Who did you buy your system from?
I'm looking at DVLINE. Heard anything about them?

Hello..

I got it from DV Gear, I dealt with Mike there.. They were awesome and price included next day shipping. I had a system before we pieced together at work and well I had problems, hangs, reboots and updating timeline was a constant.. So these are my two systems I have now. I use the one I built for Audition and Photoshop stuff since I had to piece it together with what I had on hand..

DV Gear System:
P4 3.4GHZ 1MB @ 800FSB
2GB RAM
Matrox P650 AGP Video Card
Matrox RT.X100 Editing Package)
80GB System Drive
(2) 120GB SATA DRIVES
16x DL Pioneer DVD Burner
1.44MB Floppy Drive
WinXP PRO SP2
Bella Keyboard
ASUS Motherboard (Certified by Matrox of course)
JVC BR-DV3000 Deck
Mackie DFX-12 Mixer
DV Tape Rewinder
Matrox and 6122 + HotFix2 Loaded
$6000

I use that system with two 19" NEC 1970NX DVI Flat Panels and the contour shuttle Pro2 controller..


First System:
Dell Optiplex 270
P4 2.8GHZ 1MB @ 800FSB
80GB System Drive Drive
(2) 250MB SATA Drives
(1) 320GB Lacie FireWire Drive
Matrox RT.X100 Package
8X NEC DVD Burner
16x DVD-ROM
Premiere Pro Keyboard + Contour Shuttle Pro2
WinXP SP2
Matrox G450 AGP Card
Dual 19" CRT Screens

Glenn, I'm Using a professional video monitor for comparison- this is not the problem. And I'm in a PAL region. I believe it has somehing to do with the kb rates- can anyone post some information about this?

On a side note, Capturing in "DV" gives the footage a "smoothing" compared to uncompressed- anyone experienced this?

It doesn't happen. Premiere doesn't do anything at all to material you transfer to your HD via Firewire -- it just looks at the bits you've transferred. Any difference you are seeing is introduced either by some temporary and system specific detail like your computer monitor ... or whatever hardware you are using to connect with the 'professional monitor' you are using, as Premiere itself has no such interface.

There is no variable to DV data rate, in either NTSC or PAL -- DV is always 25Mb/s, no deviation.

Not sure how you are capturing in DV -- again, this is not a feature that is part of Premiere -- but if your source was 'better' than DV25 one would expect that reducing the quality to chroma downsampled DV25 might introduce some softening ... or whatever hardware device you are using to perform this analog to digital DV conversion might be doing the softening ...

GB

<<<-- Originally posted by R Geoff Baker : It doesn't happen. Premiere doesn't do anything at all to material you transfer to your HD via Firewire -- it just looks at the bits you've transferred. Any difference you are seeing is introduced either by some temporary and system specific detail like your computer monitor ... or whatever hardware you are using to connect with the 'professional monitor' you are using, as Premiere itself has no such interface.

There is no variable to DV data rate, in either NTSC or PAL -- DV is always 25Mb/s, no deviation.

Not sure how you are capturing in DV -- again, this is not a feature that is part of Premiere -- but if your source was 'better' than DV25 one would expect that reducing the quality to chroma downsampled DV25 might introduce some softening ... or whatever hardware device you are using to perform this analog to digital DV conversion might be doing the softening ...
GB -->>>


GB, I'm using DVCAM footage, captured trough firewire. Can it be that the deck that connects from the Media 100 (a sony dvcam deck, not camera) has Component out, and the Media 100 is capturing the component signal has "UNcompressed 300kb", and the picture quality improves, because it is not applying the DV codec in software but only on the output deck? Am I making any sense?

If you are not using the Firewire transfer of data, but instead using the analog output and redigitizing using the hardware board installed on your system ... it may well look different but it can't be 'better' -- or at least it can't be 'better' except in a way you could achieve using a blur filter or something applied to the true 'transferred' material.

Firewire is a bit-for-bit identical copy of what is on tape. It doesn't matter whether you use $30 hardware or $3,000 hardware -- you get the same thing. The beauty of digital files & Firewire transfer is your tape is transferred exactly and precisely ...

Analog output is filtered, processed, subject to hardware variables -- you may prefer it, but it isn't 'better' though it is perhaps different ... even likely that it is softer, particularly if you are redigitizing and therefore re-encoding to a new code.

HTH

GB

2 Premiere Questions: I need some Help!!!
 

Question 1:

Can I edit 30i footage in a 24p project?

I have a music video to edit and it was shot on 30i and 24p.

Question 2:

Do you have to edit 24p in the 24p project or can I edit using the a Matrox project? What are the benefits and drawbacks? What does editing in the 24p project really do?

So I guess there's more two questions, but if someone can help me that would be great!

I am using PP 1.5 and the Matrox RTX100 Extreme

Thanks

What I think you saw was the video being processed into a full component 4:2:2 signal. Native DV is 4:1:1. The Media 100 was basically capturing it in an almost uncomressed form. Different decks will do a better or worse job processing the video.
Another thing that you may see or notice, is that there is a setting in Premiere Pro that will automatically adjust the video playback to give your computer the most RT playback power. So depending on your CPU, it will down sample the video so that you can get RT preview. The more you ask it to do, the more it will bring the video quailty down in the preview. A Media 100 system has dedicated hardware to control the playback of the video taking that burden off the CPU.
A friend of mine had a colleague do a little test. They took the exact same DVCpro footage and made a tape where the footage was transferred via SDI, Component, Firewire, S-Video and Composite. Once showing the video to regular non-video folk, they preferred the SDI and Component video over Firewire and the others. Maybe it's the extra processing and softer look that they liked, I don't know. Anyway, good luck with your system and learn to color correct to get the look you want.

