G400 & G-series RR performance question.

Hello,
I've got hold of a G400 and a G-series Rainbow Runner card in the hope of
building a system for capturing and editing video and then burning to CD-R
(VideoCD) or maybe DVD.
Could anybody tell me the best video capture performance I am likely to be
able to get out of these Matrox cards - I know I could buy more recent
hardware and get better, but I'm on a tight budget.
Once the above is established, then what sort of minimum system spec would I
need to get it out of them. Would something like an XP2000 with 512 Mb DDR
266 ram be sufficient ? Overkill ? or would I need a 3 GHz CPU and 1 Gb
memory to get what I want ? or maybe it would do it all on an old 1 GHz
Athlon with 256 Mb of SDRAM ?
Matrox give some idea of theoretical performance of their kit, but not much
indication of what system is needed to get this performance out of it.
I realise that I'll need to pay attention to the hard drives used as the
data stream will have to be stored quickly, but I've already considered
that. By not overspending on the CPU and memory, I do have the option to use
a bank of fast SCSI drives or RAID - a striped array / pair of ATA-100
drives - if needs be.
Basically, I've got everything together now except for CPU and memory - I
need the system to be good enough for the job without paying extra for
overkill.
Op system will probably be Windows 2000, as it is the best Windows I know of
for speed and reliability and I already have it. Some form of Windows is
required to run the software which comes with the Matrox cards. I would be
happier with the extra performance and reliability of Linux (probably Red
Hat 9), but I don't know of any video capture software for it which would be
compatible with the Matrox. Any suggestions ?
TIA
Kevin.

Hi,

You've covered a lot of ground there.

From memory, you'll have to do a bit of fiddling to get a RR working under
XP (no official drivers released for it)- not sure about Win2000. The G400
will work fine - still using mine.

Personally, I junked the RR and bought a Leadtek TV2000XP to replace it.
You've already got the RR, so you probably don't want the expense of a new
card...though they are relatively cheap.

I find the biggest bottleneck in video editing is encoding...capturing on
most systems doesn't present much of an overhead. I used to capture and
edit on a PIII 650 without much hassle - just long delays encoding.
Currently using a P42.4C and it runs very nicely - encodes at 1.5x real time
instead of 6-9x. Waiting an hour is much practical than waiting 6 hrs for a
job to finish - not such a huge drama if it stuffs up.

Good luck!

Cheers, Cliff


"Kevin Lawton" wrote in message
...
Hello,
I've got hold of a G400 and a G-series Rainbow Runner card in the hope of
building a system for capturing and editing video and then burning to CD-R
(VideoCD) or maybe DVD.
Could anybody tell me the best video capture performance I am likely to be
able to get out of these Matrox cards - I know I could buy more recent
hardware and get better, but I'm on a tight budget.
Once the above is established, then what sort of minimum system spec would
I
need to get it out of them. Would something like an XP2000 with 512 Mb DDR
266 ram be sufficient ? Overkill ? or would I need a 3 GHz CPU and 1 Gb
memory to get what I want ? or maybe it would do it all on an old 1 GHz
Athlon with 256 Mb of SDRAM ?
Matrox give some idea of theoretical performance of their kit, but not
much
indication of what system is needed to get this performance out of it.
I realise that I'll need to pay attention to the hard drives used as the
data stream will have to be stored quickly, but I've already considered
that. By not overspending on the CPU and memory, I do have the option to
use
a bank of fast SCSI drives or RAID - a striped array / pair of ATA-100
drives - if needs be.
Basically, I've got everything together now except for CPU and memory - I
need the system to be good enough for the job without paying extra for
overkill.
Op system will probably be Windows 2000, as it is the best Windows I know
of
for speed and reliability and I already have it. Some form of Windows is
required to run the software which comes with the Matrox cards. I would be
happier with the extra performance and reliability of Linux (probably Red
Hat 9), but I don't know of any video capture software for it which would
be
compatible with the Matrox. Any suggestions ?
TIA
Kevin.

