Matrox Flex 3D architecture
Before we go any further, lets talk about this Flex 3D stuff and what it means to you. As you probably already know, Matrox has been a leading manufacturer of 3D graphics cards for a long, long time. Back in the early 90s the Matrox Millenium was THE must have graphics card for any kind of PC based desktop publishing applications. Since then Matrox has won hundreds of awards from computer, CAD, video, animation, gaming and other technology magazines. So these guys know a thing or two about graphics cards. Well, they also now a thing or two about video editing. Their Digisuite line of real-time, dual stream NLE systems has been used by professional/ commercial/ broadcast video production houses for the past two years. Digisuite has garnered its share of awards as well.

Flex 3D technology is what happens when you put graphics card and video editing engineers together to maximize the technology of both. Basically Flex 3D uses the processing power of the G400 graphics card to generate all these cool 3D effects. The special version of the G400 card is integral to the performance of the RT2000. Without the G400 the RT2000 will not function. The G400 is a dual head graphics card. One head drives your computer monitor. The other is attached to the RT2000 breakout box. So the analog video output of the RT2000 system comes through the G400 card. I realize this may sound complicated, but it really isn't. Set up is pretty easy. You just have to add a step before you actually install the RT2000 card. First you install Premiere 5.1 and the 5.1c update (found on the RT2000 install CD). Next you install the G400 graphics card as a generic VGA device. Then you install the RT2000 hardware. The drivers find both pieces of hardware and the install goes ahead.

One of the benefits of the Flex 3D technology is that the graphics card carries the brunt of the workload for the real-time effects. As a result, the load on the rest of your system is reduced. This is most apparent in the storage requirements for the RT2000. Unlike other real-time cards on the market, the RT2000 will work great with a dedicated UDMA EIDE hard drive for the video. I still recommend a more robust storage solution like a Medea VideoRAID, Promise FastTrack or UW SCSI drive if you plan on creating long format (over 60 minute) productions professionally. But for home use or prosumer video under an hour, you can use an inexpensive (under $400) UDMA drive. We do not recommend using your boot drive for video with the RT2000, even with partitions. You must have a second drive dedicated for all your video clips and temp files. The RT2000 ships with an excellent disk-benchmarking tool that tests your drives up to 80% full capacity.

The Flex 3D does have one downside. It relies very heavily on Windows Direct X technology. This is not available in Win NT so NT4 support for RT2000 will not be possible until NT4 has Direct X support. Win2000 has Direct X and a Win2000 driver for RT2000 will be available soon. For now the RT2000 is Win98 only.

Native DV or MPEG2
The RT2000 supports both native DV compression and MPEG2. Like all our DV cards, the DV video quality output is identical to the input quality. When editing in DV mode you get real-time analog video output through the breakout box. To export your movie to DV requires rendering. The RT2000 uses cut-list intelligent rendering from the Premiere timeline, so only the transitions and effects are rendered. The RT2000 rendering engine is very fast. A 2 second effect that required rendering took about 10 seconds. Matrox engineers expect to be twice as fast with future driver releases later this year.

FireWire output requires that DV device control is operational and active. There is no preview to the DV device. When you want to export to DV the RT2000 puts your DV device into record. So make sure you have a blank DV tape inside so you don't accidentally erase your original footage while you are still setting up and messing around with the RT2000.
When you capture analog footage, you use MPEG2 compression. This compression setting is scalable and you can apply color correction and other filters while you capture. The video quality of the analog footage is very good at the highest setting. At lower settings I did notice the picture was not as crisp and brilliant. I've been editing with DV for the past two years now, so I'm kind of spoiled. Analog video quality (S-VHS or Hi8) just doesn't excite me anymore.

If you plan on making a timeline that mixes both analog and DV footage the RT2000 can handle it. Simply select the DV Codec and your analog footage is digitized into DV in real-time. Now your timeline will be all DV! You'll still have to render out your transitions and effects for DV output, but the output to your TV or analog VCR is in real-time.

3D FX and 3D flex
I know I covered it earlier, but the 3D DVEs (Digital Video Effects) of the RT2000 are what make it so special. When you are adding one of these effects to your timeline, you can preview the effect using the actual video clips in real-time, in the GUI interface on your computer screen and on your TV monitor. You can scrub though the effect at any speed, in either direction. I love 3D transitions especially page curls. Before the RT2000 I could spend over an hour trying to get a particular transition just right. More then ¾ of that time was usually wasted waiting for previews to render. With the RT2000 not only are my previews in real-time, but so is my hi resolution analog video output!!

Make no mistake about it; the 3D flex technology is the killer application of the RT2000. I'm not the most talented video editor. About a month ago I had the pleasure of a hands on demo/ training session with a Matrox engineer who is. He made a video that had multiple levels of picture-in-picture and incredible 3D transition sequences. It was amazing. One of the really cool features of the RT2000 3D DVEs is that they can be added to a clip as a filter. This means that you could apply an effect to each video in a Picture-in-Picture effect. One particular section of the video had 3 PIPs with effects on each track. Needless to say, this level of work requires rendering. I was amazed when this 15-second section of video took just over a minute to render! That's with 3 full motion PIPs plus DVEs, graphics and fly-ins and outs!

Want even more cool news? The RT2000 ships with over 500 stunning 2D & 3D effects. Matrox plans on releasing additional FX in the future that would be downloadable over the Internet. So your RT2000 will get better and more powerful over time!

