Best Video Card around $250

spidermonkey wrote on 6/19/2002, 11:10 PM
Hello all,

I am new to Vegas. I used Video Factory for a few projects and really liked it so I upgraded. OK, now I want the best video card that works seemlessly with Vegas 3 to be used for eventual broadcast quality output. Anyone using one with marked success?

I currently have a Matrox Dual G450 on one machine and Vegas chokes. On another machine I have an ATI All in Wonder and it everything is smooth. The Matrox is supposedly a faster card but, Vegas just doesn't like it for some reason. Video is jerky. I tried a million things. The machine with the Matrox is a PIV 1.6 GHz and the machine with the ATI is a PIII 500. The PIII 500 ATI has so much better performance.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you,

Tyler

Comments

Caruso wrote on 6/20/2002, 3:55 AM
I'm no expert, by far, and don't have a clue why one system (that appears to be the more capable of the two mentioned) isn't working, but, I'd guess that it has to do with something other than your video card. You say VV chokes . . . do you mean that the preview is less than desirable or that the final output is compromised in some way.

Again, from the opinion of a layman, I'm figurin' that as long as you have a video card capable of allowing you to reasonably preview what you're doing as you edit, the quality of your final output will be independent of the video card (rendering involves mostly your cpu and your hard drive(s).

I'll be watching to see what someone with more technical know-how than me has to say.

Good luck.

Caruso
Chienworks wrote on 6/20/2002, 7:46 AM
I've got Vegas 3 and Sound Forge 6 running on two nearly identical machines, except the one at home has an ATI Rage Fury and the one at church has a Matrox G450. The ATI is about as flawless as i could ever hope for. The Matrox is full of glitches ... random pixels in the lower part of the screen, incomplete screen redraws, occasional freezing, and i can't run SF software at the 1280x1024 resolution i like; i have to bump it down a notch or everything just goes haywire.

When you say "broadcast output", what are you looking for? Are you planning on using the video card to produce analog NTSC (or PAL) TV output? If so, i wouldn't rely on the video card for this. You probably won't be happy with anything in the $250 range. The ATI card's TV out is squashed about 1/4 vertically. The Matrox card's TV out is fuzzy and never seems to go above about 10fps.

It's far better to spend a little more and buy something like the Canopus ADVC-100 external converter and send the output through firewire. If your DV (or Digital8) camcorder has analog outputs you should be able to use that and not even need an additional converter.
FuTz wrote on 6/20/2002, 7:48 AM
I don't get it... I have a Matrox Millenium G450 and everything's ok... Athlon 1000, win 2k, 3x128M memory... The only thing that I'll get rid of next is my Crapative SoundPlaster card... But I'll check for an ATI card on my next machine/upgrade; it's not the first time I hear good things about these cards...