Content area
Full Text
QUICK FACTS
Company: Matrox
Dorval, Quebec; 514-685-2630
Product: RT2000
Features: MX25 chip from C-Cube,
DVE engine.
Price: $1,099
Website: www.matrox.com
CIRCLE 152 ON INFO CARD
I've reviewed dozens of NLE systems during the last eight years and rarely have been impressed. Products have typically fallen into one of two categories - highly reliable, but exploitatively expensive or inexpensive, but frustratingly unreliable. One exception was the DigiSuite LE from Matrox. Unfortunately for those of us who shoot DV and want a native DV NLE solution, the DigiSuite uses M-JPEG compression. Matrox first responded to our need with the $5,995 DigiSuite DTV - and then with the $1,099 RT2000. Given the dramatic growth of $1,000, and less, DV/IEEE1394 products - it made sense to first review the RT2000. The RT2000, which includes a 6400 graphics board, has a street price less than $1,000. This makes it is a very inexpensive solution - especially considering that the bundle includes Premiere RT, Ulead's Cool 3D titler, Inscriber's TitleExpress plug-in for Premiere, Sonic Foundry's ACID, and Sonic Solution's DVDit! LE.
After working with Version 1.2 of the RT2000, I'm happy to say that the RT2000 is the first product I've reviewed that offers it all: dramatically low-cost, high-functionality, very high performance, and acceptable reliability. Moreover, Version 2 of the RT2000, which will ship this fall, will further increase functionality - making the product even more potent. Simply put, the RT2000 renders obsolete nearly every less-than-$5,000 NLE product. Further, it provides serious competition to NLE solutions in the up-to$20,000 category.
If you're wondering what enables the RT2000 to out-power the competition - the answer is the Silicon Revolution I described in "Cubism" [February 2000, page 74]. The RT2000 incorporates several LSI chips of amazing power. The RT2000 PCI board's MX25 chip, from C-Cube, can take one or two streams of DV25 or MPEG-2 video and uncompress this data into YUV 4:2:2 digital video. (During capture, the MX25 is used to compresses analog video into either DV or MPEG-2 data.) Digital video from the MX25 is sent to a special version of the popular 6400 2D/3D AGP graphics board. The 6400 has 32MB onboard SGRAM with a 128-bit memory bus that generates a throughput of more than five million triangles per...