Which encoder card?

[bearings]

Hi,

Could anyone help as to which encoder card is the best to buy for what I need.

Basically I have been creating a visual mix to 1hr 20 mins of music. I have been creating this since Feb this year.

I have lots of small clips either bought or filmed myself that have effects/filters/keyframes, etc used in premiere. Most of the clips are 1-5 seconds long and are looped and plotted along a timeline in Premier 6.5

At any one time there can be up to 5 or 6 streams running together using filters and transitions. A music video basically. Dance music visuals.

Adobe Premiere Project file sizes:
Un rendered PPJ files

Track 1 - 2,242Mb
Track 2 - 19,845Mb
Track 3 - 616Kb
Track 4 - 1,730Mb
Track 5 - 993Kb
Track 6 - 2,357Mb
Track 7 - 3,203Mb
Track 8 - 4,422|Mb
Track 9 - 1,875Mb

These are the file sizes of the Premiere files that I have finished.

Each one takes anything between 6 - 16 hours to render to MPEG2.

Basically, I have looked at Canopus, Matrox and Pinnacle stuff but am still unsure which one is the best.

I figure I am looking for 5 stream encoding to MPEG2 amongst others. Realtime scratch of the timeline for which I am using AVI, DV, MOV, MPEG clips. Some 5 second clips take 20 mins to render using the built in software encoder, just to see how my transitions and effects look and then I have re-encode if I change one tiny aspect and wait another 20 minutes.

PC Specs:

K Series Motherboard
AMD 1700XP Athlon CPU
Windows XP Pro
512Mb RAM
GeForce 2 MX 400 64Mb
40Gb Boot Drive IDE 7200
60Gb Data Drive IDE 7200
80Gb Data Drive IDE 7200 8Mb Cache

Software Specs:

Adobe Premiere 6.5
Direct X 9

Would like to get a decent card which wouldn't need upgrading for a while.

I am finding it hard to distinguish between all the features of the high end cards such as the Matrox RTX100 and Canopus equivalents.

If anyone could shed some light on this for me I would be most grateful.

Kind Ragards

John

[andkiich]

Most if not all of the capture cards with built in MPEG2 are only good for real time capture. If you're wanting to do encodes of files already on your machine, I think you're stuck with software encodes.

[pijetro]

I am by no means an expert on this, but i have seen the Matrox do what you're wanting, and would nudge you in that route. There's different Matrox makes, so check their web site. I was impressed with it's compatibility with Premiere, and was impressed with its 1:1 encoding time, and instant transition viewing. No render waiting. Quality was very good.

From what I've read it seems that the Canopus users get the most out of .AVI editing, especially when the product goes back to tape. This doesn't mean though, that their ProCoder product is lacking. Many people love it...

Pinnacle seems to be the one that you either love or hate, and has the most hardware compatibility issues. (judging from other posts)...

Either way, the Canopus, and Matrox use their proprietary codecs to do "on the fly" transitions (yummy speed), for instant viewing on your Premiere timeline.
The rest is up to you as far as visual, and financial needs are....

Hope that helps.
Good luck!!!!!!

[gmatov]

This might be a silly question to ask, but this is an ideal place to ask it, as it may be relevant.

TV out works pretty well with most decent cards, at least with my 3dFX, it does.

Is it possible to go TV out to TV in on the cap card.?

The output might take so many CPU cycles that there are not enough for the capture.

I've never tried it, am going to have to.