Thanks for the response, Cliff.
Just wondering why you junked the RR - did it not work very well, poor
quality, bad software ? I'd like to know what to expect in advance, if
possible.
I'm hoping an AMD XP2400 is able to do a reasonable job of handling the
encoding, as I've got one now, and thinking whether to get lots of memory
for it (maybe 1 Gb of PC2700 DDR 333) if it will help.
There's no chance of me going out a buying Windows XP and, according to
Matrox, the RR will work with Windows 2000 fine. I'd prefer to be using
Linux for this project, but can't find any Linux RR drivers, so Windows it
is.
Cheers,
Kevin.

Cliff wrote:
| Hi,
|
| You've covered a lot of ground there.
|
| From memory, you'll have to do a bit of fiddling to get a RR working
| under XP (no official drivers released for it)- not sure about
| Win2000. The G400 will work fine - still using mine.
|
| Personally, I junked the RR and bought a Leadtek TV2000XP to replace
| it. You've already got the RR, so you probably don't want the expense
| of a new card...though they are relatively cheap.
|
| I find the biggest bottleneck in video editing is
| encoding...capturing on most systems doesn't present much of an
| overhead. I used to capture and edit on a PIII 650 without much
| hassle - just long delays encoding. Currently using a P42.4C and it
| runs very nicely - encodes at 1.5x real time instead of 6-9x.
| Waiting an hour is much practical than waiting 6 hrs for a job to
| finish - not such a huge drama if it stuffs up.
|
| Good luck!
|
| Cheers, Cliff
|
|
| "Kevin Lawton" wrote in message
| ...
|| Hello,
|| I've got hold of a G400 and a G-series Rainbow Runner card in the
|| hope of building a system for capturing and editing video and then
|| burning to CD-R (VideoCD) or maybe DVD.
|| Could anybody tell me the best video capture performance I am likely
|| to be able to get out of these Matrox cards - I know I could buy
|| more recent hardware and get better, but I'm on a tight budget.
|| Once the above is established, then what sort of minimum system spec
|| would I need to get it out of them. Would something like an XP2000
|| with 512 Mb DDR 266 ram be sufficient ? Overkill ? or would I need
|| a 3 GHz CPU and 1 Gb memory to get what I want ? or maybe it would
|| do it all on an old 1 GHz Athlon with 256 Mb of SDRAM ?
|| Matrox give some idea of theoretical performance of their kit, but
|| not much indication of what system is needed to get this performance
|| out of it.
|| I realise that I'll need to pay attention to the hard drives used as
|| the data stream will have to be stored quickly, but I've already
|| considered that. By not overspending on the CPU and memory, I do
|| have the option to use a bank of fast SCSI drives or RAID - a
|| striped array / pair of ATA-100 drives - if needs be.
|| Basically, I've got everything together now except for CPU and
|| memory - I need the system to be good enough for the job without
|| paying extra for overkill.
|| Op system will probably be Windows 2000, as it is the best Windows I
|| know of for speed and reliability and I already have it. Some form
|| of Windows is required to run the software which comes with the
|| Matrox cards. I would be happier with the extra performance and
|| reliability of Linux (probably Red Hat 9), but I don't know of any
|| video capture software for it which would be compatible with the
|| Matrox. Any suggestions ?
|| TIA
|| Kevin.

Hi Kevin,

Finally got back to check my newsgroup - sorry about the delay.

From memory I junked the RR because I moved on from Win 98 to Win XP. For
$AU99, it seemed a good deal to junk the card rather than muck around trying
to get it to work under XP. The Leadtek came with some nice software too -
able to encode direct to mpeg2 on the fly from analogue input - TV, VCR,
etc.

RAM wise 512MB is the sweet spot. I've never found video editing to be that
demanding on memory. I guess it depends on what you're doing, but in the
work I've done my PC I've found I rarely get about 300MB usage.

