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RT2000, I was wrong
I was at the ACF show in Brussels today, adn enjoyed an RT2000 demo at the Matrox booth. I asked the pants of of the demo guy, adn I got some more info. We tried to push the RT2000, and got some more nice stuff out of it. Keep in mind: the RT2000 comes from the Matrox Video Group. This is a seperate company within Matrox which already built the very successfull Digisuite range. So, they have nothing to do with the Rainbow Runner or Marvel Matrox editing solutions.
Here we go:
Well, first, I have to admit, I was wrong about the RT2000 not being able to do native DV RT effects. It can do this. All the provided RT effects can be applied to native DV video or MPEG2 video. You just choose your edit mode at startup: MPEG2 or DV. You cannot mix them.
This was an RT2000 card. Not a hidden DTV card. I saw the back of the PC, and the startup after the reboot. The card has 2 6 pin Firewire connectors at the back, a connector to the G400 and a connector to the breakout box with the analog connections. The card was stil an alpha version, and is being updated and reworked constantly. If the rumoured (Gary Bettan - Videoguys) 1 December release date will be possible was unkwon. At this time, DV Firewire machine control was not available, but should be when released.
To provide the analogue output, the second output of the G400 card is being used. This means that you cannot have a dual monitor setup from the RT2000's G400 card. The second output of the G400 is routed in the RT2000 card and this is ouptut to the breakout box. It should be able to have an additional PCI graphics card to drive a second VGA monitor and give you a dual montitor setup. But this was not tested by Matrox as of yet. The demo system was a plain PIII 600/128MB RAM/54GB Fasttrak 66 system on an Asus P2B-L motherboard with an IDE bootdisk.
Effects: as already known, these are only visible in RT on the analogue video monitor. Output to any analog system (VHS, Hi8, SVHS, BetaSP with YC) is in real time, with real time effects. Outputting to DV requiers you to render the effects parts, at 1.5 - 3X real time. Normally, you can have 2 video tracks with transition and a title fading in and out over them in RT. What we tried, and it worked, was to have 2 videotracks with a cross dissolve between them, and over that, and over the real time cross dissolve, a title that was coming in with a page peel as a fileter, and going out as a page peel. All that in real time. But that's all you can do. Adding a fade in to that page peel in effect, coloured the Premiere preview line red, indicating we needed to render. allways remeber: only the Matrox specific effects are real time, the Premiere defaults are not! The Prmeiere cross dissolve is replaced by a Matrox real time one, the other effects are available from 3 effects in the Premiere transitions palette: 3D Effects (page peels, tumbles, ...), 2D Effects (PIP's, squeezes and pushes) and (organic) wipes.
The effects were not keyframable. You cannot save them if you adjusted shadows or colours. You can only use the 'paste special' command of Premiere to copy and past a filter or effect from one place in the timeline or clip to another, in the same timeline and project. The only things that can be adjusted are the softness, colour and width of the shadows and borders. If/Or/When there would ever be keyframable effects remains to be seen. It could happen, it could not. Keywords here: could, should, might ... They don't want to burden Digisuite DTV sales.
Pricing in Belgium is 64990 BEF VAT incl., that's about 1700 USD. Release date: not known.
There you have it. That's where Matrox stands at this time. The rep. demoing seeme dto know that Matrox is working on a software DV codec to allow for real time, no rendering Firewire output. But this will only work on very stable, dedicated PC's. No date know, even not known if this will ever come out. But they are working on it.
So, again, sorry for the misunderstanding. I pointed the rep. to the C-Cube site, and he didn't know either how it's done.
------------------
Jan De Wever - Leuven, Belgium
Anyvision Media Services
Here we go:
Well, first, I have to admit, I was wrong about the RT2000 not being able to do native DV RT effects. It can do this. All the provided RT effects can be applied to native DV video or MPEG2 video. You just choose your edit mode at startup: MPEG2 or DV. You cannot mix them.
This was an RT2000 card. Not a hidden DTV card. I saw the back of the PC, and the startup after the reboot. The card has 2 6 pin Firewire connectors at the back, a connector to the G400 and a connector to the breakout box with the analog connections. The card was stil an alpha version, and is being updated and reworked constantly. If the rumoured (Gary Bettan - Videoguys) 1 December release date will be possible was unkwon. At this time, DV Firewire machine control was not available, but should be when released.
To provide the analogue output, the second output of the G400 card is being used. This means that you cannot have a dual monitor setup from the RT2000's G400 card. The second output of the G400 is routed in the RT2000 card and this is ouptut to the breakout box. It should be able to have an additional PCI graphics card to drive a second VGA monitor and give you a dual montitor setup. But this was not tested by Matrox as of yet. The demo system was a plain PIII 600/128MB RAM/54GB Fasttrak 66 system on an Asus P2B-L motherboard with an IDE bootdisk.
Effects: as already known, these are only visible in RT on the analogue video monitor. Output to any analog system (VHS, Hi8, SVHS, BetaSP with YC) is in real time, with real time effects. Outputting to DV requiers you to render the effects parts, at 1.5 - 3X real time. Normally, you can have 2 video tracks with transition and a title fading in and out over them in RT. What we tried, and it worked, was to have 2 videotracks with a cross dissolve between them, and over that, and over the real time cross dissolve, a title that was coming in with a page peel as a fileter, and going out as a page peel. All that in real time. But that's all you can do. Adding a fade in to that page peel in effect, coloured the Premiere preview line red, indicating we needed to render. allways remeber: only the Matrox specific effects are real time, the Premiere defaults are not! The Prmeiere cross dissolve is replaced by a Matrox real time one, the other effects are available from 3 effects in the Premiere transitions palette: 3D Effects (page peels, tumbles, ...), 2D Effects (PIP's, squeezes and pushes) and (organic) wipes.
The effects were not keyframable. You cannot save them if you adjusted shadows or colours. You can only use the 'paste special' command of Premiere to copy and past a filter or effect from one place in the timeline or clip to another, in the same timeline and project. The only things that can be adjusted are the softness, colour and width of the shadows and borders. If/Or/When there would ever be keyframable effects remains to be seen. It could happen, it could not. Keywords here: could, should, might ... They don't want to burden Digisuite DTV sales.
Pricing in Belgium is 64990 BEF VAT incl., that's about 1700 USD. Release date: not known.
There you have it. That's where Matrox stands at this time. The rep. demoing seeme dto know that Matrox is working on a software DV codec to allow for real time, no rendering Firewire output. But this will only work on very stable, dedicated PC's. No date know, even not known if this will ever come out. But they are working on it.
So, again, sorry for the misunderstanding. I pointed the rep. to the C-Cube site, and he didn't know either how it's done.
------------------
Jan De Wever - Leuven, Belgium
Anyvision Media Services
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