Apple

As I progress on completing my 9600, the next task is getting my Avid cards working.
I have an Avid TrueVision video I/O card as well as the additional JPEG PCI board and the ribbon cable that connects the two together.
while I can get the VGA output on the TrueVision board to work no problem, the system does not see the other video I/O (IE. no video input) nor does it detect the JPEG card. This probably means I need a driver for both cards however so far I have not found much.
I'm not the only one who is also looking for the drivers. Another one of my friends also picked up an Avid-Ready 9600 and of course, neither had a hard drive so we could not extract the extensions/INITs and use them on our system.

I don't know about Avid drivers but you should be able to find the old Targa 2000 drivers online. If not I think I have them. Pinnacle bought Truevision but I could never find the Targa stuff by going through their website. I always had to do a search through google to get the right page. Can't find it at the moment.

Do you have any info on that second PCI card? Does it handle the MJPEG compression? The Targa manuals had a page or two on an Abekas (spelling?) 3D effects card that could be added but I've never seen any info on it or seen the Avid board called that. That small square daughterboard on the main card is normally where the compression hardware is on the Targas. There were a few different versions.

If you haven't, post over at 68kmla.net.

The best information I can get from the card is "PCI Mandrill 0030-00167-0" which googling does not bring up much.

Perhaps a photo of the *other* sides of both boards might be slightly more helpful.

Looks like a Targa 2000 RTX, the one which included real-time effects. I guess your model originally included the break-out-panel instead of the more standard break-out-cable.

Hmm. These sytems obviously didn't come with breakout boxes but we did source some breakout cables though my cable is in a workshop in Vancouver right now :/.
If it helps, I'll go and completely dismantle both cards. Just tell me and I'll pull the cards out again.

I seem to remember more "stuff" on the daughtercard on the DTX and RTX versions. The Targa stuff shows up on ebay relatively often and lately dirt cheap. I could barely give away a RTX and breakout box. Apparently the best thing for them on the PC side is Discreet Edit.

Well, I could be wrong... but I think the two boards I had used to run Avid MCXpress. The first was a Targa 1000 Pro/PCI, and the second one a Targa 2000 Pro/PCI. I think all of them were three-pieces cards; you know a longer board and two daughter boards. A friend of mine also had a 2000 RTX, which included a rack mounted break-out-box.

I also seem to recall they worked with Premiere 4.2, 5.1, and 5.5 ...and I think also existed some plug-in for After Effects? I'm not sure of this.

And I'm pretty sure all of them worked pretty fine with several releases of SpeedRazor.

I checked the cards in the Apple System Profiler (I never realized how handy it is until now) two cardslisted are a Truevision, Targa 2000PCI and an Avid, PCI-Janus board.

Well, I only had two Mac's on my whole life, and one was a Performa and the other one a 9100... but none of them had any A/V options, and I've never heared about your PCI-Janus board... all my whole experience with Targa was under PC Win NT 4.0, and some hacks to get them running under Win 2K Pro. I seem to recall for these age I was pretty anxious to have the Truevision setup working with as many softwares I could find for the platform, and indeed I've tried a lot.

And after months of hard work, a customer of mine decided to buy from me the 2000 Pro/PCI... and he was indeed a very happy owner of it for about two months, until he accidentally plugged the composite video input to the wrong RCA female, and burned up the whole input section of the board...

So, advice given: be careful with the Targa inputs... they are a bit picky, and you can burn the chips either thru static discharge, or a wrong connection that some other hardware would forgive you (i.e.: an audio output)... other than that; excellent boards, with perhaps the clearest White Balance around... but for some reason the input section seems to be a bit more fragile than others like Miro DC30+, Fast A/V Master, etc... maybe others could help a bit more here (Dr. Dave? )

Be sure to connect your system to a good GND binding post around. Anyway, I was a happy Targa owner (two systems) for about three years and never had a problem. In fact I'm sure I must have over there some (PC) apps, drivers, plug-ins, tools, etc... but hard to tell if I could find them now!

Hey!, post pictures once you have the whole setup running!
All the best,
Diego

Ah, so this is a rather nice card then.
I'll try and get pics up once I figure out where on earth to locate those blasted drivers and start working on videos.

Yes, the input/output and capture/playback quality is impressive! ...the Truevision stuff works well on the lines of DPS, and I think is well above the video quality from Miro DC30+ or Fast A/V Master. You know, Targa is very nice hardware stuff.

I think the video quality for composite in/out is also on the lines of the onboard video setup from SGI VW320 or the AV1 module from SGI O2.

I could not tell you how good it looks when you record from components because the only stuff for component signals I had was an italian 33" Seleco PAL-B monitor (which was excellent too), and never had any source for video on components myself... but I guess if you use the separated components for both in/out, then the quality will be outstanding.

