G200 Marvel and Win2K?

[KRSESQ]

Greetings all.

Just installed Windows 2000 with service pack 2 on my rig and installed Powerdesk 5.37 and the leaked Vid Tools. Video Tools seems to capture all right (still testing...haven't tried AVI-IO yet).

Just wondering if anyone has managed to get the TV out function to work without enabling the Display On TV? What's the trick? Or is everyone just using it for DVD creation (probably my next step)?

Gotta keep this thing going until I can afford a RT2500. Hopefully the price will start dropping in the near future (fingers crossed).

I have to admit that so far, W2K is pretty sweet. Response time is much faster than Win98. Never had much of a crashing problem to begin with, so can't really gauge stability yet.

1200 Athlon
Abit KT7A
TBSC
3Com PCI network card

Pulled the Promise and dual 30 gigs and replaced it all with one 80 gig ATA100, 7200 rpm Maxtor on IDE 2. Benchmarks are more than adequate for my needs.

Kevin

[KRSESQ]

Guess that answers THAT question!

Kevin

[wkulecz]

Yup,

Moved to W2K, had to junk my G200 Marvel and switched to DV "captures" and output back to tape over 1394 using Canopus ADVC-100 and never looked back.

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

I agree approximately 1023.5% with Wally. I went the same way, except that I was also lucky enough to add a DVCAM tape deck to my computer, so that I can import DV tapes from the latter, analogue tapes from the ADVC-100, export either to the DVCAM deck in DV format or, if I need a VHS tape (has happened once since I upgraded) or preview a project on a TV screen, I can record/view that through the ADVC.

I find capture quality via the DV route is very marginally better than the best quality PAL hardware G-200 MJPEG capture under W98SE for most scenes. There may be slightly more artifacts with rapid pans or moving objects, though, but this is a subjective appreciation. Analogue output quality via the ADVC is streets ahead of the Marvel, which was rather weak. I can capture a VHS into DV and then re-record it back to VHS with almost no quality loss and I could never say the same with Marvel. AND it all works with zero hassle under W2k. I've even tried (experimentally) mattes with the captured DV with no problems, but I'm in PAL-land, where the DV colour-depth is not the same as in NTSC-land.

It is also possible to seamlessly edit DV and analogue tapes into the same project (NB the quality difference IS visible!), as they are both captured in the same format.

Oh! and I've never had a single dropped frame/glitch from my own tapes since I went along this path (I was unable to capture well from one commercial tape with Macro protection because the tape was hopelessly stretched, with audible wow which was bad enough to make its music almost unlistenable: other protected tapes, no drops/glitches in making a 2 hour DV file!).

IMHO, this is one of the current best, low-cost, ways to go for analogue I/O, especially for W2k (and presumably XP, but I'm avoiding that like the plague it is).