A new PP CS3 / CS4 editing station – some questions

[Eric Jurgenson]

You are jumping the gun on the i7 processors – no dual processor systems are available yet, and i7 systems are not yet certified by Matrox.

Otherwise, I would recommend the RTX2 as an economical edit acceleration card, as long as you don’t need 1920×1080 (the RTX2 offers 1440×1080 max, which is fine for HDV and DVCPRO HD, which don’t use the full 1920×1080 raster), native XDCAM HD support, or HD-SDI I/O. If you need any of that stuff, save your money for Axio.

The RTX2 has numerous advantages over Cineform: native file handling (no transcoding) for maximum quality using minimum disk space, a wider assortment of real time effects, accelerated rendering and export, video in the capture window, analog and digital I/O, audio input metering, etc.

By the way, jump into AE. You will soon love it. I used to love combustion, but now I only use it for particles and some 3D stuff. AE is much easier to use on complicated compositions.

[Carlos]

Eric, thanks for your answer.

In the present day, to buy an Axio is expensive for me.
But I’m a bit afraid of the evolution.

Right now I shoot with a Z1, and for the work I do, the camera will satisfy for a couple of years.
I do mostly corporate and some low budget commercials in SD.

But if a client comes with a format that RT-X2 does not accept ?

My main problem is with DV footage.
I’m used to work with the Targa 3000 YUV uncompressed.
On DV, color correction is always a problem.

On my last commercial, I shoot all in HDV 50i, capture on Premiere CS3 in PAL wide, edited and in the end I re-capture the HDV in MPEG.
(I have to say that I’ve had some problems with the EDL export !)

At that moment, the PPCS3 on my laptop refuse to work properly in speed terms, I mean)

I exported the 20s clip in a TIFF sequence and do the resizing and Color Correction on Combustion4 (and a 30% sharp also…)

The C4 takes a bit to render, but with the T3K I get YUV out to a PVM monitor, and get a precise picture evaluation.
The final image quality is equal or better of native DigitalBETACAM.

-Can I get this quality with a RT-X2 working with HDV source and export to SD PAL? – I want to work with the best possible picture from my Z1.

-With the RT-X2, what’s the best way ?
Import HDV natively to the timeline
edit
export to AVI uncompressed or to Digital Betacam via YUV output???

– Is the system frame accurate? – my T3K NEVER misses a frame

-What is the best configuration that YOU advise me to have in terms of Hardware? – It should be CS4 and 2 year “Future Proof”

– does RT-X2 output SD in YUV and DVI out at the same time?

I’m a fan of MATROX for a couple of years.
I’ve had a RT-2500 and the system was stable and reliable since day 1.
My Targa 3000 from Pinnacle is a marvelous board, but I’m still in version 1.0 … and have to be quite careful with the machine.
T3K is a “young and delicate rose”

Sorry for all this questions, but I’m quite alone here and want to do the best option possible.

I know that you are also a Matrox user.
Can you tell me anything about BlackMagic?
I believe I prefer Matrox.
What’s your opinion.

MAny thanks
Carlos

[Eric Jurgenson]

Carlos,

The RTX2 also has YUV inputs and outputs. The color correction tools are excellent, and real time. The RTX2 does not do uncompressed, but its I-frame MPEG compression is very good (Axio will do 8-bit and 10-bit uncompressed as well as I-frame MPEG).

I also frequently use Targa or Tiff files to move between Premiere and my compositing application. With a high performance disk system, the RTX2 will play back Targa sequences in real time.

The RTX2 will support an external monitor with Combustion, as well as other common 3D and compositing applications.

The serial 9-pin device control is feame accurate.

Stick with the system recommendations on the Matrox website. This guarantees a working system and 6 months of Matrox factory support. Get a quad core processor (or two), and 4 GB of RAM, unless you want to go 64-bit (Vista). In that case, get 8 GB RAM.

The Matrox system when configured properly is very stable. There is no better system for editing HDV, with multi-stream real time native file handling.

[Carlos]

Eric,

I will book a demo to see AXIO and RT-X2 “on action”.
I’l bring we me a HDV tape from my last work and do what I’ve done on CS3 in my laptop.

I was looking carefuly to the photos and realized that the Axio board and the RT-X2 board look a like.
Seems that one is a “light” software of the other.

In a week or os I’ve come back here.

Thanks a lot for your attention.
Carlos

[Terry Brown]

Hi Carlos,

How did you get on with this?

I wondered whether you had considered actually ditching usung a 3rd party edit card? As we did about 2-3 years ago.

We have had a very pleasant experience just using CS3 on PC hardware alone and are upgrading to i7 this week to take it even further.

We have not missed 3rd party hardware (and the extra driver compatibility issues they bring).

I can currently edit 2-3 layers on my laptop (duo 2 core 7700, 4 gigs ram, 256megs 8500gsm grahpics) with only final mastering rendering required. I also live monitor to a 40inch LCD via the laptops HDMI output.

regs

Terry

[Stefan Holt]

I’m curious as to what was done in regards to the upgrade/or non-upgrade as well. I’m in a similar situation as was Carlos but have yet to make the leap with Matrox. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks guys.

Stefan Holt
http://www.acktivemedia.com

[Terry Brown]

Hi Stefan,

We went the route of i7 920, 12 Gigs DDR3 ram,9800 graphics 1 gig graphics card.

Works a dream, we do some very complex AE dynamic link to PPro, 3d graphics behind Keyed scenes etc, check out a sample vid on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bVNR1zMHK8

This is a fairly basic version of what we do, but gives you a taste and editing this on our system is a dream.

I seriously doubt that we would go back to 3rd party video hardware.

If you have any questions please give me a shout!

Terry