New editing sys dilemma

[Guest]

Hi.
I want to get a new editing system this Sept. I have a budget of about 6000.00$ CDN.

I was looking at a single processor unit with an Matrox RT2500 editing card or at a dual CPU with no editing card. No the budget will not allow for both .. I wish it did.

I have the task of transfering all the family video's(vid8,hi8,Dig8) to cd's.. I want to convert them to mpeg4 to get more on the 80min cd's. I also want to do some editing using Premiere.

Now for the dilemma - daul cpu gives real time conversion of mpeg2 to mpeg4(at least with the dual Xeon).
But the Matrox will give a faster editing platform - at least that is what I understand. I have not heard yet if a high end daul processor unit will give as good (real time) use of Premiere as with a good editing card.

Any thoughts or comments will be mostly appriciated.

Patrick.
It's hard to get the best bang for your buck.

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[Guest]

a dual Xeon might give you real-time Mpeg2-Mpeg4 conversion but think what's really important.

my suggestion is to go for the single CPU plus Matrox RT2500 solution.
reason: it doesn't matter how long the conversion from Mpeg2 to Mpeg4 takes since there is no user input needed while it's happening. you set it up and let it run. maybe over night while you sleep.
with editing and adding of effects, titles in real time that's a completely different story. here real time working is paramount. you don't wanna wait 10 min till your computer has applied a filter or added a title that is only 10 seconds long.
I don't know about the Matrox RT2500 but I think there was an article here on Tom's Hardware. if it gives you real time manipulation of the video that's the thing to go for.

respect!

 

[Guest]

Thanks.
That's what I was leaning towards. I'm gettting anything for a couple of weeks yet -- the way prices are going I might be able to get a dual system with the Matrox.
Regards

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[lakedude]

I agree with NX. He knows what he is talking about.

 

[Guest]

Thanks again for the input.

I'm leaning toward a single
P4 1.8 - 2.0
Matrox R2500


Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[mbetea]

personally what i would do, is a dual athlon setup. you can get both of the cpu's and the motherboard for less than what you would pay for a 2ghz intel (which is $574 on pricewatch). or go with a single athlong which is almost $500 less than what you would pay for the intel and you're not going to see a whole lot more power with the intel. but i would go duals, but then i do a lot of rendering, video as well as 3d/animation so i like it. also too if you want to save some money, i would look at pinnacle sys's boards. if you are looking for realtime, i would go with canopus's dv raptor RT, that's going for $600 compared to the rt2500 which is around $850 and from what i've heard from friends and others is the raptor is just as good (that's what i'm going with). pinnacle's boards are pretty good as well. you can get everything you want, it just takes some research and shopping around.

CPUs are like testicles, every computer should have 2!

 

[Guest]

I have made my proposal of three systems to the people fonding the project. The most expensive of the three is a dual amd 1.4 with the matrox. Now I'm trying to get an answer from Matrox about compatiblity with the dual tyan board as well as answers to issues to the Asus P4T mainboard.

Thanks.
Patrick

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[mbetea]

the dual athlon is the most expensive setup you've considered? not if you were considering a p4 2ghz. but then hey it's your money.

CPUs are like testicles, every computer should have 2!

 

[Guest]

I have looked at the P4 2GHz system and found it not worth the money. At 939 CND$ for the cpu alone it is a item that prices it's self out of competion, especially with it's younger sibling the 1.8GHz at 439 CND$. I would only spend twice the money for near twice the performence gain and that is not so.

My current standing is that I am getting the best of both worlds -- kinda. I will get the AMD 1.4 system and partner it up with the matrox RT2500 to do the video editing. I will get a P4 1.8 to do flask mpeg4 encoding. The two system together come out the same price as getting a daul AMD 1.4 with some minor changes to some other components.

This setup of two units solves the problem of the incompatiblity of the RT2500 with the i850 chipset and the other problem that the RT2500 is not approved with the 760MP chipset yet. It will also allow me to effectively to be doing two task at one time -- editing video while a doing a flask conversion.
Just waiting for final approval of the money matter from my Financial backer -- approx 6800$ - 7000$ cdn.

