Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 12/17/2003, 8:06 PM
You can't. The stream can only go to one place at a time.
Grazie wrote on 12/18/2003, 12:12 AM
ilsb - my question for you is why would you want to do it? I don't know enough about other NLEs to make a comment - Spot help me here - but do they allow for this "double-stream". More to the point what, if any, compromise has been made by Vegas only allowing us 1 stream?

Grazie
Apollo25 wrote on 12/18/2003, 12:27 AM
I could be wrong, but I think that Matrox's Parhelia128MB, Dual Monitor w/TV out can offer this type of functionality. Matrox'x RT.100 Xtreme Pro Package provides this. I am hoping that Vegas with work with Matrox's hardware acceleration in the near future...
RBartlett wrote on 12/18/2003, 2:00 AM
Anything from an AGP8x P750 (triple head) to whatever replaces the 4xAGP Parhelia series.should be able to do it when Sony finish their option to render to directshow uncompressed or with the realtime intermediate codec of your choice, or via Matrox WYSIWYG drivers. Matrox market the WYSIWYG NLE functionality only on the Parhelia models at the moment - purely a marketing reason.

A modest G450 could have had limited functionality with a realtime codec (as uncompressed is a non-codec, the original DVDmax functionality cannot use this format as an intermediate codec through directshow). 16bit paletted colour is the G450s TV-out deficiency.

In both the 'G' series and 'P' series matrox cards, any intermediate codec (uncompressed, DV, MJPEG, wavelet etc) is probably best either having its own field dominance swapping capability, or something to do that in whatever Sony put into their directshow-device support.

Perhaps Vegas5? NAB2004 isn't too far off. Nobody will tell us before release though. - Good - it'll be a surprise.
cyanide149 wrote on 12/18/2003, 2:04 AM
I believe the question was about 'video preview'- not 'render as'. Connecting your video card to a TV is not the same as previewing via IEEE1394...
Spot|DSE wrote on 12/18/2003, 5:14 AM
No one in their right mind (professionally) would ever consider a TV out from a video card....
You'll most likely never see Vegas work with a DV card like the Matrox or relatives. Why should it? DV is chasing the hardware, not the other way around these days. Hardware provides external preview just fine.
With hardware assisted systems, some of them do provide the external decompression when viewing on an external, so you see both internal and external preview. I don't see that you are missing anything, and I have done both worlds. But some folks like all that happening in front of their eyes. I'm irritated by just having a good monitor and a cheap monitor running, so I'm glad that I don't see the monitor in Vegas.
It's less load on the proc to draw only one stream at a time. Vegas could be written to display both, but most likely at the expense of framerate or resolution. And proc time.
Support for the Parhelia would be nice, i'm running a parhelia myself, but I don't feel like it's worth the expense of coding it in. Maybe a year ago. Matrox needs to write that code if it's gonna happen.
RBartlett wrote on 12/18/2003, 8:52 AM
I do realise that Matrox could be overselling the TV-out port of their Parhelia cards to be anything like the equivalent of custom chip professional video hardware cards (e.g. DigiSuite, Velocity, VT). It seems fruitful that where the DV codec is in the way (compressing uncompressed 4:2:2); that whilst the NLE process has to do some things in uncompressed space- running this through directshow would actually save some cycles.

I mean to emphasise that this is for the scrubbing and preview window. A render as or "prerender using mediaplayer" is already capable of delivering SVIDEO out of the Parhelia/G-series cards without too much interruption to the workflow.

I believe the video preview on Vegas uses a bit block image transfer (BLIT) which skips the layer of the Windows subsystem that the likes of Matrox DVDmax hooked into. PureVideo (Parhelia) has some uncompressed hooks that work with MediaPlayer I believe.

If a TV-out card happens to use a video encoder with a BT656 output, a $100 adapter can be used to give SDI output from the TV-out function with no analogue losses [cf http://www.pmsvideo.com ]. Assuming a few things like framerate and aspect ratio are good. OK, this is more than a bit "space cadet".

DV is pretty shiny and uncompressed has other costs associated. It just seems that the "external monitor" choice to always re-encode (unless untouched) video isn't necessarily what folk want. Especially if their targets are DVD.

I agree that the convenience of the DV preview (for all media types) is a brillaint start point. Far better than the Premiere6.x way of having to be using DV sources to get a DV preview. Premiere6.x on a G450 gives a DV preview concurrently with a TV-out preview. If MJPEG, you get a windowed preview and TV-out on Premiere6.x. The windows desktop preview in Premeire drops frames in the hope to keep it all going out to directshow/DV.

Please don't take this wrong - I prefer Vegas for pretty much everything, but I like to compare exactly how it compares with its competition.

I am not sure what Matrox would write whilst Vegas uses a private OHCI structure and bit-blits the preview window.

If VGA/DVI cards continue their trend towards precise support standard HD rates - then I think more credence will be given to my technical prompt.

Most video-out implementations are somewhat device independent. So that is why I've commented on directshow so much. PCI overlay display surfaces might be available though another library and still be able to be pushed onto a TV-out, not sure.

My DV camera is probably about as well made, SVIDEO out wise, as the Parhelia. I don't have anything better for signal quality than either of these and I think I'm in company with other amateurs here in the same boat.

Wouldn't it be another string to the bow, and not just out of its mind?
I guess once previewed as DV, rendering out to uncompressed for the BMD Decklink or NewTek VT to send out to SDI is going to be satisfying enough.