Use FIREWIRE for external preview!

PLease explain, do i just place the pointer over the preview window and drag in the direction of the TV? I am at work now so i will have to try it tonight but if i am not understanding you plase explain.
Thanks so much for responding.

Vegas won't do what you want but Premiere will, even on a G450 (but with 16bit color on G450).

One or more of these would solve this, the later ones are compromises:
1. No WYSIWYG drivers yet for Parhelia on Vegas.
2. Vegas needs an external preview into DirectShow into which PureVideo drivers from matrox could hook in and show your scrub/pre-render on your TV monitor. ***
3. Clone one of your display adapters onto your TV-out and stretch the window just ever so slightly to reduce the present of the Vegas outer window. (hopeless for AR quality checks)

***Vegas uses bit block image transfers instead of an overlay layer for the viewport you see inside Vegas. Matrox (and almost anything that pinches a window from an app) needs directshow overlay surfaces. Vegas does however permit, when connected, an on-the-fly compression to DV (where the video has been touched, or passthrough if untouched) for output to an OHCI device. Shame when a lower CPU codec could be used that could go out of Parhelia. Whether Vegas would have to render this through a dummy (null) codec, or if the slightly different AVI-codec=NONE could be have a tee piece inserted for Parhelia - I'm not quite certain. Matrox 'G' series doesn't work with AVI-codec=NONE even in Adobe Premiere.

PS - Premiere isn't better overall. However support for video centric VGA manufacturers does seem to be better in AP for the time being.

Thanks. The whole reason i bought the card was to eliminate having to run from my card to a GL1 then to the tv. The 1394 card and the bay both have only input for S-video and composite conections, no output, unless it is through the dv ilink which still makes me go back throught the camera before i can go to tv via S-videofrom the camera using it's passhtrough capability.

B

So untill vegas adds the feature you mentioned, i still have to use some sort of passthrough device to see a broadcast version of the project i am working on? I can do this but for a display card that cost as much as the Parhelia, you'd think this would have been standard. Oh well, guess i should read more before buying!

Thanks.

With my Parhelia the media player sends video to the tv as does Power DVD
when playing and also the capture as you have said. SOFO says to use the
Converter on the firewire connection to view previewing although the Parhelia
tv image is good enough where I cannot tell the difference.

JJK

OK, i think i am getting close. So what do i need to have running to get the display to show up. Here is how it is setup now....

I have a Canopus 1394 capture card along with the internal bay(front panel access)
I have my SVHS running to the bay via Svideo and composite video along with the audio inputs.
My Parhelia is running 2 monitors and the third to my Tv display. now for some reason, it will display tv or video when i turn on the capture video feature because it see's the 1394 device as a camera i guess and it displays to the tv only while i am capturing through the card. When i close that window and import the captured file to the timeline in Vegas, the preview to external monitor is not displaying. I apologize for repeating myself but it sounds like you may know a way around this and i need to understand how or what you did better. You can email at my work at ...

bkean@burkhartdental.com

Thanks

Bryan

I would look into the ACEDvio from Canopus, it allows you to have the preview right out of the card without having to pass through and other device. I love it, it is so much of a pain in the a$$ always having to drag out your video camera just so you can get a preview on a external monitor.

JJKizak is using rendered media.
If you render out of Vegas, small area or entire work - most codecs (not uncompressed/NONE), will render out of DVDmax/PureVideo full screen 10bit gigacolor onto your TV-out.

Individual frames from the Vegas timeline can be placed into the clipboard from the preview window. It is possible to have these immediately placed into a directshow rendering through 3rd party paint apps or other tools.

The workaround is to render small sections and hit the "Open" so that mediaplayer gets a shot at the media - then it goes out. There are good reasons for Vegas' viewport drawing technique - most of them show up the competition for instance. However I don't see that having the DV OHCI external monitor is the only way to preview - a preview through directshow is sorely missed in V4.

Parhelia isn't a waste of money from the single slot integration (triple-play) point of view alone. Path to excellent digital-mode DVI-I. It is a pricey card but it has the best res from the manufacturer and has been regarded as the best signal quality - particularly for the video - of all sub $1000 cards. The single display spanned across multiple monitors is also good to evade Microsoft/intel's "PCI" overlay surface limitation.

Enjoy your Parhelia and watch for Sonic Foundry or 3rd party support for your needs.
To really have it, video out through Parhelia needs to be for scrubbing, pre-rendered media and preview.

If SoFo get it just right, the cheaper P750 will be the entry point for serving both DV, MJPEG and uncompressed video out of SVIDEO (and with the right cable RGB/YCrCb). With a specific DVB ATI card, it and OHCI MPEG-2-TS might also give HD output from Vegas - on the cheap.

Thanks, i will definatley look into that, i just wish i had known a couple of weeks ago since i just bought the 1394 and bay. Oh well, hello EBAY.

Thanks for all your help.

We've been chatting with Matrox about maybe supporting the TV Out on the Parhelia, but we're not sure if there's much demand for it, and we've a finite development team. How many of you have or would get a Parhelia to use the TV Out functionality, and why would that be better than using the 1394 output that already exists?
///d@

I -might- which doesn't answer your question one way or another; what I was in hopes for was to be able to preview on the SVid out of my GeForce card. If there's no hope of that, then I'll either get something like what is described, or an external firewire-Svid box. What I definitely do NOT want to do is to have a dv cam in the middle, if at all possible.

thanks,
David

Since I already have the Canopus and the Parhelia thoughts were rolling around
in my brain about using the Parhelia TV out for something else, but haven't
put a finger on it yet. The Canopus preview works just fine unless going
out the parhelia will eliminate some of the FX jitter when too many fx's are
applied. Every video path I have goes thru a JVC JX-S700 so many things are
possible, but the Parhelia can output the capture, media player, and POwerDVD
to another TV set.

