ToasterEdit

There is a light beside the Play button on ToasterEdit (and the DDR), when it’s lit, it
means everything that would need to be rendered has been rendered and that playback should proceed smoothly. However, you can play at any time, even if this light is not lit!
If you find that on your machine the BG rendering is intrusive on editing (it will always
run in the background in low priority, however some machines it might take more time than
desirable) you can specify in the preferences that BG rendering should wait longer before
kicking in.

The following are some performance tips when working with TEdit:

Use RTV files whenever possible, both for audio and video. These are far more efficient
than any of the other supported file formats due to our ability to read and write directly
from the disk with out the operating system providing any level of buffering or other
overheads. Use still images with alpha channel for titles instead of animated scrolls or
crawls. This uses much less PCI bandwidth.

Enable smooth scrolling in the preferences since this drastically improves the UI
performance within TEdit. On some configurations and with some graphics cards you might
notice glitches on output while performing heavy UI activity (hence the reason this is by
default disabled.) Your mileage might vary, but generally this makes editing even faster.
Ensure that you have enough system memory and run as few other applications outside of the T2 environment as possible. 256Mb is the minimum for efficient playback, however 512Mb will perform better. High bandwidth memory helps greatly (hence our system specs. Recommending PC800 RDRAM.)

Dual stream DDR playback problems and Misc. bandwidth issues

Some people have seen problems where playing back long transitions in the DDR, or maybe
performing transitions between two DDRs. The problem here is often that the PCI bandwidth on the machine is just not able to keep up with the uncompressed video demands. First thing to try is to play with the PCI Bandwidth settings and resource usage settings within Preferences. (btw. 64bit Disk controllers on a 64bit PCI card will help you get far better multi-stream uncompressed video playback with your Toaster.) It also helps to limit the number of live video streams coming into the Toaster (and thus using PCI bandwidth) which can easily be achieved by going into the Switcher and putting the Program, Preview, Key  onto the same row number, which is probably your DDR.

Glitching in playback of files (or when doing some UI operations)
Assuming that your clips are captured correctly (see below.) It is possible that if you have
a very fast drive array then it might actually cause video to glitch during playback! This is
because the VTNT needs to sustain 60Mb/s across the bus to allow two streams of video in and a single stream of video out. Now, if your disk  controller can burst data faster than ~40-
-50Mb/s it is quite possible that it will actually interrupt the steady flow of video data
across the bus. There is a way to control this, which is go to the preferences and you will
see a PCI bandwidth control that will enable you to limit the maximum transfer rate on drive
reads. The key to setting this correctly is to put it low (maybe 30Mb/s) and increase it until
you see glitches once again. Note that the default is deliberately set high since we do not
know exactly how low to take it to make all machines work reliably ... and if we did we might
be crippling some machines that can sustain faster PCI transfers. If you have a 64-bit disk
controller or dual PCI busses, you can select this from the preferences and you will be able
to push a huge number of simultaneous streams of  playback!

Audio playback

There is a misunderstanding about how Video Toaster [2] handles interleaved audio files.
When T2 loads an interleaved audio file (e.g. RTV interleaved, AVI, ASF, etc...) into
ToasterEdit or the DDR, it will start doing some pre-processing in the background to allow
it to play back this file efficiently when you have a "split" audio/video edit (i.e. the
audio that was recorded in the clip is no longer being played back in sync with the video
that is in the same clip.) While this processing occurs, a little "clock" icon will be
displayed on the clip. When this goes away you will be able to play back audio and video
with no problems. We do all this processing in the background, thus allowing you to continue
to add clips and edit within the DDR without needing to wait for this process to complete.
We will even allow you to scrub and play, but only the video portions will play until this
pre-processing has finished. This pre-processing step is actually saved into a temp folder
("NewTek Info") so the next time this clip is ever used no processing is required.

