Video system recommendations

[John Wray]

I'm considering putting together a new video-editing system. I want to run WinXP, and I'm currently only interested in capturing analog video (although DV will probably be of interest at some stage). My primary goal for this system is conversion of analog video to optical storage (initially CD, although writeable DVD drives are beginning to look affordable now). Print-to-tape isn't a priority. I want to capture with a lossless or only slightly lossy codec, and then convert to a storage format off-line; I'm not interested in real-time MPEG-2 captures (unless there's some real-time MPEG-2 codec around that can compete in quality with off-line compression).

So, I'm looking for recomendations in several areas.

First, a capture card. Although I've used Matrox products for ages (Millennium II/RR-S, Marvel G200, Marvel G400), I'd prefer not to use a Matrox capture card again, after the sudden termination of driver development for the older cards. Is there anything other than the G450 eTV that gives as good quality captures as the Marvel G400? As I said, I don't use print-to-tape, but I do occasionally use the dual-head zoom feature of my G400 - does anyone other than Matrox have anything similar?

Secondly, what's the current thinking on chipsets? My last three systems have used the BX chipset, but I'm looking for a P4 or AMD XP solution.

Third, how about a RAID controller? A year ago, nobody had anything nice to say about the Highpoint controllers. Is this still the case, or have the newer Highpoints (372, 374) improved?

Any other words of wisdom (processors, motherboards, sound-cards, etc)?

John

[dsp]

John Wray,

Here are some thoughts from my very limited insights so far.

1. For capture card you could go the route of capture card and video card being seperate in which case www.hauppauge.com has some interesting products to look at. As for something similar to Zoom both TwinView (Nvidia) and Hydravision(ATI) support it, though I'm not 100% sure about ATi.

2. If you're looking at a P4 I'd still go with an 850 chipset, but with the AMD I'd either go with a Via KT266a or more likely since its a editing machine a AMD 760 based chipset.

3. This I don't know all I know is my highpoint works fine for me (though I haven't stressed it much).

As for motherboards I'd stay with Asus, MSI or Epox for this as I've found them relatively stable. Processors, go with whatever is fastest within your budget they will all do fine.

Sound cards - People here like the Santa Cruz sound card for its low PCI bus usage. The Sound Blaster Audigy might be worth a look as it includes a Firewire port on it.

Hope this helps (at least a bit)

dsp

[Karen St Martin]

John,

I have had quite good success with my Gigabyte 8ITXR board. I use it with a 1.5 GHz P4. It uses the Intel 850 chipset and includes a Promise on-board RAID controller which has worked like a dream from the beginning.

Karen

[Indiana]

1. The KT266 worls fine here for my capturing needs. Intel chipsets may be better, but unfortunately there is no Intel chipset for the Athlon . ALi is reported to be very stable but they're a bit slow, the only SIS board available here is the el-cheapo ECS one and the Planet3DNow forums are full of porblems with it especially when faster Athlons or AthlonXPs are used.

2. Capture card used here is a Hauppauge WinTV as those actually do work in Win2k and it's cheaper in the longer run than having to buy an AIW/Marvel version everytime you upgrade your vidcard (the WinTV has seen 3 different vidcards by now....).
Besides the capture quality of the WinTV is superior to the VideoIN of my RadeonVIVO.

3. You'll most probably need an IDE-RAID (or, of course, a highend SCSI solution) if you're into vidcapturing and want to do non-lossy HuffYUV.
The Promise give slightly higher benchmarks and are reported to be less problematic compatibility-wise. That said I have no problems at all with my HighPoint370 (most users with problems have the older HPT368) based controller in Win2K and in combination with a "feared" VIA chipset (actually the second mainboard, first one was a KT133, the actual is a KT266 one).

[John Wray]

According to Hauppauge's web page, the WinTV series can capture at a maximum frame size of 320x240. Is this right? I currently capture at 640x480, and don't want to lose that ability.

