AGP G200 Marvel tape out color shift.

[wkulecz]

Is it just me or is the Marvel G200 output to tape incapable of displaying yellow?

It seems my PCI card was defective. I won't bore y'all with the details of what I consider very poor tech support from Matrox. Bottom line I ultimately got them to replace my PCI version with the AGP version (PCI was still "out of stock" and they'd had my card a bit over a month, I'd heard nothing from them).

Installed PD 4.26 and vidtools 1.21. Everything worked and haven't had a lick of trouble. Finally started trying to actually do some "real" editing and I noticed a horrible color shift on the tape out.

I'm aware that NTSC got the moniker "Never The Same Color" for a reason, but the video captured with PC-VCR and played back on my computer display with Media Player is a very good match to the output from my D8 camcorder directly feeding my JVC NTSC monitor. The Marvel "TV out" displayed on the monitor is awful. Tweaking the TV out sliders in MatroxProperties->Advanced->TVout didn't help much.

I uninstalled 4.26 and installed 4.33. The slider adjustments got closer, but yellows are nowhere near right.

My question is: does the PD5.30 and VT 1.51 set address/improve the TVout color balance situation? Did matrox send me one of the old "green tinge" or otherwise defective AGP card as a replacement? (still more stellar tech "support").

I'm asking because I've no more time to waste on the Marvel, If the "new" drivers don't address this problem, I'll junk the Marvel and get a Raptor and be done with it. I've got better things to do than waste more time searhing the registry etc. as shown in the PD5.xx installation instructions just to try the drivers "to see if they work".

Its possible the PCI card also had this problem, but what little I was able to do with it seemed to have good color balance on the two VHS sample tapes I made without having to touch the TVout sliders, although the source material didn't have any strong yellow in it.

--wally.

[fluggo99]

Mine displays yellow fine. Have you tried setting your TV Out sliders to the specs at the bottom of the PowerDesk readme file?

Also, try calibrating your TV to the Matrox card. <a href="http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/002210.html">This topic</a> has info about that.

[wkulecz]

Fluggo, did you read what I wrote at all?
Are you looing for a job with Matrox tech support? All they could do is tell me I should try what I'd already done and mentioned in my Email.

The TVout sliders cannot be set for decent output. Bad as it is the default "NTSC settings" are about as good as it gets in general.

As to the settings suggested in PD readme
jacking the Brightness from 100 to 180, Contrast from 100 to 234, Saturation from 90 to 137, and leaving Hue at the default of 0
has surprisingly little net effect. Yellows are decent but reds are not there at all, they turn an almost Halloween orange.

None of the colors on TVout are really very close to right. The yellows were immediately obvious, but reds turn mostly orange if I fix the yellows. Now that I've looked as some other source material, Its clear the TVout on the PCI card I returned was buch better than this when it worked (it kept turning into a RR-G and refused to do anything because "other video hardware was in use").

The colors on my computer monitor when video is captured and displayed on the computer screen during playback are a good match to the colors on the NTSC monitor when its displaying camcorder output directly.

But when playing back the captured MJPEG the colors on the TVoutput are horrid, while the computer display is about as good as could be expected with NTSC.

Looks like the Idiots at Matrox replaced one defective card with another defective card.

If Haig really is a Honcho at Matrox, things need shaking up over there. I'm disgusted.

--wally.

[wkulecz]

More Data.

Just for grins I recorded the TVout on my VHS
and then captured it back into MJPEG at the highest quality settings.

Now the TVout on the NTSC monitor is a pretty good match to the video window on the computer display -- since all the reds are gone. Looking closely at the computer video, what little red remained in the capture from VHS is clearly orange when
viewed on the NTSC monitor thru TVout.

The quality loss of capturing from VHS as opposed to D8 is plain, but not important here.

Recording the D8 directly on VHS yields about as good as VHS can look and the VHS playback colors on the NTSC monitor are as close to the D8 played back on the NTSC monitor as I could reasonably expect. Reds are red, not orange, yellows are yellow not orange-yellow.

It seems my initial observation focused on the yellows which I obviously noticed because I knew my subject was yellow. It happened there was little red in this initial material. So on further examination either the TVout color error has drifted with time, or the real problem is reds turn into orange, other colors are a little "off" but generally within what I expect from NTSC.

Looks like I need to hassle with another Matrox RMA.

Haig, you gotta a name or phrase I can drop to get them to turn this around it less than five weeks this time?

--wally.

[fluggo99]

For your info, I have plenty of friends that splurt out terms as if they know what they're talking about but are still clueless; replacing PCI with AGP and getting their SGRAM upgraded to a BIOS something-or-other and changing their mind every half second as to which motherboard is best for Microsoft Word.

I was simply trying to give some insight into fixing the problem with a card plenty of other people are using without difficulty, but if you're actually willing to trash what you have and get a new system every week like my friend above, be my guest. Go spend.