firewire

[Craig6]

can you please tell me what the main differences are between just having a firewire card to get my footage on to the pc and then edit in premiere.

or having a high end card like the RT2500 to do the same. I assume hardware help is given from the RT card but is it really required ?

there are lots of price variations on firewire cards £20 -£600 - why?

thanks

[Dr Mordrid]

1. output qulity. The Matrox RT cards have their own DV codec that is much better than MSDV in most apps. Bilinear and anisotropic filtering in hardware is also part of this

2. realtime previews and analog export for recording.

3. tons of keyframable effects you can't get in software editors without lotsa plugins. Many are not available outside of packages like the RT's or Storm without expensive software addons.

4. higher quality overlays

5. on effects like page curls the image of the A roll is used as a texture map over the curl to B roll. With MSPro or Premiere this is normally just a solid color.

When you go to the RT.X100 there are even more advantages over plain-Jane DV.

Software realtime editors like MediaStudio Pro 7.0 will mitigate some of these advantages and even surpass the hardware cards in many areas like the number of video layers that can be done in realtime, but for now the hardware products are a bit more mature and have more bells & whistles.

Dr. Mordrid

[Craig6]

I've been recommended the canopus dvstorm2. I went to the site and the comparrison against the matrox high end cards favours the Storm - any thoughts or advise would be appreciated - it's a lot of money £995

Thanks

[Dr Mordrid]

The Canopus pages "comparisons" are a bit "weighted", if you get my drift

You might want to read Matroxs counter-attack before making any judgments, as they caught Canopus in several "errors" regarding the image quality issues, which apply to the RT-2500 as well as the RT.X cards.

http://www.matrox.com/video/products/rtx100/advantages.cfm

That said I'd probably recommend either the RT.X10 or RT.X100, with the latter being well worth the extra money in the long term.

Dr. Mordrid

[gt40]

yep, bought the rtx.10,
wish I would have spent the extra money on the rt.x100

don't get me wrong the rtx.10 is an excellent card, I just would appreciate some of the extra features .

[Dr Mordrid]

And even more features there will be coming down the pike as faster CPU's come to market to support them.

That's the really nice thing about Matrox's Power of X archetecture: it lets them make changes and add features other boards would require a rebuild to accomplish.

Dr. Mordrid