by Tepper)? Of course not. For me, the attraction of the Mini is that it is good enough for what I do. Plus, my rig (Mini and tv) cost about ¼ of what I would have paid to get an Eizo and the professional calibration tools needed to get the benefit of its capabilities. Plus, I get the "3 screen" editing set-up that I want. To my thinking, the key phrase here is "good enough for my budget and my work." Obviously, different folks will have different levels of need.

Of course, as I said above, I'm now running into some intermittent issues of halting and pauses with CS 5.5 and MatroxUtils v. 5.5. As I recall from discussions a couple of years ago, these were the things that discouraged you a couple of years ago when we first started discussing the Mini. In my case, I did not have these issues with CS5.0x and MatroxUtils v. 5.0, so I am considering a rolling back.

[Jay West]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Jeff,

Where we noticed the significant drop-off in performance was with exporting a one hour SD DV AVI as AVI. This entails writing 13 GB to disk. It is the Disk I/O test in the PPBM5 Benchmark

We have asked people that showed very disappointing results on that specific test and that use Matrox to repeat the test without Matrox and in general, where their results where say 460 seconds with Matrox, those results dropped to figures around 80 seconds without Matrox.

Whenever we see high figures in the Disk I/O test, it is 9 out of 10 that Matrox is involved. Notice that we do not see those results with exporting small files of 100 MB, and using MPEG2 or H.264, We only see it with large files that stress disk R/W activities

I just did a quick pass through the PPBM and did not have enough time to pull out anything specific about the Matrox Mini correlating with slowdowns in disk i/o. I am not concerned about other or older Matrox hardware because I do not have it and because this thread about the Mini, anyway.

I think I need to try PPBM 5.5 on my system with and without the mini. However, I'm on the road (again) today. I hoping I'll have some time this weekend to work on the editing workstation. If I have the time, I'll run a couple of tests with PPBM 5.5 on my system.

If the Mini is impeding large file read/write, that could account for some of the peculiarities I mentioned that I have observed since upgrading to CS 5.5.

I would have been inclined to agree with Jeff in that I had not previously observed encoding being slower with than without the Mini in the system. Unlike Jeff, I am not looking at bottlenecks like the Windows software raid. I am not using any Windows software raids. I work from a 4tb RAID 10 array (gSpeedES run from a Rocket Raid Card). I often use Cineform Neo conversions which get written to a hardware 2 tb Raid 0 run from Intel controller on the ASUS P6T D v.2 mobo. These are very large files, often running 60 to 70 gb per hour of video. Transcodes (using 2 pass VBR going from HD to a DVD iso file) also go from the Raid 10 to the Raid 0.

Last year, when CS 5 was released, I ran without the Matrox Mini for a couple of months or so. CS 5 came out in May but the MatroxUtils upgrade for CS5 did not come until (I think) July or maybe even August. In the interim, I removed the Mini hardware and software from the system. In that time period, I mostly worked on multi-cam HD projects from tapeless recording (both HDV and 24 mbps AVCHD), often with Cineform conversions. I edited in HD and coded for DVD. I did not notice any increase in encoding/iso/Cineform generation times when I reinstalled the Mini in August after the new software upgrade was released.

That observation, however, is subjective. So, when I get some time (hopefully this weekend), I can try PPBM 5.5 and see what turns up.

[Peter Manojlovic]

@Jay.

I can't thank you enough for that ProVideoCoalition link..
It answers so many questions i've had in the past, and lets me go forward.

Once i dug deeper into his site, it corrected some of my preconceived notions, and backed up some of my other assumptions..

[Steve Kalle]

Originally Posted by Bart Walczak

Not to hijack a thread, but what kind of issues do you have with Blackmagic Extreme 3D? I'm asking, because we've just bought the card, and would like to know what I should be aware of.

One of my favorite features is being able to play video from the little thumbnail in the Project window thru the BM card, but this causes Premiere to constantly lock up and sometimes I lose the last 20 minutes of work - very bad in my book.

Using BM preset sequences caused occasional hang ups and the Program window sometimes stopped working.

I have forgotten other issues since I have chosen a work around where I use my custom sequences and open a sequence into the Source window which shows thru the BM card, and then I gang Source to Program to emulate editing with a normal BM sequence. This is with CS5.

A few reasons I like the Aja Kona more:
1) more adjustable settings in their control panel - to me, the BM control panel is weak.
2) more frame rates and image sizes supported
3) adds support for more file types such as 16-bit TIFF to Premiere