• Adobe After Effects

  MXO2 Mini not displaying accurate preview

  Posted by Tim Johnston on January 26, 2011 at 3:11 am

  Hi all,

  I just got a Matrox MXO2 mini, and was looking forward to accurate previews in After Effects. But for some reason, all of my previewing shows up as the wrong size on the monitor. Only the elements in the center of my 720p comp show up on my 1920×1200 monitor, and if I place elements outside of that limited area, they go off the screen. Also, most of the elements look interlaced, with flickering. I’m using the HDMI output from the MXO2 mini straight to my preview monitor, and I’ve tried many of the output options in the menu:

  AE > Preferences > Video Preview > Output Mode

  But they all seem to preview at the same size.

  Output monitoring looks beautiful and accurate in FCP, but I can’t figure out how to make it work in AE. Any ideas?

  Thanks in advance!

  Tim Johnston replied 15 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Tim Johnston

  January 26, 2011 at 3:15 am

  OK, after tooling with it a bit, I have another clue. It seems I can control the output setting by changing the preferences here:

  System Preferences > Matrox MXO2 Mini > WYSIWYG > Video Format

  But changing the output within AE does nothing. This seems like odd behavior to me (that you can’t control the output from AE directly), but maybe there’s something I’m not understanding here.

  Also, here are my system settings:

  Mac Pro 2×2.27GHz
  8GB RAM
  OSX 10.6.6
  Matrox MXO2 mini (desktop)
  fw 11.1
  sw 2.1.1.0050
  AE 10.0.1.19

  Thanks again in advance!
• 

  Bret Williams

  March 9, 2011 at 7:04 am

  I have nearly the exact same system specs and am having the same problem. It seem that during scrubbing it’s utilizing the AE video preview settings, and during pause or other times it’s the wysiwyg settings.

  It’s a mess and I can’t believe the forums aren’t afire with talk.

  Did you ever find a solution? I’ve even tried the beta 2.2 drivers.
• 

  Bret Williams

  March 9, 2011 at 3:42 pm

  I realize that this thread is a couple months old, but since you had the exact same problem I thought I’d post. The solution is to go back to the 1.9.1 drivers. They’re solid for AE and FCP. Just don’t have Avid or WYSIWYG features. And matrox tends to lose hdmi connection when the system goes to sleep on my system.
• 

  Tim Johnston

  March 9, 2011 at 4:12 pm

  Wow, thanks for doing the leg-work to figure that out! Where might one find the 1.9.1 drivers? Probably not relevant for me, since I need to use it with Avid.

  I did figure out, though, that is looks fine as long as all of your alpha layers are matted. Any alpha layer that isn’t on top of another solid or video layer will just look scrambled and like garbage. Once it’s matted over something else it looks fine through WYSIWYG. Think I’m going to just carry on with latest drivers, and keep in mind that I need to mat everything to get a decent preview.

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