Titling
The RT2000 does not provide a real-time titler. What it does give you is the ability to create 2D & 3D graphics (using the included Ulead Cool 3D software) and key then over the video in real-time. The benefit of this approach is that you can use all the real-time 3D DVEs that come with the RT2000 for your titles. So your titles can peel or fly on and off the screen. You can also use 2D effects to make your title pages scroll up or down the screen. I like this added capabilities, but I would still like to be able to create a basic title within Premiere and super-impose it on the screen in real-time. Hopefully either Matrox will add this feature or a 3rd party will as a plug-in in the future.

Audio
The RT2000 handles audio differently from the other cards on the market. When you capture the video (either DV or MPEG2) the audio is captured as a separate file at 16 bit 48khz. All your clips are handled as separate audio and video files. This may be one of the things that gives the RT2000 its lightning fast rendering times. It also makes the export for CD or DVD authoring very fast. I found no negative effects of having the file split. Audio Sync on both my test systems is perfect.

With the RT2000 the audio operation is kind of weird. When you scrub in the timeline you'll hear the audio through your sound card and speakers. When you actually play video the audio is exported through the break out box. So you need to have a TV hooked up to the breakout box to hear the audio. Once I got used to this, it was no big deal. I always use my TV monitor for viewing previews and playback anyway.

Matrox Infinite Capture
The RT2000 allows you to capture or create a video file up to the capacity of your hard drive. There is no 2GB limit with the RT2000! It automatically breaks the file into under 2GB segments. When you play and edit and footage it appears as a single file. You can also create a video file using the infinite capture capability. For my test I made a 20-minute video. The RT2000 was very fast in doing this. Only the transitions are rendered. The video files were copied to the new file at the speed of my storage system, not the data rate of the timeline. So the 20-minute video took just over 5 minutes to create. The finished movie was automatically broken down into 3 files. These played back perfectly as one continuous video.

The RT2000 CODEC
The RT2000 uses 4:2:2 based MPEG2 compression so you will get great video quality in After Effects, 3D Studio MAX and other animation programs. You can run these programs on the same machine while you are video editing. The RT2000 also allows you to install only its CODEC on another machine, without the hardware. This is very cool for professional houses that need to combine animations, compositing and video editing.

CD & DVD Authoring
I saved this section for last because I think it is the most hyped, but least understood benefit of MPEG2 technology. The RT2000 ships with Sonic DVDit le. This is the light version of their DVDit software. With this version you can create a single menu DVD. The clips are all beautiful MPEG2/ DVD quality. If you have a DVD burner ($5,000) you can create a DVD that will play on set top home DVD players. With a CD burner you can create what Sonic calls a mini DVD. This will let you create a DVD disk that will play in computers equipped with a DVD ROM drive. This mini DVD can hold up to 20 minutes of video.

What I really like about the DVDit! software is its very affordable upgrade path. DVDit! SE version retails for around $500. RT2000 owners can upgrade to SE for only $249.95. The SE version lets you make a DVD or CD with up to 10 interactive menus. It also comes with a transcoder that lets you convert avi files to MPEG2. That means you can use video clips from other sources, not just the ones you make with the RT2000. The SE version also uses a software based DVD/MPEG2 player so you can create your CD on a machine that doesn't have the RT2000 installed.

The RT2000 creates the MPEG2 file for DVDit very fast. A 5 minute timeline takes under 15 minutes to create the MPEG2 files. This is regardless of format (DV vs analog) or how many effects you have in your timeline. This is dramatically faster then other MPEG2 based NLE products on the market.

RT2000 performance and handling
One of the features of a non-linear editing system that often gets overlooked is how well the system handles. Since Premiere 5 started shipping a couple of years ago I've been testing various cards that come bundled with it. Many of these cards have quirks that affect the actual productivity of the editing environment. I'm not talking about system crashes or hang-ups, just little things that lower your productivity.

Working with the RT2000 and Premiere is like driving a BMW. The performance, speed and power are excellent!! I was able to take full advantage of all the controls on both the monitor windows. The playback in the windows was perfect. Scrubbing in either window gave the same great results. No hesitation, no hiccups, no glitches, just a very productive editing environment!

The RT2000 is a great product. It offers performance and features that are worth every penny. By giving you real-time 3D effects (analog output only) pro videographers get a productivity increase that will pay for the added cost within 2 or 3 editing jobs. For home videographers like myself, the RT2000 combines the latest MPEG2 technology with super cool 3D effects that you simply can't get with other systems.

RT2000
MAJOR PRICE DROP!! $999.95

We used two test systems for the RT2000:

1. Micron Millenia Max w/ 128 megs RAM, running Win98SE. It ruses a special version of the Tyan Trinity 400 motherboard made only for Micron. This board uses the VIA chipset and 133MHz bus speed. It has an Ultra66 controller and sound built into the motherboard. For the video I am using a 20.4GB Seagate ST320430A 7200RPM Ultra ATA66 drive. I had to go into the bios and adjust the AGP Aperture to 128. It is also very important that ALL energy saving features be disabled, both in the BIOS and Win98. This system is now validated by Matrox.
2. Dell Dimension XPS 750MHz w/ 128 megs RAM, running Win98SE. It uses a standard 100 MHz BX motherboard. It shipped with a 13.6GB 7200 RPM Ultra33 eide DRIVE. I got it with a Turtle Beach Montego II sound card and 3com network adapter. For the video I am using my 50GB Medea VideoRAID with Advansys 3940UW controller. It is also very important that ALL energy saving features be disabled, both in the BIOS and Win98. This system with a 550 Mhz CPU has been tested and validated by Matrox.

RT2000 MEGA Pack (Matrox Video Tools v2.0) is here!!!!