Marvel G200: beginning to hate it

[Biker]

Hi Chaps

Just had to say - Marvel G200, AMD333, no DMA hard drives, no write back cache disabled, 128Mb RAM, 1 IDE hard drive, partitioned into 4.

And no skipped frames, yes I use MSP.

Occaisionally I get a 'jump' in the captured video sequence, but not after defrags.

My max transfer rate is only 3.3Mb sec, yet this captures FULL frame highest quality - no probs.

Motherboard is a weird one 'Hot Shuttle', really pleased with it.

What I am saying is your gear was probably OK, but its easy to get just one device that is incompatible in a system.

Best Of luck.

Biker

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[Flying dutchman]

Hi Marijn,

I'm just about to reconfigure my system to using two drives. One question though; what's the easiest way to make MSPRO 5.2 VE output the whole project to tape? I tried to output everything to AVI (the project consisted of two 2-gb AVI files) but it reported "out of disk space" (which is nonsense - I had 9 gb free space). I find MSPRO a very confusing program to use...

[Captain Marvel]

Hi,
this is from the MATROX driver page:
Notes and known issues:
- 1.51 release notes
- Requires display driver 5.30.007
- Not compatible with the Matrox DVD module. Hardware DVD users can use the 1.21 video tools.
I just went through a similar problem, if you read the turkey post and it was the drivers. Capture was reporting no drops but it wouldn't play back.Also you need a newer copy of DirectX, (i'm using DX7 ok)You might also want to try removing all non essential hardware and software if that doesn't work so you can use a process of elimination instead of trying to analyze the whole computer at once.

[Ronald]

Here's what I did to make it work reasonably good. First of all it's no use to make separate partions on you harddisk, I think. It remains one disk, no matter what you do. You need one disk for your system and one disk for your data. I bought was so fedup that I bought a expensive UW2-scsi controller with a 9.1gig scsi-harddisk. This to be sure it was not the speed of my harddisk that was ****ing me up. Well, still frames dropped all over the place. Things changed since I installed Avid and Premiere also on the second(fast) harddisk. No frames dropped anymore. I would try that, even if it's not a scsi harddisk it should speed up things since writing to disk is devided in two.

Good luck.

Ronald

[Flying dutchman]

A second hard disk appears to help a lot. Almost no dropped frames now if the second hard drive is de-fragmented before grabbing video. I had to set the swap file to a fixed size on the first drive for it to work. I grabbed 40 minutes of hi-res PAL video with 19 dropped frames (which is GOOD compared to what I had before!). I have recently downloaded a program called "virtualdub" and I'm very impressed with it. The guy who wrote it deserves a medal.

[finnlysell]

Well this is not a reply, but a contribution to the discussion. I have experienced the same problems and I am using MSP for editing. When I want to 'create' a videotape it seems to me that the only thing working is to hit the enter-button and record the edited movie from the preview pictures. I can not understand what the MSP manual means by create a videofile - I can only do mpeg in resolution 320x200 and not the 704x576 the I need for the european palsystem. If I try to create an microsoft.avi file then the program stops when it discovers that there may be insufficient space on the harddisc. I have 15 GB free on my 25 GB harddisc and if that is not enough then what. I am now waiting for the rendering of the 10 minutes and 56 seconds of my videoproject, this normally takes more than 1 hour. But here is my question:
Does anyone have a guide for using marvel200 for editing video, so that I can see if I use the right settings, right formats for recording, preview settings, interleave etc. etc. It seems to me that so many people that uses Marvel-200 and MSP must have done something of that kind, so If you have one then please let us know. I am sure that I am not the only one.
Regards
Finn Lysell, Denmark

[evil twin]

finnlysell,

two things first there is a manual on the ulead cd go to english/manual/ms5ve.pdf and second you can try http://www.ulead.com/mspro5/resources.htm

evil

[fluggo99]

finnlysell: MPEG? You meant Matrox MJPEG, right? That's the codec that supports all the right rez's.