So, as you can see; you have a nice setup there! It costed many thousands a few years ago!
I guess the PCI-Janus could be probably some kind of hardware acceleration for transitions and filters... but don't take my word, since I'm only wild guessing. The real-time stuff on the RTX line from Targa was a sort of digitally controllable mixer, so when you add a transition or filter to the timeline, the effect is "mapped" to the required parameters to control real-time the video DSP for each layer. I don't know if this is the same as your Janus.

Well... good luck with your search! All the best,
Diego

Hi, I'm a newbie.
I worked on these cards back in '96 when they just came out - The station I was employed at bought a PC version of AVID MCXpress. It was one of the first releases, and needless to say the box was extremely unstable. But the cards delivered a quality that had to be seen to be believed. And up to now I have not been able to use a better interface than taht MCXPress. I was up and running with it within hours, it was so intuitive. I've been able to buy an RTX board and the MCXpress software but cannot find the drivers. That original board ran on NT; I am wondering if anyone really made it work on any other platform? The 3d effects software shipped with this board is called ELASTIC REALITY, for those who wanted to know. Would really appreciate the driver location, if anyone out there has it!

Hi there, BoogWar. I have almost each driver that TrueVision released at the date... and I was able to make it work also with Windows 2000 Professional. I've used the two Targa boards I've owned with MCXPress and SpeedRazor (the last one never was too stable), and never had the chance to exploit the full potential, but I agree with you... the quality was impressive!

Only problem, I don't know where should I look for the drivers inside my more than 2000 CD-R based backups... if you are not too hurried, I could try to check around the weekend or next week. All the best,
Diego

Old thread I know, but I must have skipped over this before. Diego, how weer you able to get the Targa cards working under Win 2K? They weren't supported past NT and all the questions I've ever seen regarding running them under 2000 were responded to with the answer that it was impossible.

Hey there, QuicksilverG4.

Well... to be honest, you'll not need to do nothing special at all. The fact is, that Win2KPro does not seem to reckon the Targa as a Plug-N-Play device, so the resources are basically unassigned... so, the key is simply try your board with every assgination of resources available on the Multimedia Tabs from Win2KPro, while you try all of those combinations with each free PCI slot.

[EDIT] ...and eventually you'll find a given setup that works as expected! [/EDIT]

Lots of users fail to obtain any success simply because the mainboard that they are using is assigning the PCI resources on a different way than the expected by the driver. But believe me... this is the only trick.

[EDIT] ...and I fail to see a fix for such kind of situations, but I'm sure they are a weird minory. [/EDIT]

At some point there was some kind of unnofficial couple of *.dll and *.sys files, to replace some original files... but none of them worked for me. Despite the fact that with those files the Targa board effectively appeared listed in the Hardware Explorer, as soon as any app using the board was launched, the driver crashed every time.

Please, bear in mind that I'm talking about things experimented by me about 12 years ago... but since I've offered support for a few customers, I'm completely sure that this was the way in which worked. Just try it, and if you happen to find any problem, feel free to drop me a P.M.

Also, it is not as if the Targa were the more stable A/V board over the planet... but I guess it behaved the same either under WinNT or Win2K... the video quality was simply outstanding, but the stability (to my humble opinion) was shamely poor.

[EDIT] ...summarizing, I guess it is a clear case where if you hold a bit of patience, you'll be paid. But it works. You can capture, play to video, and if you're lucky enough, also print the real time desktop to video.If you can't find the right combination of PCI slot and config, some features will be disabled. [/EDIT]

Thanks, if I come across another one cheap I'll try it with Win 2K. There's always OS 9 on the Mac too but I don't know if anything on that really takes advantage of the Targa 2000 like MCXpress and Discreet Edit on the PC.

Pentium, did you ever get anywhere with your Avid cards? That would be the OS 9 option I guess.

I managed to get teh breakout cables so I can actually use the card for video I/O but alas, the extensions/drivers/software still eludes me.

OK, well here's ISOs of the Windows and Mac drivers, etc for the Targa 1000/2000 in case you need them. It won't help with the other Avid boards but it should allow you to do captures at least.

http://home.comcast.net/~tmbannon/TARGA/TARGA_WIN.iso
http://home.comcast.net/~tmbannon/TARGA/TARGA_MAC.iso

I've come across posts from people who have tried to get Avid boards working in Macs but nothing too helpful yet. I saw a set of boards and dongles on ebay for something like $25 and that got me looking into this again.

Well, I'll be over here if anyone needs something else about Targa over Win2KPro!
I can't say it enough times, the video quality from Targa is impressive. I never finished to understand why the heck they don't pushed the drivers and the software side a bit more. Also, never tried any of them, but I guess the latest 3xxx Series from Targa should be something amazing to work with, and the driver model should be something more recent too. But probably they will score some higher $$$ to.