|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Pick a Card: Road Testing the Matrox RT.X2
|
|
by Oliver Peters
|
Matrox has a long history of designing hardware cards that are optimized for Adobe products, dating back to its DigiSuite cards for early versions of Premiere. Throughout the development of this technology, Matrox has engineered ways to leverage the power of the computer's own processor and graphics display card. That concept originated with the company's RT.X100 cards and then migrated into Axio for Premiere Pro. The newest card, the Matrox RT.X2, builds on the engineering design of Axio to empower producers working in DV and HDV with much of the real-time horsepower of its advanced sibling.
Matrox RT.X2 is a $1,995 entry-level capture and output card that comes bundled with Adobe Premiere Pro. It is intended for the DV producer who is moving into some high-definition video production using the HDV format. Although it is designed around the Axio toolset, it doesn't offer all of the bells and whistles, so if RT.X2 doesn't do everything you need, Matrox also offers the more expensive Axio LE and Axio cards.
The RT.X2 card is a full-sized PCIe card with a tethered breakout box that houses analog and 1394 (FireWire) connectors. The analog connections can be assigned to pass either standard- or high-definition video, while the 1394 port is a pass-through for DV or HDV. A big difference from Axio is that RT.X2 only uses compressed video. Its codecs include native HDV, DV and DVCPRO, as well as MPEG-2 I-frame at rates up to 25Mb/s for SD and 100Mb/s for HD. If you're working with Betacam SP, for example, you'll have to use the analog connections and capture to one of these codec options. One unique codec is an MPEG-2 I-frame codec that supports 4:2:2:4, which is video plus an alpha signal. This codec is designed for 32-bit keyable animations imported from After Effects and other compositing applications.
The board also includes a DVI port, which can be used to connect a 1920x1200-pixel LCD screen as an HD monitor. This configuration provides a cost-effective, pixel-accurate reproduction of your HD image. Since RT.X2 enables HD-to-SD downconversion, it is possible to edit in HD and monitor the downconverted image on a regular video monitor. RT.X2 is designed for the DV marketplace, so the breakout box uses consumer-style video connectors instead of professional BNCs, which Matrox reserves for the Axio and Axio LE market.
Mixing Video on the Timeline
The RT.X2 supports a wide mix of formats and sizes. You can mix codecs and resolutions on the same timeline (even in Premiere Pro's multi-cam mode) as long as the frame rates and scanning modes match. So, 480i can be mixed with 1080i and 480p can be mixed with 1080p simply by selecting "scale to frame size" when you right-click on the SD or HD clip. Axio will then upconvert SD clips on an HD timeline or downconvert HD clips on an SD timeline--all in real time. (1080p support will be added in the 3.0 release announced prior to NAB.) Film cadences in both standard 3:2 and advanced 2:3:3:2 pull-down modes can be removed on-the-fly during capture.
New for NAB 2007 is support for the Sony HVR-V1U camera and 24p, 25p and 30p frame rates with 1080 HDV footage. There is also full support for all of JVC's 720p ProHD series cameras, but you can't mix 720p content with 480 or 1080 material and maintain real-time playback. HDV 1080 media is internally processed in HDV's native size of 1440x1080 pixels to minimize scaling artifacts. Other HD formats, like Sony's XDCAM HD or Panasonic's DVCPRO HD on P2, are not natively supported in the RT.X2 card, but you can take baseband HD analog video out from the player and capture such formats using the analog connectors on the breakout box.
Putting RT.X2 Through its Paces
I spent about a day putting a workstation configured with the Matrox RT.X2 card through its paces. I'm no stranger to Matrox's design, having previously reviewed the RT.X100 card and also having worked with DigiSuite, RT.X100 and Axio systems on projects with real clients.
Axio cards are intended to run in workstation-class PCs and are sold through a reseller network as turnkey edit systems. On the other hand, the RT.X2 card is intended to run in both desktop and workstation computers, so technically-inclined owners can handle their own installation if they like.
My test system was an HP xw9300 with two dual-core AMD Opterons, but RT.X2 can certainly run on a less powerful computer. In fact, if you are upgrading from an RT.X100 card, the same computer can be used, as long as it's a recent model with PCIe slots. Of course, a big plus to its architecture is that RT.X2 is scalable, so as more powerful computers come onto the market, you will benefit from the increased performance that becomes available to the card. When the quad-core processors hit the market, just plug RT.X2 into that bad boy and get almost double the performance! Since you are working with DV, HDV or MPEG-2 media, no large drive arrays are needed to make the system work. My test system ran on the secondary internal drives installed inside the HP workstation.
