G450 etv. Can anyone recommend it?

[uktechno]

I am thinking of buying the G450 etv for transferring video off my uk analog- Sony Handycam Video8 CCD-tr401e PAL, and transferring back onto both cd rom, and USA standard video tape (I am moving to USA soon). I also want it to transfer my uk VCR tapes onto cd rom, so i can convert them onto USA standard video tape when i move there.
Is the quality of this capture card good enough to have a final full screen video with near-same quality after editing it? Will the uk VCR tape come out nearly as well?
I have an Intel Pentium 2 with a 350mhz processor, 128mb pc100 ram, and 4 gb spare hd.
Is this the ideal card for the job? I heard that the G400 is better quality for capture, but the G450 etv has more features.
Thankyou

[Hulk]

I have one and like it. The capture quality is good, probably not good enough for your application. I like it because the TV Out is great and I like to check on TV every now and then.

[uktechno]

Do you use it to capture video off an analog camcorder? Or just to watch tv?
Thanks

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes, you can capture analog from either composite or S-Video connects. It also has composite/S-Video outputs.

It's drivers also expose the YUY2 interface so you can use AVI_IO to capture using sofrtware codecs like PicVideo/Morgan MJPeg etc. It can also capture MPEG-1/2 through Uleads MPEG capture plugin as found in MediaStudio, VideoStudio etc.

Since it's also a G450 display adapter you can also use its DualHead/DVDMAX mode to export to the outputs video of about any format MediaPlayer can play. This means DV, DVD video, MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, PicVideo or Morgan MJPeg, DivX, Windows Media, Cinepak, Indeo etc. etc. etc.

It has settings for both field (interlaced) and frame based scaling on playback, which you use according to the source.

Using the DivX Playa and with frame based DVDMAX enabled I can even export 16:9 movies from Kazaa straight to a TV or VCR for recording, even if they are at 10, 12 or 15 fps, with better than expected quality considering the frame rate. DVDMAX letterboxes them automatically.

Dr. Mordrid

[uktechno]

Thanks. I will probably buy the G450 etv, unless someone can recommend a better quality one for the price (£170 uk)
Thanks

[Brian Ellis]

With such a computer, I fear you will have enormous problems capturing at reasonable quality (drop-outs, loss of synch etc.). You certainly do not have nearly enough hard disk for more than a few minutes via the Marvel. Sorry to be pessimistic, but you are doomed to failure with that set-up.

The best you could possibly do, IMHO, other than to find a much more suitable computer, is to go the DV road via an analogue>DV bridge. I recommend the Canopus ADVC-100 (two way) as being probably the best. Even so, you could capture only 15 or 20 minutes, assuming the transfer to your hard drive is fast enough, and you would have no space left over for editing.

Sorry

[uktechno]

I told the guy at the computer outlet what my system was, he said it would just take longer to do the processing, but quality would be good. I would only be doing 10 or 15 minute segments at a time, and also i will be upgrading my pc to a p3 or p4 when i move to the usa. Do you think i would encounter problems even doing small segments like that?
Thanks

[uktechno]

I just deleted some stuff, and i have 5 gig hard drive space now. I must also say, i dont wish to do any editing if possible, just straight in to the pc, and straight out to video tape/cd rom.
Thanks

[Brian Ellis]

I wouldn't put any money on it working: it's a load of codswallop what your guy said. You have to capture in real time as your source video isn't going to wait for your system to catch up. If you have a 15 minute clip to capture, it will take 15 minutes, neither more nor less, and if your system cannot cope to do it in that time, then it's hard cheese, much harder than cheddar.

Also, you imply that you have only a single hard drive. This is decidedly NOT good. You should have a secondary master hard drive of at least a minimum recommended 60 Gb, preferably more. Your system probably does not support any acceleration other than DMA, so DV is probably your only choice with a reasonable chance of success. With this, an IEEE-1394 card costing £30-odd (bundled with Video Studio capture/editing software) and an analogue<>DV bridge, I would say you have at least a 95% chance of success from the very start, on condition that your O/S is either win98SE or 2000. If the former, you will have to split the capture into ~9 minute segments, but the latter, set up for NTFS, does not have this limitation.

If you insist on the Matrox card, I'd guess that you will need a minimum of two identical hard drives, reserved for the video, set up in a Raid 0 array. I believe that this is the only way you would have any chance whatsoever of approaching success and I won't guarantee that, either. A PII/350 is, by IT standards, dinosaurian (6 or 7 years old?) and when that was made, PC video hardly even existed (I had a Genoa titling card on a see-through analogue video system, at that time).

If you wish to go straight in and out to a tape (VHS?), why do you need a computer anyway? Whether you will be able to burn VCDs with your present set-up is also doubtful, as well. If the image file on your hard disk cannot be sent to your CD burner fast enough, you may be able to start a coaster factory, but not a movie one, especially if your burner is of the same age as your CPU.

