Matrox Marvel G400-TV
Type: Analogue; Hardware: MPEG2. Price: $721.
Distributor: Focal Point Computing.
Ph: 03 9372 6600; Fax: 03 9372 6900
www.focalpoint.com.au
The Marvel G400 is certainly no newcomer to the Lab, I originally purchased a Marvel G200 a couple of years back and upgraded earlier this year to the G400 incarnation.
The medium-sized AGP card, in common with the ATI and ASUS we tested, is a combination of graphics card and video capture card. The Matrox G400 accelerator chip, fitted with a very robust heat sink, and 16MB of display memory provides graphics grunt and a Zoran ZR36060 chip takes care of the bulk of the video tasks. At first glance, the dearth of external connectors (there are only two of them) is a bit worrying. Both are D-sub connectors, one a standard VGA connector and the other a 26-pin connector that, with a quite large -snake-like" cable, connects to an external video breakout box. The Marvel cable also includes a pair of 3.5mm line-in and line-out audio connectors that link the breakout box to your sound cardâ€"the Marvel does not appear to provide native audio processing, instead it relies on your sound card.
The large breakout box includes S-video and composite video in and out with the latter accompanied by a pair of RCA audio in and out ports. A pair of patch cables for composite video/audio is provided to hook the Marvel up to your camera or VCR video in and video out ports. Another feature of the break out box is the inclusion of a TV tuner with an antenna cable connection, which allows the user to watch TV and grab images on the fly.
The installation process is a doddle thanks to the large fold-out, double-sided installation guide that is around the size of three A3 sheets and includes step-by-step installation with very clear diagrams. The Users Guide looks a substantial size until you discover it covers five languages and so only 31 pages are devoted to English. As a consequence it only covers the installation process in more detail. All other documentation is online.
Four software CDs ship with the Matrox, the installation CD includes a DVD player, the native capture and playback software that also functions as your TV Tuner -remote control" and an LSX MPEG2 software transcoder. The latter is provided to convert the native hardware compressed MJPEG format to MPEG2, which is considerably more space efficient but requires your CPU to carry out the transfer to MPEG2. Other software includes the game Tonic Trouble, Ulead's Photo Express 2 and Avid Cinema V1.0.
Avid Cinema is a basic video editing program, and it is very easy to use. The program layout is logical with four main -tabbed" sections from Storyboard through to Finish Movie for your final output. Novices can simply follow the tabs in order and at the end of the exercise will have produced a video that can be output to a VCR, or the Web, for example.
Editing is pretty minimalâ€"for example, we could clip the ends from a video clip but could find no way to break the clip into sub clips and reorder the pieces, you must import the clips as small segments if you wish to have the flexibility to swap scene order. The clips are all placed in a single video line on the timeline with a transition field, voiceover field and music field located below. Unfortunately, you cannot edit the clip's audio track either, but a voiceover and musical accompaniment can be included in the project. There is a good range of transitions and they are very easy to insert and implement. For Avid Cinema, the bottom line is that the program should be adequate for the novice user that simply wants to patch a couple of clips together with a transition or two and a title. If you want to do anything more flash than this then you will have to purchase a more upmarket software package.
When we unfairly compare the quality of the capture file and final edited output to the IEEE1394 based cards, the Matrox looks a bit paleâ€"literally. The colour saturation is quite low compared to the vivid, but realistic, final product from the DV cards. However when compared against the other -non-DV" cards, the Matrox actually stacks up quite well and was actually preferred over ATI's output and is literally streets ahead of the ASUS. It may not have hardware MPEG2 but it was far more stable on both the systems we installed the card and software on, when compared to the ATI.
4%
4%