One major trick I can suggest in video work is to make sure you're input
files and output files are on separate drives. It'll save a lot of
thrashing around that would happen if they were both on the save drive. The
bottleneck will still be the CPU though.

Cheers, Cliff

"Kevin Lawton" wrote in message
...
Thanks for the response, Cliff.
Just wondering why you junked the RR - did it not work very well, poor
quality, bad software ? I'd like to know what to expect in advance, if
possible.
I'm hoping an AMD XP2400 is able to do a reasonable job of handling the
encoding, as I've got one now, and thinking whether to get lots of memory
for it (maybe 1 Gb of PC2700 DDR 333) if it will help.
There's no chance of me going out a buying Windows XP and, according to
Matrox, the RR will work with Windows 2000 fine. I'd prefer to be using
Linux for this project, but can't find any Linux RR drivers, so Windows it
is.
Cheers,
Kevin.

Cliff wrote:
| Hi,
|
| You've covered a lot of ground there.
|
| From memory, you'll have to do a bit of fiddling to get a RR working
| under XP (no official drivers released for it)- not sure about
| Win2000. The G400 will work fine - still using mine.
|
| Personally, I junked the RR and bought a Leadtek TV2000XP to replace
| it. You've already got the RR, so you probably don't want the expense
| of a new card...though they are relatively cheap.
|
| I find the biggest bottleneck in video editing is
| encoding...capturing on most systems doesn't present much of an
| overhead. I used to capture and edit on a PIII 650 without much
| hassle - just long delays encoding. Currently using a P42.4C and it
| runs very nicely - encodes at 1.5x real time instead of 6-9x.
| Waiting an hour is much practical than waiting 6 hrs for a job to
| finish - not such a huge drama if it stuffs up.
|
| Good luck!
|
| Cheers, Cliff
|
|
| "Kevin Lawton" wrote in message
| ...
|| Hello,
|| I've got hold of a G400 and a G-series Rainbow Runner card in the
|| hope of building a system for capturing and editing video and then
|| burning to CD-R (VideoCD) or maybe DVD.
|| Could anybody tell me the best video capture performance I am likely
|| to be able to get out of these Matrox cards - I know I could buy
|| more recent hardware and get better, but I'm on a tight budget.
|| Once the above is established, then what sort of minimum system spec
|| would I need to get it out of them. Would something like an XP2000
|| with 512 Mb DDR 266 ram be sufficient ? Overkill ? or would I need
|| a 3 GHz CPU and 1 Gb memory to get what I want ? or maybe it would
|| do it all on an old 1 GHz Athlon with 256 Mb of SDRAM ?
|| Matrox give some idea of theoretical performance of their kit, but
|| not much indication of what system is needed to get this performance
|| out of it.
|| I realise that I'll need to pay attention to the hard drives used as
|| the data stream will have to be stored quickly, but I've already
|| considered that. By not overspending on the CPU and memory, I do
|| have the option to use a bank of fast SCSI drives or RAID - a
|| striped array / pair of ATA-100 drives - if needs be.
|| Basically, I've got everything together now except for CPU and
|| memory - I need the system to be good enough for the job without
|| paying extra for overkill.
|| Op system will probably be Windows 2000, as it is the best Windows I
|| know of for speed and reliability and I already have it. Some form
|| of Windows is required to run the software which comes with the
|| Matrox cards. I would be happier with the extra performance and
|| reliability of Linux (probably Red Hat 9), but I don't know of any
|| video capture software for it which would be compatible with the
|| Matrox. Any suggestions ?
|| TIA
|| Kevin.

Cliff wrote:

RAM wise 512MB is the sweet spot. I've never found video editing to
be that demanding on memory. I guess it depends on what you're
doing, but in the work I've done my PC I've found I rarely get about
300MB usage.

