[Aaron Strader]

I’d hedge my bets against self made enclosures. We had run through test for generic enclosure with a hard drive and failed to find one that could stand up to heavy daily use. Either the USB port would wear out, or the controller in the box would fail, or the power supply wasn’t up to snuff. I heavily recommend either a Lacie drive or Seagate drive. Lacie’s drives have been consistently crash free for us, and they look slick to boot.

-Aaron

https://www.stopfcc.com/
Knock it off! I like my radio and television the way it is…

[Aaron Strader]

I assume you’re referring to what something like the cineform codec is going to do with your footage. This won’t always be the case. We’re real early in the development of HDV. Within a few months we’ll have decent hardware rendering solutions that will process HDV footage in realtime just like you get with DV.

Matrox has already announced that the Axio will feature this on it’s next driver set, which should be along before the end of the year.

https://www.matrox.com/video/press/releases/hdv_dvcpro_hd_editing.cfm

I’d bet good money that it won’t stop there. I would imagine realtime HDV decoder cards will get very big soon.

-Aaron

https://www.stopfcc.com/
Knock it off! I like my radio and television the way it is…

[Aaron Strader]

As both an editor and a DVD compressing/backup kinda guy, I’ve needed this quite a bit. Here’s what I’ve done.

You need to get two programs.

DVD2AVI

and

VirtualDubMod (This version has MPEG2 support built into the software)

What DVD2AVI will do is strip the VOB into a M2V file and a seperate audio file (PCM, AC-3, etc.) If you’re wanting to re-edit it, you’ll need to rip the AC-3 as a WAV (which is a supported option) and have an M2V file and a WAV. From there you can use VirtualDubMod, and rejoin the M2V and it’s audio file back into a single AVI.

This is no lie, it will take a LONG time. 10 minutes of video can take up to half an hour to reencode. I’ve seen 30 minutes of video take 4 hours to recompress at times, but you can do it in any codec installed on your computer. I’ve used old projects out on DVD and reripped their footage back into the project on my RTx100. With the hardware, I’ve got supported realtime footage after it’s converted.

https://www.videohelp.com was a good recommended site, but you will have to dig through an awful lot of FAQs and how-to’s to get what you need.

https://www.doom9.net has some good individual writeups on each software package.

-Aaron

https://www.stopfcc.com/
Knock it off! I like my radio and television the way it is…

[Aaron Strader]

If you can find someone local who has a Tricaster or a Video Toaster 4, those two will do everything you’re looking to do. Rent it off ’em and you’re good to go.

[Aaron Strader]

Unless you’re looking for specific features that Scenarist offers, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole personally.

https://www.sonic.com/products/Professional/Scenarist/compare.aspx

It’s too much like ReelDVD for my taste, in terms of design.

You shouldn’t confuse the complexity and features of the software with the capability to create a competent looking DVD. I manage just fine with Encore, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

[Aaron Strader]

Another popular one is Ayatoweb.

It’s a bit of work getting the instructions to make sense, but all the effects work.

https://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e.html

[Aaron Strader]

AMD based motherboards are so TOTALLY not recommended for RTx100’s.

There’s an issue with PCI bandwidth that’s difficult to resolve on AMD based systems. It’s one of the reasons why Matrox has 2 approved AMD boards on their list.

Check this list for approved Matrox hardware configurations.
https://www.matrox.com/video/support/rtx100xtremepro/rec/mb/home.cfm

They have a PCI Optimizer that MAY help resolve this issue, but it’s not a guarantee like switching hardware. A P4 based system is going to be your best bet with the Matrox hardware.

Here’s a link to the PCI optimizer. I am not guaranteeing that any of this will work, but it’s worth a shot.

My ultimate recommendation would be to change hardware, but I know that’s not always feasible for homebrew systems.

[Aaron Strader]

It sounds like it could be memory issues.

If you’re doing any time intensive video projects, those tend to lend heavy on the memory.

If you have some way to have your memory swapped out, you could check this out pretty quickly.

Take your rig over to a PC repair shop and have them troubleshoot it and see what’s going down…

[Aaron Strader]

Yeah, I agree.

I’ve learned a lot off of this site.

I work with a lot of schools (HS and College) and kids HAVE AE on their computers but out of 30 kids, maybe 2 will know anything at all about AE. So, when I’m there around kids, I’m chatting them up on the importance of the software and how necessary it is to know it to get anywhere professionally in the industry.

Good lord. I would have given anything to have my school district have AE in class when I grew up. We had two VHS decks and a Videonics titler keyboard. The titler had NO overlay features in it as I recall.

Sad thing is… I’m not even old.

[Aaron Strader]

I’ve found the Random Edits plugin with the Sapphire plugins does the job nicely.

Random Edits needs text with some predone movements. Applying Random Edits to this layer will animate it with random movement from the base animation you setup.

You can download the demo and see it in action.

Also, you could try animating a particle with text as your particle. Particle Illusion has some presets that do this quite well.