Also, I don't wish to sound naive, but how do you propose converting PAL at 720 or 704 x 576 pixels, 25 fps, to NTSC at 720 or 704 x 480 at 29.95 fps? To do this even half-decently, you need some quite specialised equipment.

I would seriously suggest that you don't waste your money and time. Wait until you get to the States and buy a state-of-the-art computer, geared to do serious video work but take your tapes and a PAL tape deck with you. You'll buy everything far cheaper, there, if you shop around, especially PAL/NTSC converters.

Otherwise, you'll be spending several hundred quid with possibly nothing reasonable to show for it in the end. (Except maybe a stomach ulcer)

[landrover]

Here's the C***-word again!!

But Brian is right. You'll probably be disappointed. The G450eTV is a good card, but you CPU lacks the power to capture full frame video (I even doubt if it will capture CIF without problems), since the card's capture features are software based and therefore processor-dependant.
First upgrade your system, then get a capture card. For what you intend to do, it doesn't even have to be a Marvel. Modern PCI add-on TV and capture cards (Leadtek, Terratec, Zoltrix) can handle your work just as well.

landrover

[Brian Ellis]

Sorry, yes, Landrover: I forgot the 450 was software-based: I was thinking along the lines of my old hardware codec G-200 Marvel which was made when PCs didn't have the oomph to do it with software. You are quite right, that makes the situation even more hairy!

[landrover]

UKtechno, let's make things a little clearer. You "heard" that the G400 offers better picture quality. That's not necessarily true. The Marvel G400 TV had a hardware MJPEG encoder chip on board, where the G450 eTV is a card that depends on CPU power for it's capture performance. The Marvel G400 TV would probably suit your needs perfectly, even on your current rig. Only problem is: find a used one. They're not manufactured any longer. And if you upgrade, the Marvel G400 was designed for and works perfectly under Win98. You'll have to be a somewhat advanced user to make it work under more modern OS'es

landrover

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes, I have to agree. I didn't notice his CPU limitations. A system upgrade is very much in order. My recommendation is an ECS K7S5A mainboard ($50-55) and a 1.3 ghz Duron CPU (~$40).

That should keep the upgrade to about $100 USD (the ECS K7S5A can use his existing PC100 RAM) and still make him capable of using the eTV. It'll also leave him an upgrade path to an AthlonXP and some DDR266 ram later on.

Dr. Mordrid

[smok3]

iam sorry, but i couldnt recommend that card to anyone really (especialy this days - talking about etv 450 which i own)

- u need an over 1ghz computer to capture to fullscreen (704x576) matrox mpeg, and when its captured its really not suitable for editing, especialy not with that suplied toy - some ulead joke...

- if you go some alternative way and capture with software mjpeg, you will end up with interlacing problems, meaning that you would have to deinterlace clips before editing to get a feel on material and then used interlaced for online - kinda boring and the quality isnt that good at all.

questions:
1. maybe iam missing something, so if iam please enligten me, especialy about interlacing problem.
2. some1 knows a software way to capture vitc with etv 450?

(btw, i would look the canopus way this days as well)

edit: some typos...

[Dr Mordrid]

IF you remember my first post I noted that with the eTV you can use AVI_IO with the PICVideo or Morgan MJPeg softcodecs. These are very much superior to Matrox's codecs and require very little in the way of CPU resources. Once editied they can be encoded in the video editor or by TMPGEnc with excellent results.

Most realtime MPEG captures aren't worth the effort and are very difficult to edit with any quality.

The problem with the eTV's MPEG captures & editing only occur when using PCVCR's segmented captures. Captures done in VideoStudio or MediaStudio do not suffer this problem

I can remember doing this kind of full frame capture using the YUY2 interface of Matrox cards on Celeron 466's and 600's on a 66mhz bus, so the Duron 1.3 ghz would be MORE than enough.

Interlacing problems typically occur if you have your editor set to use field A and not the field B used by the Matrox G200/400/450 capture cards OR if the signal you're capturing has weak synch pulses due to copy protection (analog Macrovision for one) or weak/degraded sources. This makes it difficult for the card to lock on the synch pulses, which mark the beginning of a frames first field.

For altered synch pulses the fix is a time base corrector, which can be found in many devices including mid-range SVHS decks. For weak signals a small video amp. is the order of the day. This is often made worse by the cheap input/output amps (aka: procamps) used in consumer analog capture devices.

TBC's and a video amp are often combined in what's called a video processor. These can be had for under $100 (very basic) to $ 800 (Elite Video BVP4+) or even more for studio units.

If you're referring to interlace artifacts on a non-interlaced VGA screen during an edit preview, this is normal and they disappear when the video is exported using fields (presuming you use the correct field order). The main exception is when you're applying a moving path to an image or overlay in the editor. The fix is to simply change the involved clips and images timeline setting to FRAME, but to export using fields.

Dr. Mordrid