mavel g400 looks incredible!!!

[inperson]

Ive downloaded your mpegs and all I can say is superb! I cant believe I almost bought an All-Is-Under. Im definately placing an order asap. Im trying to put together an amateur demo reel for school on vhs and I do have just a few questions which should be pretty easy.

1. Does the marvel capture audio? (my sound card kinda sux.)

2. Im going to get a new hard drive. What kind of transfer rates does my hard drive require to get at least good vhs quality video? My mobo only supports ata33, will a dedicated 33 be able capture good quality?

[DrMordrid]

The Matrox vidcap cards all capture the audio off your audio card so it may be a good time to upgrade ;-)

IMHO the best way to go is to get an old ISA AWE64. It has the necessary four connectors (line in, line out, spkr and mic) and works very well as long as you turn off reverb and the other F/X before working on videos.

PCI audio cards, at this point, are still a crap shoot. Some work great, most don't.

As far as disk reqirements go, what you need depends on what capture formats you plan to use and what length of project you expect to be doing.

For short project of an hour or less using MJPeg a 17g ATA33 drive is plenty. Maxtor makes one that's perfect for this. IBM's ATA33 Deskstar drives are also excellent.

If, on the other hand, your expectations run to the power end you will need more capacity and speed. A two hour project length screams for a 28-30 gig storage system just using MJPeg.

Complicating this the Marvel and RR-G also have two other capture modes, RGB and YUY2;

RGB can be done through the standard PC-VCR program. These files are basically uncompressed and are very high quality.

YUY2 is only available through Microsoft's VidCap, Uleads VCapture and Markus Zinng's AVI_IO capture programs. With some driver versions you also have to do a registry hack to activate it.

Both require high data rates at their highest resolutions; 20 megs/sec for 704x480 YUY2 and 27 megs/second for 640x480 RGB. They are therefore only for those with RAID arrays. Big ones.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by DrMordrid (edited 23 October 1999).]