JJK

The main reason it'd be better would be higher frame rates. On my system I can get 29.97fps in the preview window onscreen, but it drops to around 25fps for firewire output especially if any effects are involved. I always get higher throughput on the preview window.

I suspect it's because Vegas is having to perform on-the-fly DV recompression, and for 24P material Vegas is also having to perform on-the-fly pulldown insertion. Neither of those steps are necessary for the computer display, right? So you get a higher frame rate, and the Parhelia would automatically translate that into NTSC.

With that said, I don't know that someone should go spending the money for a Parhelia-class card just to get that small improvement in frame rate, and I don't know how many customers would be benefitted (or at what cost: what else is your development team cooking up?)

REMEMBERING THAT SONIC FOUNDRY ASKED US TO EXPLAIN *W*H*Y* WE WOULD WANT THIS SUPPORT ASWELL AS TO EXPRESS INTEREST:

I don't think that to say "it would be cheaper than an external DV converter" or "I don't want to wear out my camera just to convert DV onto my preview monitor" cuts it. Sonic Foundry want to know exactly what benefits having this feature has and why that is important to you.

On the same lines as ICExpo here........
Performance even with DV media would be one reason. The on-the-fly render to DV of the selected quality level is somewhat redundant. Quality level needs some adjustment - but to not take advantage of a common feature of a modern graphics cards seems a pity. Taking the I/O classification of Vegas outside the label of "DV centric" would be another reason to provide alternative preview hardware support.

Being able to acquire uncompressed D1 4:2:2 albeit with SVIDEO for US$60 is desirable with the speed of the current cheap end storage technology. So going out for a similar price point (P750) would be attractive. Matrox place the Parhelia as the only board with WYSIWYG uncompressed support. G series cards TV-out being limited to a 16bit palette and it being necessary for a compression codec to be used so that DVDmax kicks in (by jumping in at the directx graph rendering phase, subject to the contention to only having one surface, and only 1 port for TV-out).

As I understand it, RGB and YUVY/YUY2 mode directx overlay surfaces can be acquired by Matrox, NVIDIA and ATI cards. If no compression codec is used - I believe the Parhelia drivers can even take and put it out to the gigacolour TV-out (typically SVIDEO again). The use of a Sonic Foundry custom built "null-codec" could possibly allow Matrox,NVIDIA and ATI to support uncompressed video out to 8bit/10bit SVIDEO - the directx graph rendering being the key axis for the TV-out to be engaged.

DirectX overlay surfaces might I guess be less efficient than purchasing a license from Matrox to have the WYSIWYG SDK and the programming effort at Sonic Foundry. However it surely be more attractive to use a generic windows subsystem for TV-out, even if a new codec, or a requirement to use MJPEG (lossless or 2:1 perhaps) was the best it could achieve.

As Vegas went forward, the ability to use a windows subsystem to generate a DV-MPEG-2-SD or DV-MPEG-2-HD could perhaps be created through Windows code instead of a joint MainConcept development. ATI cards support some HD output formats for DVB media they capture don't they? - thinking ahead for upconversion options on the next gen PCs.

I would have bought a Parhelia by now - if Vegas supported preview.
Where I have uncompressed or 4:2:2 media - I use an external player after rendering.

An example of where not having DV preview is important - is when you are trying to get a nice key and the edges and colors are abrupt. The mosquito noise and poor sub-sampling of DV ends up with quite a variation on some of the controls with no apparent change in the compressed output. Perhaps this isn't where the large majority of users are operating. However it seems a pity to hobble the capabilities of Vegas. Uncompressed is one of its generic formats (kind of a silly statement to make as most things in an NLE are done in uncompressed display memory space).

Please seriously consider the external preview / PTT to directx or Matrox WYSIWYG (DVDmax/PureVideo). The only thing better than that would be SDI SD input/output/preview - which would be a "smaller" market to magnetise yet again.

PS I almost thought that windows had a standard TV-video-out capability in VfW. Having seen references made to it on the Silicon Graphics Premiere based workstations. Yet I think this was a specific case that didn't catch on or get ported to the WDM API.

I don't think that I am the only one who would trust a recording from a Perhelia to VHS/BetaSP/Betacam IMX/D9 (before that of an nvidia or ATI oriented advanced "gamester" card). I'm more confident having overcome my Matrox G450 field dominance quirks.

It would be a coup indeed to have all that HD support in Vegas with uncompressed SD preview!

Well, I for one would have bought a Parhelia if it could have provided TV preview for Vegas. I almost did... until I read a few of the comments here!

Yes!
TV out please!
And have Matrox cut the price in half :-)

Joel

I wouldn't buy a Matrox card solely for TV out capability. There would have to be some serious advantage to get me to switch from my ATI Radeon card...such as improved palyback frame rate, for example.

Regards,
Doug Graham

I use a parhelia i would use vegas wysiwyg plug in for it if it exsisted ..

If SonicFoundry provides the capability I will buy the Matrox card. It would be great not to have to go through a 1394 device just to get a window out to the Monitor.

Support within Vegas for Matrox TV-Out would be a *huge* plus for me - it's my #1 wish for future Vegas features.

Yes, i would buy a Parhelia if Vegas supported its TV Out function. I think it would be better than using the existing 1394 output for the same reasons as listed by RBartlett above.