anyone using matrox rtx-100 w/dvx-100?

[Matthew de Jongh]

hello.

i have had it with my canopus raptor rt2 card, i came home from 4 days of shooting footage for my current project and it has stopped working yet again.

so i'm 90% sure i'm going to trade it in for a matrox rtx-100

i'd love to hear from anyone using this card with the dvx-100?

one of the biggest problems i had with the raptor was it didn't like the footage from the dvx-100

i shoot it mostly in standard 4:3 with the "fake" widescreen bars, yet the canopus raptor capture utility would think that it was 16:9 and make it some weird size.

matthew

[Mike Morrell]

I have been using the RTX-100 with the DVX100 for over a year. I don't think that I've ever tried capturing "fake" widescreen, but it captures anamorphic 720x480 fine. I will occasionally have problems locating the edit point with the matrox during capture, especially when the first scene is close to the beginning of the tape. I'd recommend striping the tape and not recording any footage inside of the first minute. I've started using matrox's "alternate" seek method and this, I think, is working better than the default method.

I can say that I have never gone out to DV tape with the matrox, so I cannot say how well this works. But when I first purchased the matrox, I had BIG problems trying to do this. But that was several software revs ago.

I have had mixed results using the board itself. Under P6.5, I found the RT effects to be very worthwhile but I experienced bomb-offs at an alarming rate. I use a fair amount of add-on 3rd party utilities and push the limits of the host. The combination is definitely not stable on my system.

Under PPro with the RTX-100, I have been more stable but I have found the RT effects to be less worthwhile for what I do most often. I urge you to read how Matrox handles its RT effects and what is real-time and what is not real-time before you go from one card to another. For what I do, I experience "red-bar" constantly and have to render.

The good thing about the matrox is that they can and do make enhancements to the drivers that can and do improve features. They have not ever made a firmware update to the chip, but this is also an option. So far they really appear to believe in their chip and all of their upgrades, which do include feature enhancements, have been free.

Their support forum is closed to non-members. If you looked at it, you would see plenty of dissatisfied customers as you do on most support forums. But their are also a lot of Matrox defenders that claim that they have no problems and that everything works 100% fine for them. Definitely stick to matrox's hardware guidelines if you go with them. I really think that you need a good PCI bus with their card more than anything else. I am going to try to install mine into a Dell Poweredge 2600 that I have to see if this helps me any. Being a server, Dell does not support XP and I have loaded some 2000 drivers on it, so this is definitely not supported hardware from Matrox, but the 2600 has an outstanding PCI bus. But it uses SCSI and (RAID) which matrox does not like. Again, check matrox's configuration before you buy!

Let me know if you have any specific questions and I'll try and answer them for you.

[Matthew de Jongh]

the irritating thing about the fake letterbox is that it is just regular 720*480 with black bars on the top and bottom, so it might have just been that the raptor didn't like the dvx-100?

i hadn't really done anything that wasn't in that format.

i don't use many special effects and just want a card that will speed up the rendering on the basic effects/transitions that i use and a card that will output to my sony professional ntsc monitor with the safe area lines.

the canopus support can be really hit or miss, they all seem to work off of a list of common problems and if your problem isn't on that list they just repeat the nearest problem on the list and it becomes really apparent that they weren't even listing to the answers to the questions they asked you.

matthew

[Stephen van Vuuren]

I sold my RT1000 over a year ago and moved to Vegas. I don't miss the "real-time" feature at all since I get real-time previews in Vegas, both to computer or to NTSC monitor. Plus I have a Parhelia for multi-monitor and after effects plugin.

I don't miss all the driver problems, install headaches, system compromises, crashes, things not working.

CPU and GPU speed is such these days that unless you spend all day doing 3D rotating boxes or such, I would look at the joys of using something other than Premiere.

Vegas LOVES DVX100 footage, or actually any and all footage, from web-cam to film rez. Final Cut Pro and Avid are same classor the product.

I don't think Premiere will ever cut it (pun intended). I would sooner jump off a building than ever have to cut anything in Premiere again (and this is someone who own AE and CS Premium Suite).

