Parhelia and editing.....

[Dr Mordrid]

Been running a Parhelia 128 meg on my main editing system for a while. Here are my impressions;

1. Triplehead is cool. Imagine a timeline spread across 3 monitors using a 3840x1024 display

2. its dualhead/DVDMAX output is much improved. Pretty.

3. its visual qualty has to be seen to be believed. Gawd....

4. if you have a Matrox RT-2500 system you should really consider this thing. You have to see it to believe it.

5. the GigaColor utility allows editing 10bpp TIFF's in Photoshop. 'nuff said.

6. ColorReal has presets for about every kind of config you could want ranging from 3500k to 9300k to a special preset for Quake

and more, and more.....

Dr. Mordrid

[Electric Amish]

Cool!

Maybe there'll be an RT based on this chip?

amish

[AndrewDV]

Ah! This is the stuff I want to hear!

All other aspects aside, can you hook up this card to a TV only? In other words, there are no monitors, just a single TV.

It may sound silly, but I would appreciate it if anyone can answer that. The last Matrox card I have that could do that is the G400.

Thanks

[Dr Mordrid]

I actually haven't tried it in that configuration (who would? ) but I could give it a try and see what happens. I'll let you know....

As far as an RT card based on Parhelia goes, who knows? IMHO its a great idea given the quality of its output.

Dr. Mordrid

[davpen]

Just been over at the AnandTech site. They have a card for testing which is under NDA to the 25th of June. Matrox has told them that the rest of us should be able to buy cards about then.

At long last a replacement for my G400MAX!

[Fred H]

The Cost of Doing Business

Read this:

http://hardware.earthweb.com/main/article/0,,12108_1141071,00.html

Cheers!

Fred H

[Brian Ellis]

Fred

450 bucks? You can buy one and a half whole computer systems from Walmart for that!

If you want 3 screens (or 4), there are choices available for less than half that without all the bells and whistles that videographers would never have need of.

"...users with longer memories will remember the lamentable Matrox Mystique (codenamed Mistake) and the 3D wrappers sent out with the initial G400 launch. Even in those days of far lower consumer expectations, Matrox still got taken to the rack for unsatisfactory drivers. ... There are certainly those who are overly optimistic about the Parhelia-512 performance, just as there are many who never forget past driver transgressions."

I wonder who will be the first to complain about the Parhelia drivers? I, for one, have almost zero confidence in Matrox' ability to write drivers that will work in all circumstances and their total s'en foutisme when anyone has difficulties with their apologies of drivers (for those whose French is not up to translating this semi-obscenity, the best I can do is to say that it is roughly, "hard luck, mate, f..k off and don't bother me"). I've had my fingers burnt twice and I can promise Matrox that there won't be a third time, even if they give Parhelia 512 away free with a packet of corn flakes.

[Dr Mordrid]

$399 is the official retail price but OEM boards will be available contrary to that articles supposition. They will be cheaper, if slightly slower clocked. Even the slower clocked boards should be fine for editing systems.

Brian: you're making suppositions that will bite you back. If you ignore its capabilities the loss will end up being yours.

I actually have one and have used it to edit with several platforms ranging from plain-Jane IEEE-1394 DV and beyond to platforms you haven't even heard of yet. I'd NEVER go back to another card on an editing system given the choice and plan on buying several eventually.

The advanced features are NOT superfluous to editing at all and are very much in line for being the basis of an excellent multimedia authoring system. For starters triplehead timelines are very handy. Works in MSPro and Premiere, but I'd be willing to bet that Avid and others will work as well.

The OpenGL support is NOTHING like the G cards. It's been totally re-created from scratch by someone that knows how and is quite fast enough for doing 3D work in high end programs. I would suspect strongly that over time it will become even better.

The 2D can be set to 10 bpp and a plugin allows Photoshop to edit pictures in that pixel depth. This same plugin also acts as a system viewer for 10bpp graphics. Other plugins, including one for 3D Studio MAX, are on the way.

The card also does overlay on all three outputs; the primary and secondary are hardware and the tertiary is software, but all 3 are so fast that it's a distinction without a difference. This means the preview window of editing software can be on any display.

