G450 eTV Question?

[stephenf]

We are a small church in Thornhill and we need to do some video capture and video editing. We had a small budget but were able to purchase the following.

AMD XP 2100+ CPU
ASUS MB
512 MB RAM
120 GB HD (Maxtor)
SoundBlaster Live Audigy (OEM)
Matrox G450 eTV

We will be installing Windows 2000 as we could not afford Windows XP. We would like to know 2 things.

1. Would it be wise for us to partition the HD for video capture and editing? If so what is a good configuration and should we use NTFS?

2. We have a projector that we use for isslustrating PowerPoint and videos through a VCR. Can we use this with the G450 eTV card and will we need any further hardware?

PS ... Will we need any CODECS that are free to d/l from the internet or other type of video editing software other than what is supplied that we could get off the internet for free?

Thank all of you who reply your help is appreciated!!

Sincerely,
Stephen

[KRSESQ]

Stephen:

For best results, You may wish to get a relatively inexpensive 20 gig HDD and install the OS and editing software on that, using FAT32 file system (to simplify trouble-shooting). Then format the 120 gig HDD with NTFS and use it for the video capture drive. You'll get much more satisfactory video playback performance from having the OS/swap file on one drive and vidcap on the other. Also, your video projects will be isolated and protected should the boot drive crash.

For good measure, put the capture drive all by itself on the secondary IDE channel. Slave your CDROM to the boot drive on the primary IDE channel.

What's the model number of the motherboard? An important question as the SIS chipset is generally superior to the VIA chipset for this kind of work, especially with Soundblaster sound cards. Don't worry too much if yours is VIA based, tho. Plenty of folks in these parts have gotten good results with them. Just make sure you have all the latest drivers and patches installed.

The stock Matrox Motion JPEG codec that ships with the ETV should be adequate for your needs. For better image quality try PicVideo or Morgan MJPEG codecs (not free, but not expensive). If one of your goals is Video CD or DVD, most low-end editing software like MGI Videowave supports MPEG 1 (VCD) or MPEG 2 (DVD) file conversions, with varying quality. Many prefer to create MPEGs using the TMPGEnc encoder which I THINK is still a free download...haven't checked in a while.

You should be able to feed video to the VCR through the ETV's composite output (3 RCA jacks) and from the VCR to the projector. You could also hook up the ETV to the projector directly using the composite output. Or you can use the SVideo output on the ETV to feed the projector or the VCR, if it supports SVideo. This has the virtue of giving better image quality, too.

Don't forget to install Win2K service pack 2. also DirectX 8.1. DirectX 9 is coming out soon but avoid it for a couple of months, until the bugs have been worked out of it.

Am I forgetting anything??

Kevin

[Flying dutchman]

... Eh, servicepack 3?

plus there are other free mpeg-1 (and even -2) encoders around such as BBMpeg.

[KRSESQ]

Some people have problems with the percieved intrusive nature of SP3. See this thread:

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37815

Kevin

[KRSESQ]

Here's another useful thread:

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38080

Kevin