[Lee O.]

Jason,

I too have the MXO2 mini and have been afraid to try the upgrade to 2015.3 since everything is working with 2015.2! I’m darn sure not trying 2017. Everything working for you in 2015.3 now?

Are you also still on Windows 7? I’ve heard some folks have it working on Windows 10 with the last drivers released from Matrox. It’s SO frustrating that such a nice, perfectly serviceable piece of hardware is being ignored.

[Lee O.]

I think what Lauren is looking for is to expand the dynamic range of an audio clip in general. I’m not in front of my editing computer right now, but I’m pretty sure under the dynamics processing effect in Audition you can select an expander preset and tweak that as you wish, or design one. When I’m not on this notebook PC I can look more specifically. You’d basically be doing the opposite of what I’ve done at times to try and tame dramatic peaks. So yeah, look under dynamics processing for an expander.

[Lee O.]

I’ve been archiving old home videos and uploading them to YouTube (using PP CC’s YouTube SD 480p H.264 export), and I get this message every time too despite there being no apparent problem. No complex edits, just simple cuts and some titles. I just figured it was something odd in the signal from the ol’ VHS and VHS-C tapes, but now who knows. I choose to ignore it like my “check engine” light. 😉

[Lee O.]

Thanks, Robert, for the reply. Since at the moment I’m merely getting all my footage onto the system and making backup DVDs, I haven’t done anything else with it. However, I plan to do what you described (zoom to fill a 16×9 frame) then combine with HDV, and I’m sure I’ll be asking questions and sharing that experience. Later, I have a project idea which would combine 16×9 1080p footage from a DSLR with all manner of SD footage to make a retro video podcast, and that should be quite challenging regarding workflow and the best ways to de-interlace and zoom, etc.

[Lee O.]

I’ve seen old forum entries where people link to that, but the link doesn’t work. 🙁

Just says “This webpage is not available.”

[Lee O.]

Oki,

Thanks for the suggestion. Reading through that, it sounds like a bit more trouble than it’s worth for my 25 HDV tapes, though. Since I’m probably going to be buying a Matrox MX02 mini and renting PP CC6 (I can get a teacher discount), I’ll probably just wait and capture my HDV tapes then.

At least good ol’ CS4 will get me through these DV tapes for free. 😉

[Lee O.]

I totally understand about not wanting to waste time. I just want stuff to work.

To be clear, I don’t know FOR SURE that Windows 8.1 has Firewire drivers, but I would be SHOCKED if it didn’t. Firewire is an old, established i/o system. One system in my house has it built-in on the motherboard, and another one has it on a SoundBlaster sound card!

And now, after a moment of research, I find a page that should get you a driver if any card you buy doesn’t immediately work:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/usbcoreblog/archive/2014/09/10/announcing-the-availability-of-a-standalone-legacy-1394-ohci-firewire-package.aspx

Good luck with it.

[Lee O.]

Do you plan to (or want to) edit in the Mac world or the Windows world? That would answer the question for me right there. Otherwise, the Windows PC hardware will be much cheaper. Any Firewire card that works at all will work perfectly. Windows will likely install its own drivers and recognize it immediately. Premiere will make an .avi file on a Windows machine and, I believe, a .mov file on a Mac, but the data is the same from the tape. An HDV tape generates a .mpeg on a Windows machine. I wish I knew anything about Mac / thunderbolt hardware.

[Lee O.]

Thank you so much, Jeff!

Sounds like there’s no harm in me starting my capturing project, at least with the DV and HDV. No loss, generic DV and HDV .avi’s it is!

The analog-to-digital capturing is more involved, apparently. I also had a Matrox editing product, the RT.X100. It did indeed use a proprietary Matrox Motion-JPEG codec for DV and any analog signal that was captured. It looked nice, and was the only way you could do real-time effects or send it out to an NTSC TV, but you couldn’t just take the .avi’s to another computer without that codec. I recall experimenting once with it vs. capture via camcorder pass-through, and did notice precisely what you describe, although subtle. The color seemed richer on the Matrox encoded file, but the camcorder just plowed right on through problem tapes. SUBTLE is the keyword here, and I wasn’t sure if I was experiencing a placebo effect when I thought the Matrox file looked a bit better.

Another worry of mine was that with camcorder pass through, you couldn’t set audio levels, so a loud audio signal from a hi-fi track might get even more compressed by the auto-leveling in the camcorder. And as I type that, I wonder now if I could set audio levels manually on that Panasonic camcorder during pass-through. Hmmm.

Anyway, the computer with the old Matrox RT.X100 died before massive archiving became practical with giant cheap storage, so I never used it to do what I want to do now. Sounds like to satisfy my image quality OCD, I need to get something like that MXO2 mini. But if I wait too long, I may never get going. Don’t want perfect to be enemy of good, ya know. 🙂

My next question will be about best methods for de-interlacing, when you want to use tons of interlaced footage in a project with modern non-interlaced HD footage, or simply when exporting to a H.264 file. De-interlacing with CS4 isn’t particularly pleasing. I assume that should be put in another topic.

Again, thanks for the help.

[Lee O.]

Take the inverse of a center channel cut and see what you get (center channel extractor, filtered for female voice in this case). Your speaker is in the middle so you can at least cut out the voices on the left and right. Since your speaker is the loudest voice (although not by much) you can also do a bit of dynamic processing to expand any part of the signal above about -15db. It’s not magic, but it’ll help some. I tried it on your sample, and can e-mail you the results if you like.