The video out circuits also do 10 bpp graphics right up to the output stage for highest accuracy. This part is just too nice and the output is beautiful. Call it DVDMAX on steroids.

As for drivers: that had to be written by someone who never had an ATI display or capture device. Talk about lame drivers :-P

Dr. Mordrid

[miya]

I was very excited about the possiblitlies of Parhelia, until I found out that it will not support two VGAs and one TV at the same time (according to Haig.) I think Matrox really dropped the ball on this one. DualHead + DVDMax at the same time would be great for editing, but triplehead (3 VGAs) is just overkill for anything but gaming. For now, I will be sticking to my G400Max + G200 combo, which gives me exactly what I need.

[dchip]

I like the sound of Parhelia but also the Maxtrox G550 Dual DVI.

As for triple head with two monitors and one TV, I have no use for that, because the TV OUT would still be some type of SVGA going into the TV which does not give me the NTSC preview of my video that I need, so I don't mind going back through the camcorder and then to the TV for that. I am assuming I am right Of course it's possible to have a third monitor that is an NTSC type. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about what a VGA signal going into a TV looks like.

I'm not sure if Parhelia would be overkill for video editing. Might be a a real useful card because of the super quality output, but it does appear to be a card designed for creating the ultimate gaming experience. Time will tell.

[AndrewDV]

Hi Doc,

Did you get a chance to see if the Parheila can be connect to a single TV only (again, no monitor, just a SVideo hookup)? I have had to do setups like this in the past for various clients.

Also, just for fun, how is the DVD playback? How are the progressive scan capabilities?

Thanks

[miya]

dchip: That is what I'm talking about, two VGA monitors and one NTSC. This is the setup I currently have with my G400 (vga #1 and NTSC) and G200 (vga #2) and it looks beautiful outputing my Avid composer window to the NTSC. The Parhelia will not support this configuration with its 3 outputs.

[Fred H]

Questions, questions and Q.
Keep it cool.
How many (%%%%%) of us will pay 399$ (sorry it was not me, who said 450$) for this card?
Who will trust Matrox after the Marvel G400 drivers story?
Not me.
Who is the target market for Parhelia?
Not me.

...and, Brian E. you are right. I agree with you

Fred H

[Ant]

Whooever wrote this doesn't really know what they are talking about. The G400 shipped with OpenGL drivers it was the G200 that had the wrappers.

Up until the G200 OpenGL fiasco Matrox were well known for having by far the best driver support around. Their restructuring around the time of the G200 saw things take a nose dive. The OpenGL fiasco was brought about by them farming out its development to the lowest bidder who couldn't produce the goods. Their in house drivers remained high quality. But then again recently cut backs and budgetry restraints saw a decline in the development of the video tools for the RR-G and Marvels as these were proving not to be financially viable products for Matrox to produce and support.

As far as the Parhelia goes the majority of the talk around about it's "performance" is still gaming-centric which unfortunately still dominates how a video card is judged these days, if it can't do 200fps in Quake 2 at 1600x1200 then its obviously a useless piece of junk. Thankfully the audience in these forums is a lot more educated and mature to fall for that.

Originally posted by Brian Ellis

"...users with longer memories will remember the lamentable Matrox Mystique (codenamed Mistake) and the 3D wrappers sent out with the initial G400 launch. Even in those days of far lower consumer expectations, Matrox still got taken to the rack for unsatisfactory drivers. ... There are certainly those who are overly optimistic about the Parhelia-512 performance, just as there are many who never forget past driver transgressions."

[Elie]

Originally posted by AndrewDV
Hi Doc,

Did you get a chance to see if the Parheila can be connect to a single TV only (again, no monitor, just a SVideo hookup)? I have had to do setups like this in the past for various clients.

Also, just for fun, how is the DVD playback? How are the progressive scan capabilities?

Thanks

You can connect a TV only to a Parhelia providing you hook up a monitor, and then setup the dual head for monitor and TV, then set dual head mode to clone.

The next time you reboot, you simply disconnect the monitor and leave the TV connected.

Regards,
Elie