Matrox RT2000, again......................
pcworld.com
Pro-Quality Video Editing for $1295
Matrox RT3000 packs professional video features and effects at a striking price.
by Stan Miastkowski, special to PC World
August 10, 1999, 6:37 a.m. PT
Near-professional-quality ("prosumer") digital camcorders are flooding the market. And so are low-cost PC solutions for editing those hours of vacation videos into something that won't put your audience to sleep.
But if you want to produce corporate or broadcast-quality Videos using true professional-level PC-based editing and effects, or nonlinear editing, prices start in the $3000-$5000 range and have gone way up (not including the PC).
Well, scratch that pricing. This week Matrox announced the RT2000, a true real-time, nonlinear editing system that will sell for $1295 when it ships in October.
The RT2000 works with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 and includes the Matrox Millennium G400 graphics card, a video codec (coder/decoder) card with a dedicated video processor from C-Cube, and an external audio/video breakout box that lets you connect cameras and recorders to the RT2000 without having to crawl in back of your PC.
Software includes Adobe Premiere RT (Real-Time), Ulead Cool 3D titling, Sonic Foundry ACID Music for audio editing, and Sonic DVDit LE for creating DVDs.
Minimum system requirements for the RT2000 include a Pentium-II 300, 128MB of memory, free AGP and PCI slots, 500MB of drive space for software installation, and a dedicated high-speed SCSI drive for storing video.
Input, Output, and Effects
The RT2000 can accept input from consumer digital video formats used by Sony, JVC, Canon, Sharp, and Panasonic, as well as Sony Digital-8. It also supports semi-professional formats including Panasonic DVCPro and Sony DVCAM. The breakout box includes a 1394 (FireWire) input for digital video, as well as S-Video and composite video inputs.
The unit can create both analog (S-Video and composite out) and digital video for transfer to videotape, as well as MPEG-2 files for creating DVDs, music CDs, and streaming video for the Web.
The C-Cube dedicated video processor in the RT2000?s codec board provides dual-stream video editing, which lets you work with the raw video and special effects at the same time. The RT2000 includes over 500 customizable real-time effects and transitions including page curls, perspectives, scaling, picture-in-picture, organic wipes, and titles. Matrox says additional effects libraries will be available on the Web.
A new feature, Matrox Infinite Capture, overcomes the 2GB file size limitation in Windows 98 and 2000, allowing seamless capture and playback of unlimited-size files in Adobe Premiere, according to Matrox.
The company says the key to the RT2000's versatility is Matrox Flex 3D, a programmable architecture that applies 3D textures to video using the graphics card's accelerator chip. The company claims the result is broadcast-quality video. |
