Marvel G200: beginning to hate it

[Flying dutchman]

I have spent long months of desperate attempts to get my Marvel G200 to
record video in highest PAL resolution. It just wouldn't work reliably
on a K6-300 system. I really tried everything.

I have now completely re-built my computer around my Matrox Marvel.
Threw out of my motherboard, processor and sound card and bought a brand new
Gigabyte BXE board with 64 megs of sdram and a Celeron 466. The hard disk
is an IBM DJNA 15.2 gb, and besides the Marvel there's only a Soundblaster
16 p&p in the board.

I re-formatted the hard disk into two partitions (c=2g, d=13g) and installed
Windows 98 SE, Powerdesk 5.25, videotools 1.51, Avid Cinema and MSPRO 5.2.
I keep the D partition empty for video editing purposes.

I set the swap file to a fixed 128 mb on drive C:, and "vcache" to a fixed
value of 8 mb as recommended by various authors in this newsgroup.

"HD Benchmark" gives me a throughput of 9 mb/sec and ultra DMA 33 busmastering
is working fine.

Guess what? MSPRO STILL WON'T PLAYBACK full-resolution PAL WITHOUT DROPPING
FRAMES. I'm beginning to hate this Marvel. Avid Cinema works more or less
though (I didn't notice any dropped frames here).

It eludes me where the bottleneck might be. I'm using hardware that is a LOT
faster than the stuff that was on the market when the Marvel was first
introduced. Is it the hard disk? Lack of memory? Is the Celeron too slow with
its 66 mhz bus speed? It can't be THAT difficult to sustain a throughput of a
pathetic 3 mb/second!


I'd be grateful for any tips to get it working. I feel like throwing the thing
out of the window so high it'll hit the moon.

[Patrick]

This seems like such a simple question, but do you not have a second hard drive in your system?

I'm definitely NO expert, but everything I've ever read here states that a second hard drive dedicated to video capture is the ONLY way to go. Having a single hard drive partitioned in two will NOT give you the results you want I'm afraid.

[Migou]

Me too i could not playback video without dropped frames...

i tried to use cutlist playback in MSP, but there was always something going wrong...( dropped frames, too long to prepare, delays in audio after 1:30 hours...system errors...)

i found on the forum someone that sugested using DDClip..
i did and wow... it must be the way it's programmed....

i have VERY rare dropped frames while playback..... and there is NO delay between video files..
( i use it with 3 2GB clips created with avi_io... no probl )

The program was designed to add sound tracks to a video... but just use it to playback videos from the time line... ( tip: disable waveform display in options... much faster )

now my tools to import/export vide

o are: Avi_io & DDClip

and i'm satisfied!
http://www.softlab-nsk.com/Pro/DDClip.html

Mig.


[This message has been edited by Migou (edited 23 November 1999).]

[Aryko]

Just curious, but are you talking about video preview here, or are you talking about a movie produced with MSPRO?

I use instant preview and it pretty much drops every other frame, but it's perfectly watchable. Best preview takes a while to pre-render, but it turns out fine.

- Aryko

[Phil Pugh]

Put your hard drives on separate controllers. Have them as the master devices on those controllers, set the CD's to slave.

I have a PII 266MHz 128Mb system running W98 with 6Gb IBM disk with op sys and apps and a MAXTOR 17Gb disk as Video only disk. I have a Creative 24X CD on the primary IDE (as slave) and an HP 7200 CD-RW on the secondary IDE as slave. I don't have any playback / recording problems. I had lots before installing the second disk.

[Elie]

Hi,

The Marvel cards support cutlist playback only if you have Ulead set to "Best Preview".

To get smooth playabck all the effects/transitions have to be rendered first
then cutlist playback can commence smoothly.

I also suggest that in order to playback and record without dropped frames.. you setup a second hard drive ( I recommend the Maxtor Diamond plus 2500, 7200rpm 10 gig drive )
and set it up strictly for video editing.

I don't use any of the above mentioned software like avio or ddclip and I get great results, maybe it's because I have the promise fast track dedicated for capture/playback.


Hope this helped,
Elie

[Guci]

Hai Flying dutchman

I also posted similar topic before that my marvel skipping frame during play back.

I solved this problem by having second hard hardisk on my system. hard disk one for system and 2 for video.

Good luck

[This_Idiot]

Agreed, second HD is the most likely option. But it's a bummer to lay out on that and find that it was something else.

Take a tour through the Tips&Tricks to see of there is anything else that can help you out first !

Just to muddy the waters, I use a pair of drives on IDE1 and my CDs sit on IDE2.

[Flying dutchman]

Ok, I'll try that right away. I also have
two Aptapi cdrom drives as master/slave on the second IDE controller. Since these only support PIO mode, I'd rather keep them separated from the hard drives. Or is it written anywhere that the hard drives must be on separate controllers?

[fluggo99]

And NEVER use MSP to play back to video. It stinks. I use the new Windows Media Player.

[TommyS]

You did not mention the amount of RAM, do you have 128Mb?
I got a lot of problems too with Via chip-set-AMD cpu and 128Mb ram, and i changed to a Pentium III and asus P2B-F 256Mb ram. I now have tree HD one for boot (master first channel), one for data and Swap(slave first), the last for Video (ibm dtta 8Gb master second channel) and i never got problem at any resolution.
Ciao
Sebastiano

[YG]

I have Marvell G200, Celeron 366, Chaintech 6BTM, SB AWE32, HDD WD10+IBM10(video), CDROM + CD-R
Capture by prog SmartCarp - make many files about 2 Gb
Capture to 30 - 40 min - have about 10 drop frams (fortuitous)
Assemble films by Premiere5.1, but make preview (to VHS) by Media Studio Pro 5.2 - it's good and more then 2 Gb
Make MPEG1 by Panasonic Encoder (Video-2048)
for VideoCD - to MS Media Player
I think Marvel - quite good to VHS video.
Question:
Is it important - what size of cluster - 8K or more at video HDD make (FAT32)?
I can make it to 32K
What you think about it?
Yuri
P.S. - I get promise IDE UDMA66 card (30$) and can set 8 IDE drivers at my computer


[This message has been edited by YG (edited 24 November 1999).]

[Marijn]

Hi dutchman,

I've had similar problems on my system when I had only one drive. I was able to playback without problems though, after disabling the virtual memory. 64MB of ram seemed enough to playback from timeline, after I had rendered my entire project. Now that I have a second drive, I don't have to do this anymore.

Keep in mind that when playing from the timeline (preview) that a seperate audiofile is created, that is played from the temporary-files directory.

I wish you good luck,

Marijn

[Phil Pugh]

Flying dutchman:

Have you tried defragging the disk? I had this problem a couple of months ago and a defrag 'recovered' some disk space that seemed (to MSP) to go missing.

[This_Idiot]

FD,

Load up your project into MS and then just hit the "return" button and watch in wonder