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The video industry's equivalent to "All Natural" has to be "Real Time." As I worked with the DigiSuite LE M-JPEG pci board from Matrox, it was clear there were crucial, favorable differences between it and other real-time boards. Because the LE sells at half the price of some boards and atthe same price as other boards,yet offers more-price is no obvious guide to performance and functionality. Therefore, the best way to get the most bang for your buck is to decide which rendering functions you want to avoid and then to consider only those products that have the hardware necessary to eliminate rendering these functions.
Because they typically are applied to lengthy segments of video, the list of effects that can eat up lots of rendering time include colorcorrection, static and dynamic (rolls and crawls) titles and graphics downstream-keyed over video, image cropping, DVE to create different sized images, plus chroma- and luma-keys. Of these functions, only the last one - as well as real-time transitions and PIPs requires dual codecs. However, these functions all require sophisticated hardware that some dual-stream products don't have. Not only should a product offer the necessary hardware, it must offer several replications of this hardware. For example, performing a real-time transition on two clips that are being color-corrected in real time requires two color correctors. Thus, the board must contain at least two sets of image-processing hardware -one for each video stream. This is where the DigiSuite LE shines. The following functions, and their order, can be applied to each of two AVI streams: Crop Image >> Proc Amp (hue, saturation, level, setup) >> DVE (resize, apply border, create shadow, apply sub-pixel generated motion)>>Paint(tint, posterize, mosaic, invert chroma, invert luma) Stream Transparency and Stream "Combiner" Stream Transparency controls the degree to which a stream is visible when it is "combined" with any other source. One other source is, of...