Vegas 4 and Matrox VFW driver

swattum wrote on 3/26/2003, 8:25 AM

Matrox has just released a VFW driver so that in theory, I can capture from my Matrox RT2500 card directly into Vegas (as opposed to using Premier to do the capture first).

I'm new to Vegas, and I'm having problems getting the VFW stuff to work - I suspect that I may just be doing something wrong with Vegas.

So, what I do is install the Matrox VFW driver, then in Vegas, I go to Preferences/Video Device and select "Video For Windows Standard" and one of the Matrox codecs listed, such as Matrox I-Frame or Matrox DV. Then I try to Capture Video, the capture application starts, and then throws an exception (write error in ntdll.dll) and produces a .dmp file.

I'm not sure if I'm selecting the correct stuff in Video Device. The Matrox VFW driver does show up in the device manager under "Sound, video and game controllers," "legacy video capture devices" as the "Maxtrox Video Capture Device" - but I'm not seeing anything that resembles this in the "Video for Windows Standard" pulldown list.

Has anyone played with this yet? If so, can you share with me what you did to get it to work? I've asked this on the Matrox forum, but no response yet, and though I'd ask here as it's really specific to how I get Vegas to see this VFW device.

Thanks,
--Scott

Comments

Sid_Phillips wrote on 3/26/2003, 9:10 AM

I had the 2500 and Premiere installed on my machine before buying Vegas Video 3.0. Never could get VV3 to work with any of the Matrox stuff. I believe it's all geared specifically to Premiere. But I haven't really missed anything, I've found that Vegas (I'm running 4.0 now) does everything I wanted without having any additional hardware, other than a FireWire card which I needed anyway for my drive.

I'd suggest ripping out the 2500, uninstalling all the Matrox and Adobe stuff, and installing a good FireWire card and using Vegas exclusively. I haven't regretted the decision for a second!

swattum wrote on 3/26/2003, 9:22 AM

I need the RT2500 for some analog capture (which it seems to be ok at doing). If it was just strictly DV and firewire I would have tossed the RT2500 long ago (and considered the $600 I spent a learning experience that you can't trust reviews written about products).

The entire goal behind Matrox releasing the VFW driver was so that the RT2500 could be used by software like Vegas rather than locking themselves into Premier.

Trichome wrote on 3/26/2003, 5:19 PM

I'm with Sid. I just did a similar gutting of a Matrox card and installed a simple firewire card on my machine at work [media company].

Now V4 is only editing software I open there.

swattum wrote on 3/26/2003, 7:38 PM

Thanks. I've learned the error of my ways and count myself lucky it only cost me $600. I did just purchase Vegas+DVD and have already accomplished in 2 hours more than I accomplished in 2 weeks with Matrox/Premier.

However, I still need to do resonable quality analog capture, and that's something that the Matrox card can at least seem to accomplish - so I was hoping to avoid using Premier at all using this new VFW driver.

All I'm looking for is if anyone else on this side of the fence might have tried this and if I'm doing something obviously stupid as far is trying to configure Vegas Capture is concerned.

Additional testing suggests that the very presence of the Matrox VFW driver on my system causes Vegas Capture to throw an exception, regardless of what I select in the Video for Windows drop down in Preferences/Video Capture.