[Matthew de Jongh]

i know very little about vegas, is it hardware based as well or just software?

if just software what do you use for the ntsc preview?

matthew

[Stephen van Vuuren]

It's software based - that's one reason for stability. It's support NTSC preview out your firewire connection (I just have a NTSC monitor plugged into my JVC DV deck).

[Matthew de Jongh]

interesting...

i never really considered ditching premiere pro as it has been very stable for me, the only issues i have had were always the canopus card.

i am downloading the demo right now for vegas 4.0 + dvd and will check it out.

my system is way overkill, so for me a non-hardware based realtime system would work great.

i can't find any mention of whether or not vegas fully supports multiple cpu's??

full support for 24p would be a godsend as i shoot with a dvx-100a

matthew

[Stephen van Vuuren]

Vegas does support multiple cpus and hyperthreading. I can easily run all Vegas operations while working in any other application. I just run a 3.0 HT CPU.

[Matthew de Jongh]

well i downloaded the vegas demo, i'm sort of stuck out of town for 3 days and i thought it would be good to spend some of that time trying out vegas, but the damn demo wants a serial number and they didn't give me one when i downloaded it and they didn't email me one.

anyone know the default trial/demo serial number??

matthew

[Matthew de Jongh]

ok i'm trying out a matrox rtx-100 with my dvx-100a

so far, it just doesn't want to do scene detect.

doesn't matter if i use their capture utility or premiere pro's

i have tried the default method and alt. 1-3

i'd love to hear from some who has this working and hear what setting they use and perhaps what timecode setting they have in their camera?

the odd/interesting thing is that if i plug in my dvx-100 to the matrox capture card it doesn't show up in windows xp pro, but if i plug in my little sony trv-19 it shows up (at the desktop level)

neither one will do scene detect.

i can capture and see the playback o.k. but i really need to have the scene detect working.

also, what the hell is the preset file for? they have a lot of presets for different devices but there is no mention of how/where to use them?

matthew

[Matthew de Jongh]

ok, so i mostly have the rtx-100 working...

i'd love to hear from someone who has it working with the dvx-100a

the 1394 port on the rtx-100 does not recognize the dvx-100a

the other odd thing is that virtually all of my tapes start with 10 seconds or so of the on camera color bars, well for whatever reason i have to forward 5 or 10 seconds beyond that for the batch capture feature in the rtx tools to work.

never had to do that with the other capture utilities i have used with the same tapes.

matthew

[Paul Leung]

I have RTX100 and DVX100A. I never have any problem with capture. Scene recognition works in most cases. I use default setting except the search method, which I use Alternative 1. I previously use a cheap Sharp camcorder. Both Sharp and DVX100A can be recognised by plugging in RTX100's IEE1394 port. I trust that you are using the latest Matrox driver, right?

Now I regret getting the RTX100 for the following reasons:
- Premiere Pro is quite sluggish.
- Without RTX100, many effects can be display on PC monitor real-time anyway. With RTX100, many things, such as applying filter on titles, require rendering anyway.
- Premiere Pro does not support 24P pull-down
- Many Premiere people converted to Vegas, Vegas must be pretty good. Vegas support 24P. Many say that the Vegas workflow is very good.

I my opinion RTX100 is good only for the following:
- Analogue capture
- realtime analogue output (Vegas can do that with the help of a DV camcorder or Deck)
- realtime mv2 export (many people in HK now use the DVD VCR to do realtime DVD production, instead of using PC)

[Matthew de Jongh]

i'd love to figure out what i'm doing wrong because my system works fine with a sony trv-19 and with my sony mini-dv deck, but it won't recognize the dvx-100a

i had the same problem with an adaptec firewire card where it would recognize the sony stuff but not the panasonic.

matthew

[Paul Leung]

<<<-- Originally posted by Matthew de Jongh : ..my system works fine with a sony trv-19 and with my sony mini-dv deck, but it won't recognize the dvx-100a matthew -->>>

Sound's like a driver problem. Try plug it into other PC with 1934 port.

[Matthew de Jongh]

ok paul, if you shoot footage with your dvx100 in letterbox mode do you use the preset for widescreen or standard?

matthew