John

[Indiana]

It can capture up to 768x576@25fps (PAL) or 720x480@30fps (NTSC). I don't know why they're stating those lower values on their website, but they already did that when I bought my card.

[dZeus]

when capturing at that res, can you leave on overlay preview? I remember with my Pinnacle PCTV Pro I couldn't (and avoid that card, it's a POS). Having overlay preview would be very nice when capturing

[Indiana]

No, unfortunately the Overlay preview doesn't work at full PAL res (as it is with all BT848/878 based card to my knowledge).
But the unacceptably (in idle mode) stuttering non-overlay preview in VirtualDub suddenly becomes nearly smooth once capturing is started (strange thing I don't know why).

[Brian Ellis]

The Spacewalker Shuttle AB30R may be an option. It is a P4/Intel 82... chipset board with a built in Promise Raid controller (for 2 extra IDE drives) and the usual 2 IDE drives. I have the AB30 (without Raid) for my office computer and it seems very solid. However, it does have 2 disadvantages:
1. the built in sound system is worthless (I added a Creative)
2. the AGP socket will take ONLY AGP4 cards.

[Phil Pugh]

I am just putting together a new video editing system to replace my ageing PII.

I have put together an AMD XP 1600+, MSI KT266Pro2-RU m/b (on-board raid and USB 2.0), 512MB Memory DDRAM. I will be trying a Lucent based OHCI card, even though I have a CANOPUS Raptor in my current set up. I am doing this to see if I have better compatibility with MSP 6.5 and other s/w I want to use (e.g. Scenalyser Live). It's a cheap option (£21UK ~$30).

It has a 10Gb system disk and will have 2*23Gb drives in a RAID 0 config. All these are MAXTOR - long time MAXTOR user - no problems yet (touch wood).

I literally stared putting it togther last night and have got it loaded with Win ME. I will probably go to XP in the new year but I have been using ME for a while on my older system and it was rock solid. Biggest problem was getting the GlobalTek CPU cooler to clip onto the chip/socket! I broke one of my (cheap) screwdrivers trying to do this.

I will use my existing HP 9100 CD re-writer, my very nice (and new) Midiman AudioSport Quattro sound box and a a Pioneer DVD / CD reader to complete the system. DVD writer for next Christmas (if the standards war looks like it has settled down).

If I get time tonight I will load up DirectX8.1 and install the OHCI card, load up MSP 6.5 and see what happens - but probably won't get around to serious use until the week-end.

Just one question. You mentioned you want to do analogue capture with low-loss CODEC and store the info on CD? It's going to take a lot of CD's to save even a shortish video. You get about 3 mins of DV .AVI on a CD-R and you are talking about less compression. DVD-RAM would be better - but it's still a lot of money for blanks (but getting cheaper). I'm a mini-DV user and I archive my video's back to a very cheap Sony D8 camcorder bought for that purpose. Media is cheap, OK it's a bit slow to access! I can then 'recapture' and transcode to SVCD/MPEG2 at a later date.

[John Wray]

Just one question. You mentioned you want to do analogue capture with low-loss CODEC and store the info on CD? It's going to take a lot of CD's to save even a shortish video. You get about 3 mins of DV .AVI on a CD-R and you are talking about less compression. DVD-RAM would be better - but it's still a lot of money for blanks (but getting cheaper). I'm a mini-DV user and I archive my video's back to a very cheap Sony D8 camcorder bought for that purpose. Media is cheap, OK it's a bit slow to access! I can then 'recapture' and transcode to SVCD/MPEG2 at a later date.

No, I didn't mean that I wanted to store uncompressed video on CD-R, just that I prefer to capture uncompressed, then compress it with an off-line compressor for storage (as opposed to using a real-time compressor).

John

[Dr Mordrid]

You guys might want to keep your eyes open for MPEG-2 capture devices & software that will use the new Ligos GoMotion Pro system.

It's supposed to capture realtime MPEG-2 using the 4:2:2P@ML Studio Profile. They're claiming higher video quality than either DigitalS or DVCPRO50, which is nothing to sneeze at.

