I have a bunch of home movie videos I want to archive. I've elected to use the Matrox RT2500 video capture card.
Having ordered the card from Dabs, I better think of a machine to put the thing into.
A specific machine seems to be required. Software and hardware installation seems onerous. Not to be done on a live machine!
Windows 2000. There were problems, but OK now. Apparently.
Assuming I don't get an expansion card for IDE, or use SCSI, there is a limit of 4 IDE devices.
OS hard drive - anything - just for the operating system.
Video storage hard drive. 80GB min. This should give 120 minutes of DV material or 3 hours of MPEG-2 material.
Transfer rate > 4MB/sec Tom's Hardware used a IBM Deskstar 75GXP DTLA-307030 hard drive. The specs for these ATA/100 drives list 30 GB capacity, 2 MB cache and 7200 rpm. DMA-enabled hard disk.
Précis from Matrox: rotational speed of at least 5400 RPM. To be compatible with the dual stream operation of the RT2500, the storage device has to sustain at least 12 MB/sec data transfer rate.
CD reader / writer. For loading the OS initially. Writing "Super Video CD"
DVD reader
Faster the better! Impact on Data format conversion, and special effects. "Athlon (1 GHz and up) or the Pentium 4 - time is money!"
The Celeron and K6 family of processors are not supported. Athlon-based systems that appear on their lists of supported motherboards and systems are supported.
See RT2500-compatible motherboards on Matrox's support page.
Tom's hardware reviews motherboards. This page reviews MPEG 4 compression decompression. the i845 is not good, but the i850 is!
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011217/i845d-07.html
Millennium G450 - has a direct connection. More likely to work.
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live sound card. (The RT2500 only handles native DV and MPEG-2 formats.)
Network card
Mouse, Keyboard, monitor, TV
Dual monitor console. A future option with a second graphics card.
512Mb
Playback suffers from a "line slip" effect. I'll get a Matrox 550 card.
Installing the G550 was a bit of a pain!
Notes for next time:
1, remove Matrox video capture software
2, remove RT2500 card and reboot
3, Set screen resolution to 640 by 480 with old existing card.
4 Replace video card with new Matrox G550
5 Get it running at 1152 by 864 pixels
|
As an aside that's a odd set of figures: 1152 by 864? 22 * (32 * 25) by 31 * (32 * 25). Fair enough. That's the 3 by 4 ratio I'd expect. |
6 Install the RT2500 video capture card, and drivers...
7 Run up Premiere.... Look no line slip!
If you scrub around Matrox's site you'll find some useful links.
I found the following of use:
(I refuse to fix wandering links when doing my annual web site maintenance!)