The usage usually depends on how much memory you have. If you had 1 GB of
memory, you might have found that it rarely goes above 800 MB.

What more RAM gives you here is speed. Fewer disk operations, and more
caching of data that won't have to hit the disk at all.

One major trick I can suggest in video work is to make sure you're
input files and output files are on separate drives. It'll save a
lot of thrashing around that would happen if they were both on the
save drive.

That depends on the programs used. Some write the data to a temporary file,
which they then rename to the final file when complete. If the temporary
directory and work directory are on different drives, the millisecond-long
rename operation can't be done, and the file has to be copied instead. That
takes a LOT of time.
So test it first -- including the final stages, where renaming is likely to
take place.

Another tip is to increase the block size of the partitions used for video.
This reduces fragmentation (and thus "trashing around") a LOT, and allows
the read-ahead to work better, at the expense of small files taking up more
space than they would with a smaller block size. Bump the block size up
from the default 4 kB to 128 kB, and I can almost guarantee that you'll see
a big improvement.

Regards,
--
*Art

Thanks for the reply, Cliff.
I think I'm going to continue along the lines I outlined before and see how
well it all works.
If we can expect the XP2400 to be the bottleneck, then that will show that
the RR is well up to the job.
Good point about uing two different drives. The machine in question will be
running two 7200 rpm IDE drives and a few 15000 rpm SCSI drives - I'm hoping
this means I won't get a bottle neck at the disk storage. I should be able
to keep everything on seperate disks, with the windows swap/paging file on
its own as well.
Still looking forward to giving it a try - thanks for the advice.
Kevin.

Cliff wrote:
| Hi Kevin,
|
| Finally got back to check my newsgroup - sorry about the delay.
|
| From memory I junked the RR because I moved on from Win 98 to Win XP.
| For $AU99, it seemed a good deal to junk the card rather than muck
| around trying to get it to work under XP. The Leadtek came with some
| nice software too - able to encode direct to mpeg2 on the fly from
| analogue input - TV, VCR, etc.
|
| RAM wise 512MB is the sweet spot. I've never found video editing to
| be that demanding on memory. I guess it depends on what you're
| doing, but in the work I've done my PC I've found I rarely get about
| 300MB usage.
|
| One major trick I can suggest in video work is to make sure you're
| input files and output files are on separate drives. It'll save a
| lot of thrashing around that would happen if they were both on the
| save drive. The bottleneck will still be the CPU though.
|
| Cheers, Cliff
|
| "Kevin Lawton" wrote in message
| ...
|| Thanks for the response, Cliff.
|| Just wondering why you junked the RR - did it not work very well,
|| poor quality, bad software ? I'd like to know what to expect in
|| advance, if possible.
|| I'm hoping an AMD XP2400 is able to do a reasonable job of handling
|| the encoding, as I've got one now, and thinking whether to get lots
|| of memory for it (maybe 1 Gb of PC2700 DDR 333) if it will help.
|| There's no chance of me going out a buying Windows XP and, according
|| to Matrox, the RR will work with Windows 2000 fine. I'd prefer to be
|| using Linux for this project, but can't find any Linux RR drivers,
|| so Windows it is.
|| Cheers,
|| Kevin.
||
|| Cliff wrote:
||| Hi,
|||
||| You've covered a lot of ground there.
|||
||| From memory, you'll have to do a bit of fiddling to get a RR working
||| under XP (no official drivers released for it)- not sure about
||| Win2000. The G400 will work fine - still using mine.
|||
||| Personally, I junked the RR and bought a Leadtek TV2000XP to replace
||| it. You've already got the RR, so you probably don't want the
||| expense of a new card...though they are relatively cheap.
|||
||| I find the biggest bottleneck in video editing is
||| encoding...capturing on most systems doesn't present much of an
||| overhead. I used to capture and edit on a PIII 650 without much
||| hassle - just long delays encoding. Currently using a P42.4C and it
||| runs very nicely - encodes at 1.5x real time instead of 6-9x.
||| Waiting an hour is much practical than waiting 6 hrs for a job to
||| finish - not such a huge drama if it stuffs up.
|||
||| Good luck!
|||
||| Cheers, Cliff
|||
|||
||| "Kevin Lawton" wrote in message
||| ...
|||| Hello,
|||| I've got hold of a G400 and a G-series Rainbow Runner card in the
|||| hope of building a system for capturing and editing video and then
|||| burning to CD-R (VideoCD) or maybe DVD.
|||| Could anybody tell me the best video capture performance I am
|||| likely to be able to get out of these Matrox cards - I know I
|||| could buy
|||| more recent hardware and get better, but I'm on a tight budget.
|||| Once the above is established, then what sort of minimum system
|||| spec would I need to get it out of them. Would something like an
|||| XP2000 with 512 Mb DDR 266 ram be sufficient ? Overkill ? or
|||| would I need
|||| a 3 GHz CPU and 1 Gb memory to get what I want ? or maybe it would
|||| do it all on an old 1 GHz Athlon with 256 Mb of SDRAM ?
|||| Matrox give some idea of theoretical performance of their kit, but
|||| not much indication of what system is needed to get this
|||| performance out of it.
|||| I realise that I'll need to pay attention to the hard drives used
|||| as the data stream will have to be stored quickly, but I've already
|||| considered that. By not overspending on the CPU and memory, I do
|||| have the option to use a bank of fast SCSI drives or RAID - a
|||| striped array / pair of ATA-100 drives - if needs be.
|||| Basically, I've got everything together now except for CPU and
|||| memory - I need the system to be good enough for the job without
|||| paying extra for overkill.
|||| Op system will probably be Windows 2000, as it is the best Windows
|||| I know of for speed and reliability and I already have it. Some
|||| form
|||| of Windows is required to run the software which comes with the
|||| Matrox cards. I would be happier with the extra performance and
|||| reliability of Linux (probably Red Hat 9), but I don't know of any
|||| video capture software for it which would be compatible with the
|||| Matrox. Any suggestions ?
|||| TIA
|||| Kevin.