My guess is that they're also going to target the camcorder silicon market with GoMotion Pro, positioning it as a higher quality alternative to miniDV.

The rub:

Using GoMotion Pro on a computer requires a P4 because of the need for SSE2. SSE2 Athlons might not come until the Hammer core starts working its way down through the product line.

The GoMotion Pro SDK just went out to developers in October, so I would imagine products *could* be here by spring/summer....if we're lucky.

Realtime high-quality software DV codecs & export modules using SSE2 are also in the works.

Dr. Mordrid

[John Wray]

Regarding motherboards & chipsets, it looks like I don't really have that much choice. If I use a P4, it looks like the options are Via P4X, SiS 645, I845 and I850. The I845 will supposedly support DDR early next year, but I doubt that such support will came via a BIOS upgrade (does anyone have any data on this?), so if I buy an I845 system now, I'll only be able to use standard SDRAM with it. I'm not inclined to trust SiS or Via. So I guess my preference would be for an I850 chipset, with I845 as a second choice if I buy today, or if I wait a month or so, probably a DDR I845 system...

The Shuttle AB30R that Brian mentioned is a possibility (I845 with Promise RAID), and Shuttle has also pre-announced the AB40R - the DDR-capable version of the AB30R. Brian - you said the on-board audio is worthless - are you talking about the AC97 audio, or the optional C-Media 8738 audio?

I looked at the Gigabyte 8ITXR that Karen recommended, which also looks promising (no pun intended).

Is there any downside to an integrated RAID controller over an add-in PCI card? The only issue I can think of is that controller BIOS upgrades presumably have to go via the motherboard manufacturer for an integrated controller. How are Shuttle and Gigabyte for support (e.g. BIOS releases)?


Are the Hauppauge cards really up to capture use? They seem to be positioned for TV-in-a-window use, with capture being almost an after-thought. Can anyone comment how the capture quality compares with a Marvel G400? Do they have any peculiarities (like e.g. the Marvel's flaky Macrovision detection)?

John

[Dr Mordrid]

The on-board RAID controllers (as goes for most other on-board devices) are IMHO trouble looking for a place to happen.

Theoretically you can disable them if they fail and use a PCI replacement, but those that I've tried have often taken out other capabilities on the mainboard when they die. Also, most on-board RAID controllers are using the HighPoint chipsets.

I wouldn't use a HighPoint chipset on a bet. The current ones seem to have a problem with their striped arrays failing after a short while, which is not good. I much prefer the Promise chipsets, and even then would prefer not using an embedded one.

Another reason for a PCI card: you can upgrade it. I recently pulled a couple of Promise Fasttrak100's and replaced them with TX4's to get the speed boost on a 4 drive array. Can't do that with most embedded controllers and feel confident of sucess.

As for the Hauppage WinTV cards: they do provide a very nice tuner AND excellent video capture capability. Their only weakness is that they provide no video output.

This is best handled by a Matrox G450 (available as a PCI or AGP) using its dualhead/DVDMAX feature because of it providing composite, S-Video and the ability to output about ANY codec to its outputs. Because of it being available as a PCI card you can also use a G450 as a secondary display adapter to a faster 3D gaming card.

Other display cards with high quality vidouts & S-Video connects are also about. They just aren't as good as the G-450's DVDMAX mode when it comes to exporting edited video.

Dr. Mordrid

[John Wray]

Dr Mordrid:

This is best handled by a Matrox G450 (available as a PCI or AGP) using its dualhead/DVDMAX feature because of it providing composite, S-Video and the ability to output about ANY codec to its outputs. Because of it being available as a PCI card you can also use a G450 as a secondary display adapter to a faster 3D gaming card.

3D performance isn't important to me, so if I used a Matrox video card, I'd use it as a primary display. Given that, is there any reason to prefer the 450 over the 550? The 550 seems to give DVI support for the primary monitor, which I don't think the 450 does.

John