Video capture/editing hardware

BogoSort · Post by **BogoSort** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 8:57 pm

So I'm finding myself with plans to do an increasingly large number of video editing projects(many of them, amazingly enough, not amvs). i was wondering if any of you have experience with RT editing cards such as the Canopus DV Storm or the Matrix RT.X10 or RT.X100. Having done a bit of research, they both look to be quality products, however most articles about them tend to have bias one way or the other. Anyone actually use one of these products with sources ripped from DVD/have any comments about them otherwise?

dwchang · Post by **dwchang** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 2:36 am

BogoSort wrote:So I'm finding myself with plans to do an increasingly large number of video editing projects(many of them, amazingly enough, not amvs). i was wondering if any of you have experience with RT editing cards such as the Canopus DV Storm or the Matrix RT.X10 or RT.X100. Having done a bit of research, they both look to be quality products, however most articles about them tend to have bias one way or the other. Anyone actually use one of these products with sources ripped from DVD/have any comments about them otherwise?

Now I've only used one of these products, but I can give *some* information on the RT.X10. It was the card I had the pleasure of using for Iron Chef Anime Central.

Now you talked about DVDs and such, but I had to use DV footage that was captured, so I'm not sure how relevant this post will be to your needs.

Anyway, with DV footage, the card is marvelous. I was able to edit in realtime and preview everything on the fly. Even some of the "simple" effects and transitions could be previewed in realtime. Things like Cross-dissolve (my friend) and transparency settings. These are all fairly fundamental and it's a lot easier than rendering or the "ALT-scroll" method.

Again, unfortunately, I have no idea how the thing works with DVD footage and the AVS methods listed in the guides, but hopefully something in here is useful. If it can't do what you need, I don't know about paying the hefty price on it (b/c it's REALLY expensive).

Good luck with the purchase!

BogoSort · Post by **BogoSort** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 10:05 am

I suppose with one of these cards, one could just take DVD rips and convert them to DV and then do all of your editing in that. With the DV codecs on those, it should be really fast to do the conversion. It just has the drawback of being lower quality from the conversion, but from what I've seen through the (admitedly biased) articles, they look pretty reasonable.

Part of the motivation is that I'm probably going to be picking up a quality video capture device, such as the Canopus ADVC100, and thus a card like these would only be a couple hundred bucks more. Then again, part of the worry is that such a card would be obselete(or be pwned by driver issues) in a couple of months. I'm just seeing all of those DV500 owners who have just tossed them because they didn't scale with the computer speeds, and Pinnacle being nazis and forcing people to use their Software.

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 12:41 pm

Matrox seems to be fully behind Premiere and After Effects, you can ask Vlad about his experiences with his RT-whatever # he has. I'm stuck with my DV500 for now, but because none of these cards support using MPEG2 source properly, it's realtime capabilities have been moot for quite a while now. I only use it as a means to view my videos on an NTSC monitor.

TaranT · Post by **TaranT** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 12:57 pm

BogoSort wrote:I suppose with one of these cards, one could just take DVD rips and convert them to DV and then do all of your editing in that. With the DV codecs on those, it should be really fast to do the conversion. It just has the drawback of being lower quality from the conversion, but from what I've seen through the (admitedly biased) articles, they look pretty reasonable.

Some of us work exclusively with DV footage. Theoretically, the video quality is lower, but I'm not sure many people can notice the difference.

Part of the motivation is that I'm probably going to be picking up a quality video capture device, such as the Canopus ADVC100, and thus a card like these would only be a couple hundred bucks more. Then again, part of the worry is that such a card would be obselete(or be pwned by driver issues) in a couple of months. I'm just seeing all of those DV500 owners who have just tossed them because they didn't scale with the computer speeds, and Pinnacle being nazis and forcing people to use their Software.

I've been thinking about one of these Canopus devices, too, just to get my camcorder out of the capturing loop. (Either Canopus, or one that other companies are selling; e.g. ADS Tech.) But I'm not looking at a real-time card. Vegas is pretty good with real-time previewing: crossfades, opacity changes, simple effects are all previewed at or near the project framerate.

dwchang · Post by **dwchang** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 1:06 pm

BogoSort wrote:I suppose with one of these cards, one could just take DVD rips and convert them to DV and then do all of your editing in that. With the DV codecs on those, it should be really fast to do the conversion. It just has the drawback of being lower quality from the conversion, but from what I've seen through the (admitedly biased) articles, they look pretty reasonable.

Yup, that would be my suggestion. I guess I can't ultimately give you an answer since all my footage was already captured (for Iron Chef) and thus I can't compare the quality loss. Uhm..my MPEG-2 of my iron chef looks pretty good so I guess not much loss *shrug*.

Anyway, tell me how it works out. I've also thought about buying a card.

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 1:09 pm

Converting massive amounts of clips to DV is slow and cumbersome. And it eats up lotsa space. If I'm going to do clip conversions, I'd rather convert them to Huffyuv and keep it lossless.