It doesn't matter that the video is output from the deck as 4:2:2 -- the source is 4:1:1 and nothing in the decompression adds to the amount of data. Premiere used to decompress to 4:4:4 before they realized that 4:2:2 at least represented the actual colour space used in video -- the 'expanded' space didn't add to the image in any way.

Let's say we have the value 1.5 -- we can redescribe that as 1.5000000 ... but we haven't changed the value in any way. Your results are limited by the source ... The Media 100 can do whatever it wants to the video but in truth _it can only degrade it_ compared to the Firewire transferred source. You may prefer the degraded version, but that's what it is.

GB

Dual Processors w/rtx.100???
 

Hey all just putting together another computer and wondering (because matrox doesnt show an intel dual processor in compatibility list) if anyone is using a Dual Processor machine with a matrox rtx.100 My buddy Gary thinks that with the rtx.100 the second processor wouldnt get used very much with premier, he agrees that in photoshop and after effects it would but in premier it might not. It is costly and with matrox not showing an intel board with dual processors in their list I dont know if it is worth the risk. Any thoughts?

Some decks will upsample the chroma/color information when playing DV out through analog/component or digital/SDI. It can make the color less blocky.

There might also be other things going on... edge sharpening, saturation/contrast/brightness changes, etc.

If this stuff is going on then the media 100 footage may look subjectively better, even though its technically inferior. From a practical standpoint then the media100 system *might* have a small advantage if it's better workflow-wise, as it makes images look better without rendering any special filters. This is like how vinyl may be subjectively better than CD, or how analog formats sound better than digital (because analog clipping/distortion have a warmth to it that's nicer than digital compression/dynamics).

I would try to figure out what's going on though. You can check if saturation stays the same by the following:

Have a NTSC monitor with blue gun. Calibrate it properly. http://www.videouniversity.com/tvbars2.htm

Put NTSC bars and tone onto DV tape with Premiere or Final Cut. Capture bars and tone into both systems.

Display the color bars on the NTSC monitor. Use blue gun to check for accuracy- the grey and formerly-blue bar on the right should be equal brightness. If not, then there's some shift in saturation.

Options:

A- Convert the 60i footage (I assume you mean 60 fields for per second interlaced, and not 30i) to 24p and edit away. Magic Bullet Suite, Mac/FCP/Nattress, DVFilm Maker are some programs that will do this conversion. Edit 24p.

B- Convert the 60i footage to 30p (various methods to de-interlace, or shoot frame mode) and edit in a 60i timeline. Convert to 30p so the footage will match the 24p footage a lot better.

You could also skip the de-interlacing part, but there will be a difference on high motion scenes.

If you edit in 60i, you will lose a few things:

Your final product will be 60i and the files will be larger than 24p files. This may be important for web and DVD distribution.

You can't get precise control of the cadence of the 24p footage.

Some things will move while the 24p footage does not (i.e. masks).

2- Before you shoot, check that you are shooting without electronic shutter (1/50 for PAL, 1/60 for NTSC are the right shutter sppeds) and that you are shooting the right 24p mode in your camera (that will work with Premiere).

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : Some decks will upsample the chroma/color information when playing DV out through analog/component or digital/SDI. It can make the color less blocky.

There might also be other things going on... edge sharpening, saturation/contrast/brightness changes, etc.

If this stuff is going on then the media 100 footage may look subjectively better, even though its technically inferior. From a practical standpoint then the media100 system *might* have a small advantage if it's better workflow-wise, as it makes images look better without rendering any special filters. This is like how vinyl may be subjectively better than CD, or how analog formats sound better than digital (because analog clipping/distortion have a warmth to it that's nicer than digital compression/dynamics).

Display the color bars on the NTSC monitor. Use blue gun to check for accuracy- the grey and formerly-blue bar on the right should be equal brightness. If not, then there's some shift in saturation. -->>>

Glenn, very helpfull info- problem is, I'm in Pal land- the calibration method doesn't work over here...

David, I think that 4:2:2 vs $:1:1 is what was happening there- that was why I asked if capturing uncompressed would give me better results (in the mac forum).

Hi Terry,

I would stick with the recommened from Matrox. You could run into all sorts of problems, and I personally would not like the headache.

The recommened specs are there for a reason, the reason being that Matrox know that they work correctly with their hardware. Also if anything goes wrong, then Matrox are more likely to support you if you go for a product on their list.

But its your choice...

Cheers,

Ed

I'm not sure if that would help or not, it depends on how the video is being transferred to the computer. If it is going firewire, then it's a direct bit to bit transfer, so it would still have the DV compression and be 4:1:1. If it is going thru a compenent card that is in the computer, then the deck is transferring it and would be converting it to a 4:2:2 signal, most likely.
I went to a demo of an Avid DV express with their Mojo system. The Mojo can capture thru firewire, S-video, composite and with a special adapter component. All the audio is thru RCA, unbalanced.
The guy doing the demo was bragging how the Avid can do uncompressed with the DV, BUT when I asked him what is the difference between regular DV and uncompressed DV thru the firewire cable, he couldn't give me an ansewer. I can understand thru component or even S-Video, but not the firewire transfer.
Anyway, good luck with your system.