Nahh...you don't need all that. But it's a sweet card, isn't it?
As long as you've got a 2.6 proc or faster, and a gig of RAM, HDV is your baby. Slower CPU's work too, but it's gonna be painful.

i hope this Parhelia will have a better mpeg hardware encoder than my old Parhelia ... because for mpeg playback the matrox really was not great compared to any nvidia or ati recent card ..

everything else was great though ..

It's a PCI Express card. You'll definitely need some new hardware if you haven't bumped up to PCI Express yet.

Many PCI Express motherboards use DDR1 but you'd still need the mbd, cpu, and probably a power supply. The new PSUs have more pins in the main power connector but the power socket on the board is supposed to be backwards compatible. Same with the new 4 pin connectors for CPU fans-you can use an older 3 pin connecctor. I think I'd get a new PSU anyway.

All the new hardware should fit into existing cases, although some high end graphics cards have huge fans that prevent you from using the 1st PCI slot. Or, sometimes the GPU fan brackets actually hang up on the lock levers for the DIMMs.

Rob Mack

So the question is, will Vegas let us use the cards component outputs as the preview monitor?
I guess I know what the answer will be but we, the lowly users, live in hope.
Bob.

From the Matrox press release down near the bottom:

"Bundled software includes: ..... and WYSIWYG video output plug-ins for Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Adobe After Effects®, Adobe Photoshop®, Discreet™ Combustion® 3, Discreet 3ds max™ and NewTek LightWave 3D®. "

Anybody know what this is all about? My G550 gives me great WYSIWYG from Vegas without (as far as I know) any Matrox/Vegas custom software or drivers.

Video output is different than display output. What you see on a computer monitor is display, what you see on an external monitor, such as a broadcast monitor, is video. Big difference. The Matrox card allows for 2 displays and a video monitor, or 3 displays and no video monitor.