You can create a video using File->Create->Video..., but for a ten-minute piece it might be best if you stuck with what you're doing, making sure that the preview mode is set to "Best" so you can overcome the 2GB limitation. (Hey, wasn't I just talking about this elsewheres?)

The 2GB limitation might be why you're getting that "insufficient disk space" thing. AVI's are only limited to about 2GB due to limitations in Microsoft's Video for Windows drivers. You can do the trick I gave above to get around it (most of the time). You should check out the "Tips & Tricks" section of This_Idiot's Guide to Desktop Video (one of the "MURC News Affiliates" on the opening screen).

Also, Win98 sometimes gives you faulty reports as to whether your disk space is low, so if you think Win98 is giving you that report, simply ignore it.

[Marijn]

Hi guys,

I would like to add something to what is written overhere. I see that some of you are experiencing problems with playback from timeline, because Ulead says that there is insufficient HD space. I also notice that most of you have a second HD, which has (of course) plenty of storagespace.

My first question is, how much space is left one the first (yes the first) drive? Because, MSP creates seperate files for all the parts that have transitions, titles, video filters etc etc. Apart from that, it creates a separate audio file when playing from the timeline. Within the projectsettings, you can set the locations for these files. If you don't, they just go in the windows temp directory, which is on the C-drive. I have a 50 minute project, that consists out of seven files with only a few transistions, but it has resized my temp directory to more than 800MB!

You may haven't noticed this, and it may not be the case with you, but at least be aware of this...

Happy editing,

Marijn

[Marijn]

Hi Dutchman,

here is an other thought for you. I saw that you now have only 19 lost frames during the capture. Is this when you lock the capture to 25fps? If so, when your source doesn't provide that much frames per second, you will indeed loose some frames. You can check if you still loose the same amount if you don't record with a set number of fps.

Also, if you record from let's say a camcorder, you might have some lost frames at the points where the recorded material on the tape had stopped and started. If you see (with MSP cap) that you loose a frame, rewind the tape, play it again and see if it occurs again at the same point.

19 frames lost may seem a lot, but with 40 minutes...

Happy editing,

Marijn

[Dayspring]

As an idea, but one that's probably not too satisfying, if you already have a new board...

I had a Pentium II 300 and two hard drives on different IDE chains. But still, I could never get satisfying playback (although I could capture with no drops)

I was doing a project that I wanted to look perfect, but I just couldn't get it. Finally, I ended up borrowing a friend's faster computer (350), and it worked flawlessly. So I wondered what the problem was... I figured 50 Mhz couldn't be that much more... but then one thing made sense... rather than the 66 Mhz bus, this was a 100 Mhz bus.

And that's been what's made the difference. I upgraded to a Pentium III 450 with 100 Mhz bus, and everything has been fine since then.

Just from what I understand, the AGP speed is based on your bus speed, and I don't think the 66 Mhz speed is fast enough to reliably decode and output.

This is just a total guess, but it worked for me. I don't have any cool RAID, or FastTrack or anything. Just a Pentium III that's tremendously overloaded with cool gadgets.

[A_BIT]

In addition to many of the good advice in here I would suggest that if you have only 2 hard drives (and they are primaries on separate controlloers of course)I found that for timeline playback it is best to put the video on the second drive, and let MSP generate preview audio files on the system drive. If you have the video and audio files on the same drive, the drive will thrash like crazy during playback. You will wonder when the little bits of metal are going to start flying out the box!

-Anthony

[Flying dutchman]

Hi everyone,

thanks for all the good advise. I now have a Celeron 466 and it works a lot better. I got rid of my old K6 board - it was worthless for video editing. There's nothing as reliable as a BX-type motherboard (Windows 98 at least knows how to enable ultra dma-33!). As for the bus speed, I don't know if 66 MHz (AGP 1/1 * 66) is any worse than 100 MHZ (AGP 2/3 * 100). The celeron 466 is tremendous value for money, so there's some left for a FAST hard drive. I'll wait till after christmas, prices drop like crazy in January. I read some good reviews about Seagate Barracuda drives but it also seems they get rather hot. By the way, has anybody ever succeeded in directly recording video using a different codec than Matrox' own?