'Digidesign Ignores Matrox!' Read all about it!

[K.B.]

YES IT WORKS!

I'm back in London for a couple of days, and tried out Aza's settings (many thanks for taking the trouble to post them Aza)

But it's temperamental. Have only had time for a little fooling around with it. I find I need to load my Busted.mov to kick it into action (download/rip any Busted video, the settings are all straightforward), and then to replace it in PT with the video I'm working with.

The movie I am using is quite big though, and I can't manage to cover all of it up, which partially negates the point of having a third monitor. When i get back I'll try exporting it again out of After Effects in a smaller window at a higher resolution. That way I can cover it up with another window, and still get a high res 3rd monitor display.

Or does anyone know of a way of prioritising the mix or edit windows so they always sit on top? And that way could just cover the video window?

Lorenzo, tried mailing you, but it got bounced back. My firewall's also been blocking trojans coming via your ISP. Have you got more than just flu..?

[K.B.]

Just got back, bruised, twisted, exhausted, but exhilirated!

Highlight was zig-zagging down through a wood, midly out of control, then zipping through someone's back garden at high speed to find a snowman in my way (not there the day before!). Had no time to turn, so just hoped there wasn't a dustbin buried in the middle, and crashed straight through it in an explosion of snow. Continued downhill with a child's voice behind me shouting "Curva!" (won't translate, but you can guess).

Serves him right for using such bad language.


Sorry, bit off topic there.

Hey guys, our chat about this Parhelia/P750 business on the Matrox forum is now 'locked', meaning we can't now post to it any more...

meaning all discussion on the matter is now ended...?

[Stone Knife]

As gone as the Nixon administration, bub.

[K.B.]

Is that a plug-in?

[K.B.]

I've had some queries about how exactly I've got my system working, so in a bid to help...

I’ve not had the time to do too much experimentation here, and like most computer users I just try a few things until it works, and then stick with that, without necessarily knowing why. Meaning that my tweaks may not work on anyone else’s machine. So some of this is guesswork, which I’ll italicise for clarity.

My two 21" CRT monitors (fortunately I have the room, they are brighter, and don’t have the latency problems of flat screens) are both set at 75Hz – a convenient multiple of 25. If they’re set at different rates, the VGA card will have to work harder.

I’ve now opened ProTools here, and started a new session. Import a WAV. Then I import Busted.mov (this is the excellent promo for That’s What I Go To School For by Dawn Shadforth). I move the video to a point at the bottom of the screen where most of it, BUT NOT ALL, is offscreen. And leave it there. The PAL monitor pops into life, and the whole system works fine.

This moving-offscreen thing ONLY works on one of the monitors. Not on both.

Busted. mov is 240 x 180, 25fps, and encoded with Sorenson (NOT sorenson 3).

Any movie with these settings will work.

So ideally you should have the movie you are working on at these settings too (or any 4:3 ratio with the numbers divisible by 4, maybe 8)

You may be tempted to simply re-encode the working video you have. Be careful, as this may result in lost or gained frames. Re-encode from your original.

I haven’t re-encoded my original (JL.mov) yet, which is widescreen and so not 4:3. So I’ll have to add a black area top n bottom to get the aspect ratio right.

However, at the moment, once I have the system up and running with busted.mov, I can import JL.mov movie (which then replaces busted.mov) and the system will continue working. It seems to need to be kicked into the right mode, and once it’s working it continues doing so.

But if I reboot, it won’t work with JL.mov any more, and I have to start all over with busted.mov, and then re-import JL.mov again. This doesn’t cause sync problems since the first frame automatically lines up with the beginning of the sound track.

So far it works. But I will re-encode the original (in After Effects which allows me to burn in my own reference timecode) to stop doing this busted.mov business.

Is that clear? Does that help?

Any tips much appreciated.

[K.B.]

Hey no! Wait a minute.

I just closed PTLE, re-opened and it's still working with JL.mov.

Just goes to show... something.

[K.B.]

I'll try the settings when I'm finished with this feature, I may be a bit superstitious, but I don't like to change something in my confidured system in the middle of a work, in the past it led me to some pretty annoying system crashes and overnight reinstalling...

Couldn't agree with you more.

BTW, did you see if there's any latency with this setup? Using the zoom has some tiny latency, but for sync work is still noticeable. How about performance? does the system have to work hard?

Yes, I have noticed a degree of slugginess with the rate PTLE refreshes it's windows when running my JL.mov on the PAL monitor, but it is a huge movie, and I will cut it down to a smaller pixel size when I re-render it. Busted.mov didn't seem to show any such problem, but it is far smaller.

As for latency, I must confess I haven't looked too closely (not got back to the project properly yet). But, as I understand it, there is always some latency present. Your graphics and sound cards will both have a small amount of latency, which will be different for each, so in theory they're a little out of sync. But hopefully the amount is so small it's not an issue (though it can be with LCD monitors). There was some discussion on this in the TDM Post forum a while back, but I can't find it! It seems to be quite normal to expect to 'slip' your soundtrack at the end of a project to compensate. So you should include some readily identifyable sound and video sync point at the beginning.