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[Brada]

well, after all of this, i'd like to say: if you want to spend so much money, it's not so good idea to choose matrox rt2k. matrox is built on old and problematic chipset. you should take a look at canopus dvstorm. it will save you a lot of sleepless nights, for a few bucks more. look at http://www.justedit.com

 

[Guest]

Thanks, I will look into it.
Patrike

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[Brada]

things that you won't find in white papers:
1. rt2k is not realtime.
1a. storm is realtime.
2. rt2k has very low compatibility.
2a. storm you can put into any computer. put it into p4 1.7ghz, you will have a monster nle system. you don't have to worry for compatibility.
3. rt2k uses c-cube dvxpress chipset that is old mpeg chipset.
3a. storm is using canopus developed chipset for dv. much more features (i.e. 3 video streams, 24 rt filters etc)
4. canopus has the very best codec on the world. it will give you absolutelly better picture quality then rt2k. rt2k is allways having some softer picture then the original. if i want my video to be softer, i'll appreciate if they let me blur it myself.

it's visible that i'm using canopus myself. yes, i am. but i met a lot of people that bought matrox or pinnacle and now they are sorry for that. today i met one who sold his rt2k and bought storm. he says that the difference is ten miles, and that it's worth every cent.

 

[littleking]

I am new to the video editing world, and I'm also looking at getting a editing system. Which means I don't know a whole lot about different products yet.

I don't know if I would end up getting this product, but here is my suggestion. If you get the <A HREF="http://www.justedit.com/products/dvstormseplus.php3" target="_new">Canopus DV Storm</A>, you have the option of getting both realtime editing and realtime conversion. And the more processing power you have the more realtime editing you can do. Let me explain.

From different reviews I've read, it looks like the DV Storm system mainly uses your CPU power to edit. In one review from <A HREF="http://www.dv.com" target="_new">DV Magazine</A> (The review was in the print editing, June '01 I believe), they were using a PIII 1 Ghz and they said the had loads of realtime editing capablities, and it would only get better with the more CPU power. So if you got the DV Storm system and dual Xeons, then you could have both.

<A HREF="http://www.justedit.com/streaming/samples/canopusrealtime.wmv" target="_new">Here is a video</A> that sample the DV Storms work. Can also be found at the <A HREF="http://www.justedit.com/products/dvstormseplus.php3" target="_new">bottom of this page</A>.

Like I said before, I don't know if this is the system that I would end up buying but it might be right for you.

LK


EDIT:
Also at the near the <A HREF="http://www.justedit.com/products/dvstormseplus.php3" target="_new">bottom of this page</A>, are some links to a few reviews which better explain how the system works.

Here are a few excerpt from <A HREF="http://industryclick.com/magazinearticle.asp?magazineid=127&releaseid=6956&magazinearticleid=116635&siteid=15" target="_new">Video Systems Magazine</A>:

First, because special effects are rendered by the PC there are no limits to the sophistication of the effects. ...

The second benefit of a CPU-centric design is that the number of video streams is limited only by the PC's throughput. As CPU performance increases, DVStorm's capabilities increase. ...

Third, the order of the effects is determined by the editor — not the designer of a special effects chip. ...

Fourth, unlike competing boards, DVStorm uses its onboard DV codec only to compress rendered effects so that DV can be continuously output via IEEE-1394. ...

Canopus recommends at least a 700MHz Pentium III, but the real key to unlocking maximum performance is to install DVStorm in a system with dual 1GHz P3s — or one 1.4GHz (or faster) P4. I spent a brief time using a dual-1GHz system, and it was vastly superior to my 600MHz system. ...

It's important to note that the DVStorm has no support for realtime 3D effects. Canopus does offer Xplode Professional software that offers accelerated rendering of 3D effects when used with nVidia-chipset graphics cards.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by LittleKing on 09/09/01 08:13 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

I was just reading about the new pinnacle pro-one. It sounds pretty good. Read the article and let me know what you think, I would appreciate it.
http://www.videoguys.com

Thanks
Patrike

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[Brada]

i know that. there is allways a difference between matrox or pinnacle products and canopus products. those two are mpeg products, they are not dv products. so if you work with dv, you want a good and sharp picture, there is no way you can be satisfied with pinnacle. lot of people come to my house and look at the picture quality of my (cheapest!) canopus dv card and it's rendering speed. stability of this card is legendary: once i saw canopus software standing alone and working while everything in that guy's windows system was broken. this is partially because of the chipset, that i allready mentioned.
beside this: storm can handle realtime three video streams. there is probably endless number of storm's title layers, motion or still, text or bitmap. everybody is shouting about thousands of video effects. it's no problem to create video effects, you can do it yourself in storm. but the transitions don't sell the video - after three days playing with fancy transitions, you will stay at maybe 10 of them. realtime filters are something different. you need them. storm has got more than 24 realtime filters.
pro-one is not realtime in dv. that means thatit is in product range of canopus raptor rt, priced $799.
and, of course, how can i trust to the piece of hardware that is not shipping with w2k drivers? pinnacle is not shipping w2k drivers with pro-one.