Arthur Hagen wrote:
| Cliff wrote:
||
|| RAM wise 512MB is the sweet spot. I've never found video editing to
|| be that demanding on memory. I guess it depends on what you're
|| doing, but in the work I've done my PC I've found I rarely get about
|| 300MB usage.
|
| The usage usually depends on how much memory you have. If you had 1
| GB of memory, you might have found that it rarely goes above 800 MB.
|
| What more RAM gives you here is speed. Fewer disk operations, and
| more caching of data that won't have to hit the disk at all.
|
|| One major trick I can suggest in video work is to make sure you're
|| input files and output files are on separate drives. It'll save a
|| lot of thrashing around that would happen if they were both on the
|| save drive.
|
| That depends on the programs used. Some write the data to a
| temporary file, which they then rename to the final file when
| complete. If the temporary directory and work directory are on
| different drives, the millisecond-long rename operation can't be
| done, and the file has to be copied instead. That takes a LOT of
| time.
| So test it first -- including the final stages, where renaming is
| likely to take place.
|
| Another tip is to increase the block size of the partitions used for
| video. This reduces fragmentation (and thus "trashing around") a LOT,
| and allows the read-ahead to work better, at the expense of small
| files taking up more space than they would with a smaller block size.
| Bump the block size up from the default 4 kB to 128 kB, and I can
| almost guarantee that you'll see a big improvement.

Nice one, Arthur.
It seems that if I dedicate a couple of the 15000 rpm SCSI drives to video
editing, use large block sizes, and defrag before an editing session I
should get the best out of them. I'll have to check, but I believe that the
location of the working file in the editing software I'll be using - Ulead -
can be set with a simple registry adjustment. Most things like that are.
Kevin.