It does worry me, since it seems to me that if you sync up sometimes on the fly by eye/ear, and at others by lining up in the timeline, then later on (on another system, or when you render via a different signal chain) you might finds that bits are out of sync. I hope not.

Anyone else know anything about this?

I think, once you have it up and running, it's worth putting your computer monitor and PAL monitor next to each other and seeing if either picture appears to be lagging behind the other.

And maybe render a small portion, and play it back on another PC (or DVD player ideally) to see if sync is maintained. Just to reassure yourself (and if anyone claims there's a problem later, then you know for certain it's not you).

Unfortunately, since our systems differ, all may be hunky dory for me, and not for you.



Send me a Quicktime movie on CD when you're finished. Let's see what you're up to.

[gerax]

Hi Karel

Jumping in right now from the post on the TDM forum, let's stay at our home...right.

Latency may be unavoidable, and it certainly is there, since I have the TV screen right next to my monitors and I can spot a tiny lag between the QT window and the movie (almost unnoticeable, but it's there); fortunately I sync my tracks using a reference track I fed to the camera while shooting production, and while low quality (should I say NO quality? )it really is a lifesaver for sync work, and once I'm in phase with it I'm sure I'm in sync, no matter the latency I have on the TV out (it's only a bit annoying). Plus we have the luck to be able to do some screening tests at a local theater using a DV and projector to full cinema screen and PA.

I too noticed my system becomes sluggish when I start to load some DSP on the session: if I only have the video track and some audio tracks then it's no big deal, and I noticed it depends a lot on the movie lenght; smaller clips tend to play back smooth, while longer of course become a little stuttering; while this is a thing that can easily be fixed by increasing the movie priority in the movie menu (I set it for low when editing and doing my mix moves, and for high when I want to check back if everything I did is spot on, since doing this disables all controls but start/stop) I suspect it can be addressed to my CPU being not powerful enough (XP 1800+), and while more than enough for most audio mixes I do it may not have the overhead necessary to drive both audio and video, plus a separate TV output (if you think about it it's a whole lotta things to do in real time...), maybe a CPU upgrade down the road this year (and eventually a fix from Matrox/Digidesign to the infamous issue) will take care of this; on one of the bigger sessions I had a 10m long clip and like 24 audio tracks (@16/48) with a slew of plugins (focusrite, Waves, Bomb Factory), and once I added a Waves Linear Phase EQ on my master fader the system became letargic, in that even zooming in or out took 3-4 seconds to accomplish .

I asked the video editor to split the 2Hrs long feature into smaller cuts or "reels" so that I could handle them separately and do my premixes, then I'll have the whloe movie and merge all of the premixed cuts to the final lenght (it worked fine for the last feature I did).

I'll try to send you a preview of the finished work as soon as it's...well, finished, and I get the approval from the director.

All for now (thanx for the lonx on DX uninstaller)

Cheers

L.G.

P.S. : I agree, let's have this thread go past 1000 replys!!!

[K.B.]

Have you switched off or reduced the virtual memory settings? It could help.

How much RAM have you got?

Have you tried putting your movie on a different hard drive from the audio files?

Is either drive on the same bus as the CD drives? I think I remember reading that if it is, and your CD is a bit slow, this will also slow your hard drive down.

Since there are only a total of two busses in most PCs this limits our options. I'm wondering, if this proves to be a persisent problem, whether ir's worth getting a firewire card, and an external firewire hard drive and putting the movie on that (all a bit pricey!!). That way OS, audio files, and movie are on seperate disks, and access time is reduced. kind of depends where the bottleneck is. Is it the chip after all? Mine's a 2Gig P4. Should easily be enough. How do we find out?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I don't think the actual length of the movie matters too much (until it gets huge, which I suppose 2 hours is!) it's more the resolution and frame rate of the image, which is directly related to the throughput of data.



(I think we'll easily go past a thousand. Just how many stupid hours have I spent on this?!?)

[gerax]

Originally posted by Karel Bata:

Have you switched off or reduced the virtual memory settings? It could help.

Yes, already did.

How much RAM have you got?

512 Mb DDr PC 133

Have you tried putting your movie on a different hard drive from the audio files?

Yes, currently on the OS drive, I may try to hook up another one.

Is either drive on the same bus as the CD drives? I think I remember reading that if it is, and your CD is a bit slow, this will also slow your hard drive down.

The audio drive is on its own Promise controller PCI card, so the bottleneck isn't there.
I don't think it's a bottleneck thing, to me it's just a power issue, as I said above that's a whole lottls of things to do at once, and I red even some TDM users have this kind of problems.
Certainly hiding the video track from the timeline helps.
Maybe even a separate drive for video files could help, but currently the situation isn't so messed up that's preventing me from having work done; for the next project involving video I'll definitely hook up a "video" drive.
Definitely the more the CPU the better

L.G.