 

[Guest]

Are you sure your not a canopus sales rep! :>) Well, you make very good argue ments. One thing I interested in is convertering video into mpeg4 for storage on cd's. Can the storm take my Digital 8 and Video 8 stuff and load it to the hd's as mpeg2 so that I can edit then convert it to mpeg4.

Thanks
Patrike

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[Brada]

with dvstorm you don't capture in mpeg. this is very important. dv is digital format. d8 is the same format as dv, just another kind of media. the main thing is that you don't have to transcode the video for computer editing, like with analog video. canopus hardware/software is working with the original dv file as it is recorded on the tape. there is no generation loss if you copy (capture) the video from dv tape to the disk. you can do what you want with that video later, even degrade the quality by converting dv to mpeg. storm has an optional daughterboard used for hardware mpeg encoding. i tried to encode some dv to mpeg at half resolution and it was made in 1:1.1 (i want to say that for ten minutes video it will take 11 minutes for conversion). so if you have 4 hours wedding video and the guy with the money wants to have video cd or dvd, you can simply calculate how much time you will save with this...
but, don't get me wrong, i really can't see the point of making a video cd (that's what it is, basically) from dv tape. you will spoil the quality of video just to save space? why? is dv or d8 tape so big? people spend a lot of money to keep the backup files on the tape. the best way to archive the video is to keep it on the original tape. but never mind, your answer is that even with canopus ezdv, this is the cheapest card, you can copy the video from the tape in d8 or dv camcorder to your hard disk. you will get avi files, which are made with canopus dv codec. then you can use canopus editing software or any kind of editing software to edit your video, and print it on the tape. during this process, if you are using canopus software, there is no slightest quality loss, i can guarrantee that. or you can use that avi to make divx, windows streaming, quiktime, etc. no problem at all.
what you get with dvstorm and not with cheaper cards is realtime editing. i was trying storm with dual p3 866 mhz and ide disks. i took two video clips of about 30 sec. i connected them with a simple clock transition. but i put motion blur filter on one clip and old movie filter on another clip. i also added one motion title (with country specific letters, btw) and one small semitransparent logo in the corner. finally i added some spanish guitar for better mood. i was amazed when this all together played with no rendering, printed to analog and digital tape with no rendering and encoded in mpeg in allmost realtime! the storm is now my secret love, now and forever. unfortunatelly, i don't have enough money yet.
in the other hand, i heard the people around me that were talking about rt2k, and especially pinnacle. in my country pinnacle is well known for their extremely bad support. about matrox, don't try to use support. i had to call international to their hotline support, then ther was automated answering system that took about 25 minutes to reach the technician, and after next ten minutes of explaining my problems, and i allready sent the problem description by email, so called support told me "sorry, we don't have any problems like yours reported".
you can go to matrox forum. you have to be the owner of some matrox product to write in their forums! and still they have to cut some posts, people are not satisfied. and go to canopus forum. you can see a very big forum with allmost any subject you can imagine, answered and solved, and you can write whatever you like. they'll cut you if you're off topic.
i was just glorifying canopus because i have very ood expirience with canopus, and i see that everybody will buy matrox and pinnacle and then they will be sorry, they will see they did wrong decision, but they will never complain because they don't know for anything better then rt2k.
well, i have to stop writing essays. the people here may think that i'm professional...

 

[Guest]

Thanks.

I am definately looking into it. I am still considering getting 2 systems for my editing. I will most likely get a
dual AMD to partner up with the video editing card which now I am leaning towards the canopus. And I am considering a P4 1.8G to do my mpeg4 four conversions.

I will do some more reading. I am interested how the canopus will handle my input of my older video* collection. My dig8 collection is not the concern if I get this card.

Thanks
Patrike

Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!

 

[Brada]

canopus will not handle your old video. it will be handled by the camera. you just put your hi8 tapes into d8 camera and and you will capture in dv codec, same as dv, via firewire. this is very nice...

 

[Guest]

That is sweet -- Thanks.



Take Care.
What the heck was that all about!