The power of the RT.X2 card is in its ability to process effects using a combination of CPU and GPU power. Many effects are guaranteed real time, while others are accelerated. Accelerated effects might be real time, but, depending on parameters, they can also be slower or even faster than real time. Some real-time standard-definition effects will be accelerated effects on a high-definition timeline. As you build up more effects and exceed the capabilities of real-time playback, the RT.X2 will degrade the frame rate but not the image quality. In other words, you will always be looking at a high-quality image during complex effects. Matrox uses the host graphics card for GPU effects. Both Nvidia and ATI are supported, but Matrox claims somewhat better performance on the ATI 1950 Pro and 1800 series cards.
Optimized Effects
Effects come in two categories: the standard Adobe Premiere Pro effects and the additional Matrox Flex effects. Even in the case of the standard Adobe palette, Matrox replaced more than 60 transition effects with Matrox-optimized effects. They also took over the processing of Motion tab and opacity effects, so many more effects are guaranteed real time in SD or accelerated in HD. At the beginning of the year Matrox released RT.X2 version 2.0, which added new features and several new Matrox effects, including cube, impressionist, ripple and twirl.
One big benefit of choosing the Adobe approach is the solid integration of the Studio bundle. With RT.X2 you'll get WYSIWYG video output for Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Bridge with dynamic Alt+Tab switching. Since the Premiere Pro timeline effects are processed under Matrox power, you also gain accelerated output with the Adobe Media Encoder when encoding files for the Web, DVD or Adobe's Clip Notes.
I decided to check out the real-world limits of the card's performance. The claim is for real-time performance on Matrox Flex CPU effects like color correction, speed changes and chroma/luma keying, plus real-time and accelerated Matrox Flex GPU effects such as 2D/3D DVE, blur/glow/soft focus and shine. This is all true and not much of an issue with timelines consisting of a few video tracks. But how far will it go? For me, this was based on the number of streams you are trying to process. I find that 2D DVE effects without shadows or other modifiers are pretty easy, and you can generally get high layer counts on just about any modern system. Then, the minute you make one layer a 3D DVE or you add a soft drop shadow, the whole system chokes. Not the case here.
I tested HDV files (rather than easier DV files) and got three streams of HDV video without problems. At four streams, the system started to drop frames, and at five streams, the video was running at about 15fps. Although this is quite good, it is comparable to Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro on a fast computer without a Matrox card. In fairness, though, when these systems play multiple streams in real time, that's preview quality, and you still need to render before a print-to-tape. With Matrox, real time can be trusted.
The real power is when you apply a series of filters to a single clip. The Matrox effects folder contains a whole series of artistic effects, including shine, crystallize and impressionist, that are comparable to sophisticated plug-ins from companies like Boris, GenArts and others. I stacked up a series of Matrox Flex filters and it wasn't until I passed the tenth filter that I hit the wall. The eleventh threw me over the edge and I needed to render. Some of these filters included large blurs, lens flares and distressed film effects--all of which are computationally intensive and definitely not real time on other NLEs. Obviously, this is more than you'd use in normal editing.
More realistically, a typical sequence would contain a few tracks with color correction, dissolves, some DVE effects and titles. This sort of timeline will easily run in real time without the need for rendering. On the other hand, if you make extensive use of effects that are not optimized by Matrox, you might not get the benefit from RT.X2 that you had expected.
The day wasn't without a few hiccups. The test system locked up a couple of times when I was applying effects. I've seen this sort of system freeze in other Premiere Pro workstations, but I don't know if this is a Windows, Adobe, AMD or Matrox issue. The good news is that these are infrequent, and Premiere Pro has a strong recovery system, so when the application does crash, hardly any edit information is lost once you recover the project.
Remember that this system is intended to work with native HDV--a format maligned by many editors. HDV timelines are made up of mixed Long GOP MPEG-2 files, so time-consuming rendering is needed with even cuts-only sequences to rebuild the MPEG-2 cadence. (Some systems call this "conforming" to avoid the "R" word.) In the case of RT.X2, HDV rendering to correct the GOP structure is required only when native output over 1394 is desired. If you can output your timeline through the analog connections, then even HDV sequences play in real time without any rendering.
Matrox RT.X2 rounds out the Axio product family nicely. Matrox will demonstrate a standard-definition version of RT.X2 at NAB 2007 for those who aren't working in HD yet. (Matrox RT.X2 will be available in April for $895 in a bundle that includes the RT.X2 SD PCIe card and a professional breakout box. It is designed for use with the customer's copy of Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Production Studio.) In either case--SD or HD--RT.X2 fits a market segment dominated by corporate, event and DV producers. It gives them a cost-effective option for professional I/O combined with powerful real-time effects, and it is the first and only card designed specifically for their needs.
advertisement
|
|
|
Videography is part of the NewBay Media Community
copyright 2007© NewBay Media, LLC. 810 Seventh Avenue, 27th Floor New York, NY 10019 T (212)378-0400
F (212)378-0470
|
|
|