BogoSort · Post by **BogoSort** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 2:23 pm

ErMaC wrote:Matrox seems to be fully behind Premiere and After Effects, you can ask Vlad about his experiences with his RT-whatever # he has. I'm stuck with my DV500 for now, but because none of these cards support using MPEG2 source properly, it's realtime capabilities have been moot for quite a while now. I only use it as a means to view my videos on an NTSC monitor.

I shall have to make a note to poke Vlad about his choices regarding these. I seem to remember that the Matrox RT.X100 has realtime mpeg2 capture and exporting. Not sure if that will allow you to use those files for editing too. Part of the motivation of the Matrox X series is that they partially use the computer's CPU for such effects in addition to the hardware on the card. Thus making additional functionality a driver update away, and thus way more scalable as computing speeds increase. The question is if this stuff is better than say just buying a new blazing fast computer.

TaranT wrote:Some of us work exclusively with DV footage. Theoretically, the video quality is lower, but I'm not sure many people can notice the difference.
I've been thinking about one of these Canopus devices, too, just to get my camcorder out of the capturing loop. (Either Canopus, or one that other companies are selling; e.g. ADS Tech.) But I'm not looking at a real-time card. Vegas is pretty good with real-time previewing: crossfades, opacity changes, simple effects are all previewed at or near the project framerate.

If I don't wind up getting this card, I'd wind up getting one of these Canopus boards for capturing. I've done a bit of video capture, and all of my gripes about them seem to be be addressed in this product. The reviews for it are also overwhelmingly in support of the awesomeness of this Canopus product too.

d-dubya wrote:Anyway, with DV footage, the card is marvelous. I was able to edit in realtime and preview everything on the fly. Even some of the "simple" effects and transitions could be previewed in realtime. Things like Cross-dissolve (my friend) and transparency settings. These are all fairly fundamental and it's a lot easier than rendering or the "ALT-scroll" method.

This is more what I was curious about. There'd be no point in spending money on one of these cards if you weren't going to take advantage of their ability to edit and preview everything in realtime. If I can get something that gives me a much better editing flow, I'd be very happy with it.

d-dubya wrote:Again, unfortunately, I have no idea how the thing works with DVD footage and the AVS methods listed in the guides, but hopefully something in here is useful. If it can't do what you need, I don't know about paying the hefty price on it (b/c it's REALLY expensive).

Well the AVS methods and whatnot can be used presumably to convert everything to DV. Since it'd all be hardware accelerated you could do it in realtime(granted realtime still means like 13 hours for a full 26 episode show), but that's negligable to the hundreds of hours spent on a single video.

ErMaC wrote:Converting massive amounts of clips to DV is slow and cumbersome. And it eats up lotsa space. If I'm going to do clip conversions, I'd rather convert them to Huffyuv and keep it lossless.

Currently I convert everything to Huffy, but it winds up taking up way too much HD space(maybe what I really should be doing is investing in hard drives). DV quality is good enough, and if really desired one could presumably use AVS files for rendering the final output.

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 2:34 pm

The thing is, in order to do AVS replacement, you'd have to convert the ENTIRE contents of a D2V file over into DV, and work with that, which is insane. Just 2 hours worth of DV is like 24 GB, and if you're working with, say, a 26 episode series, you can forget it. I ain't make 125GB worth of clips just to edit with, and then you still have to keep the VOBs around to convert back to.
Unless you made lots of little AVS files for every single clip you wanted to then make a DV clip of, and that's just insane and a waste of time.

What I do when I use Premiere (which I haven't lately, all AE baby) is simply have all my source in AVS files, and dump them on the timeline. But I then render all my previews as DV and use the DV500's Tv-out so I can watch things on my monitor. The cardi tself accellerates the DV encoding, so it doesn't take much CPU, it only takes a long time when I'm compositing several AVS files at once.

If you want to be able to just edit realtime from your VOBs, get a card that'll read MPEG2 streams and do it that way, don't go converting everything to DV.

And BTW, DV is really not optimal for animation. Because of it's color sampling, it's much better for live action than it is for animation, which makes sense since the format's supposed to be for shooting live video with. With animation it can cause a lot of nasty color stepping. I wouldn't want to go through more than 1 DV recompression, otherwise you introduce nasty color artifacts. The master of Soul of an Angel always needs filtering because the reds bleed all over the place and look like crap because it went through DV recompression like 3 times.

BogoSort · Post by **BogoSort** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 2:46 pm

Right, my point was that if one really wanted to get every single bit of quality out of the source footage possible, one could presumably still do that. What I was more concerned about is editing flow. If you save half the time in the rendering of previews, you've massively increased the amount of work that you can do while editing. Actually, yes my current video editing method involves picking through the AVS file and exporting lots of little Huffy files of the clips that I see potential in using.

Since you mention cards that will read mpeg2 streams, do you have any suggestions for ones worth looking at?

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Video capture/editing hardware

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