Compressed Capture

NewTek has designed a very open system that does not use "propriety" codecs, but rather
allows you to encode video using any available codec on your machine. Unfortunately, there
are many codecs that are just not fast enough to run in real-time; this is compounded by
the fact that most codecs do not use multiple threads to actually encode the video frames.
There are, however, codecs out there sufficiently fast to do real-time capture on our
specified system (or even lower). Codecs we have had success with include the PicVideo MJPEG codec http://jpg.com/products/ . This also has a wavelet codec that appears to be pretty quick as well. The DivX and Windows Media codecs are usually fast enough to record half resolution video. The DV codec is a difficult one because Microsoft did not allow its
current version of this codec to encode YUV video. So when used with the Toaster, it needs
to first be converted into RGB color space before it is even encoded! DV with interleaved
audio takes far more CPU to record than DV with uncompressed audio; both of these conform to the DV AVI standards and could be uploaded to a camera if you want, so choose the latter. (Note : the MS codec does not have this color space problem for playback) We have found that the Main Concept  DV codec can perform real-time DV encoding using the Toaster. You can get a demonstration version of this at www.mainconcept.com

Calibration of your Toaster

Because there are two video decoder chips on the Video Toaster card and breakout box, it
is possible that the same SX8 video channel, when coming into the switcher from the
two encoders at the same time (e.g. when Program row=1 and Preview row=2) might
not have exactly the same color on both channels. This would typically be seen as
a slight color"tint" when you perform a DVE. It might appear to occur randomly.

To calibrate your inputs fully you should follow these steps :
Open the switcher and decide what input type (Component, Composite on Row A, Composite on Row B, Composite on Row C or SVideo) you want to calibrate Put an input of this type in the switcher (drag fromVBob, or use right mouse menus) Open a DVE and move the TBar to a position where both video sources are visible on the output monitor at the same time.
(Alternatively, open two TVisions / Tscopes and put one of these to monitor the program row
while the other monitors the preview row. It is generally best to have the TScope in vector
mode since the calibration is generally in the chroma domain.) Open the preferences panel and calibrate these inputs using the relevant entry (e.g. "Composite U Delta (a)" and
"Composite VDelta (a)" for Composite input on row A.)

DV support.

The Video Toaster supports native DV playback and encoding. It also supports the live
decoding of input DV streams from cameras that are connected to a fire-wire card that you
might have in your machine. Inside the capture panel, you can record analog video and
encode it in real-time to a DV file (assuming that your machine is fast enough.) What the
capture panel doesn't do is import video footage through the Firewire cable and record it.
At this time, the capture panel is for the digitization of analog video only that is coming
into your VideoToaster card. If you wish to import DV footage digitally, we recommend that
you use the utilities that come with your Firewire card for “downloading” video from it. If
you do not have such a utility, one is included with Video Toaster in the Extras folder
called DVApp.exe.Video Toaster offers support for DV AVI files, both type 1 and type 2
(see below for the distinction between these.) These files can be used in the Editor, DDR,
QuickPlay, etc…

Type 1 DV files. Interleaved DV data can be stored in its native format as a single stream
within an AVI RIFF file. This has the advantage of using the minimum amount of data storage
for DV. The primary disadvantage is that this file format is not backward-compatible with
Video for Windows, because it doesn't contain either a video 'vids' or an audio 'auds' stream.
Support is provided for the interleaved DV stream through the DV Muxer and DV Splitter filters provided with DirectShow.

Type 2 DV files. Interleaved DV data can be split into a video stream and one to four audio
streams within an AVI RIFF file. This has the advantage of being backward-compatible with
Video for Windows, because it contains a standard video 'vids' stream and at least one
standard audio 'auds' stream The primary disadvantage is that this file format requires the
audio data to be redundantly stored as audio streams. The "video" stream is actually the native interleaved DVdata stream. However, as a standard 'vids' stream with a handler type of 'dvsd', the DVVideo Decoder is used. This format also requires that "captured" files are split by using the DVSplitter filter before they are written as AVI files.

Using the external controller module, you can import a live DV stream from your Fire Wire card and use it on any one of the switcher rows. The high CPU overhead of real-time decompression and uncompressed playback requires a fast machine to simultaneously decode multiple streams in this fashion.

 
Known issues, Recent Changes & Additions to Toaster [2] software

Known issues
Embedded audio in RTVfiles might drop frames within Speed Razor. To separate audio from
within an embeddedRTV, right click on the file and render it as an uncompressed PCM audio
only file.

In LWX, RTV saver will append your file as .AVI; manually re-name the file to have an .RTV
file extension

NewTek not liable for chiropractor fees if users attempt to use the ‘Roadruck’ keys

SX-8 termination applies only to composite signals