Sound card and RT2000

[Rob100]

Hi,

What "purpose" (beyond passing the RT2k's audio through the aux or cd inputs) does the sound card have in an RT2k system? What I mean is that - as it's not used for the actual capture is there any reason to use say a Santa Cruz rather than an AWE64?

Rob.

[Dr Mordrid]

Generically one doesn't always send the audio out through the BOB and the RT-2000's audio doesn't handle system events.

Specifically: when recording to SVHS I find the results are better sending the TBSC's audio to the deck than the RT-2000's BOB stereo jacks. No suprise, it's a very clean sounding card and it provides a very strong and well modulated signal.

Another nice feature of the TBSC is that it can record to a stereo track from several of its inputs at once using the Stereo Mix Record Source setting in its control panel.

The sources can be any combination of versa jack, line in, mic, cd player and mediaplayer. Handy for a quick mix without having to move things to the audio workstation. You just have to make sure you have them balanced properly in the mixer before hitting REC.

Plus; every now and then I like listening to MP3's while editing and they sound great on the TBSC. All I have to do is make sure I don't leave 'em playing when exporting

Terry

[Rob100]

Thanks for the info Doc.

A few more RT2K questions:

1) When capturing Analog video via SVHS input on BOB do you find it best to use DV, DVCPRO or MPEG-2. At the moment I'm using DV, but the RT2K's manual implied (atleast the way I read it) that DVCPRO was better when in "PAL land" which I am. Normally final output will be to VCD/SVCD (using CCE or TMPEG via AviSynth) or VHS.

2) Is there any way to monitor the (analogue) audio levels coming into the RT2K via the BOB? I can't see any way to do this in Premiere. When I use to use AVI_IO (with Marvel/TBSC) I could switch on the VU meters or when using ME/98 could use the TBSC control panel VU's.

3) Is Premiere the only solution for capturing analogue video sources using the RT2K? The Matrox Media Tools only supports 1394 captures.

4) Not that I personally have any IRQ or playback problems (that I know of), but how are your boards arranged in your system (what slots). What I'm really interested in is what device (sound card, network, FT100 etc) does the RT2K's "Multimedia device" and "Serial bus controller" share with on BUS 2.

Thanks in advance.

Rob.

[Dr Mordrid]

1. Go with the manual first and see how it looks.

As far as MPEG goes I frameserve TMPGEnc and get much better results than using the built-in MPEG features. Not unexpected since most times realtime MPEG capture isn't up to the quality of offline encoding.

2. Nope. Don't see any options for doing that here either.

3. As far as I know. There is a slo-mo capture program that can capture analog or DV, but it only does the video track. If you're interested in it here's the URL;

http://paul_martin_1.tripod.com/paul_martin_1/

4. Here 'ya go (PCI's counting from AGP slot);

AGP: G400 Flex
PCI1: RT-2000
PCI2: Linksys LNE100TX NIC
PCI3: Fasttrak TX4 RAID
PCI4:
PCI5:
PCI6: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz

Here's my Win2K IRQ list (running it as Standard PC):



IRQ's 2, 7 and 9 are open.

Note that COM2 is disabled in my system BIOS to free an IRQ in Win9x.

Dr. Mordrid