Stepping into Real-Time editing hardware-advice needed from the experts

[Christo Leone]

I’m also looking into buying a blackmagic card. Have read up on the other things but the Blackmagic seems like the way to go. Would love to hear form someone that already has the card and can give us some accurate responces and not worked up marketing hype.

Thanx

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Cheers vir eers

~ You are only limited by you’re ignorance ~

[Mike Velte]

I would be concerned about your OS…XP 64 is not an Adobe certified OS for CS4 or CS3.

[Shane Mcconnell]

I was running brand new build of Windows 7 64bit, all the latest everything (drivers, updates) about 35 days ago and I couldn’t even get CS4 to launch. I would execute and whammo- big fat crash w/ report. I sent about 40 of those crash reports with my email info and a description almost everytime so “one of the Adobe Engineers could review and possibly contact” HA- that will be the day. Anyways I went through the painful process of uninstalling and rolling back to XP 64bit..haven’t had a crash yet.

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Shane,

Long-time RT.X2 user here, and producer of the RT.X2 Revealed training. While I haven’t tried Black Magic myself, it’s my understanding that the RT.X2 (and AXIO) are really the only hardware options for Premiere that actually provide TRUE “realtime” effects.

In other words, some vendors promise “realtime previews” which maybe means that even though the clip has a red bar, it will play back smoothly. But in the end, any final output will require that red bar segment to first be rendered. So if encoding to MPEG-2 for DVD, the red bar segments first need to render, then the timeline can be encoded to MPEG-2, a two-step process.

With Matrox RT.X2, say you have a one hour clip with Matrox Color Correction filter applied. There will be no red bar. If you wish to encode to MPEG-2, then that is all the time it takes, there is not additional time to first render the entire one hour color correction. You may be able to export the entire hour program, with effects, in 15 minutes for instance.

Doing a Premiere-native color correction (red bar), it may play back smoothly, but come export time, you take the penalty in render time. Like the old saying, “You can pay me now, or pay me later…”. Either way, you’re gonna have to render.

The RT.X2 LE is $795, somewhat less than the $1200 you mentioned, and works well with CS3, but note it will not support XP 64, you would need XP Pro 32-bit with CS3.

Another option is to wait for the next version of Adobe which promises realtime performance, but I don’t know when that will ship.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor

[Alex Udell]

Jeff is right…

Other solutions allow for Inout and output of signal in PPro.

The Matrox products are the only real solution for genuinely enhancing creative performance during the editing session. They do this by leveraging a combination of their own chips plus those of a paired qualified graphics display adapter.

However, you do find yourself at the crux of an interesting point in PPro history. Adobe has been showing it’s forthcoming “Mercury Playback” Engine. This is Adobe’s implementation of leveraging graphics hardware to do more in real time in PPro. I would guess it would be in PPro CS5, as they’ve been talking about it and demonstrating it. This has not been formally announced, however.

This means that because your workflow is essentially filed based (.m2t) there is no need for signal capture and output. If the Mercury playback engine uses the graphics hardware for acceleration one of the chief advantages of the current Matrox line gets reduced. I love Axio and RT.X2. compared to the long render times of the FCP suite I currently find myself in, I miss them a lot. But keep an eye on where things are going and spend your money wisely.

Hope that helps,

Alex

[Shane Mcconnell]

Great- thank you for the responses so far! I am thinking that a Quadro FX 3800 card may be the way to go- this way I am supporting Adobe’s Mercury playback engine whenever it happens to surface..and picking up a performance gain in the interim. A Matrox card does sound very tempting tho. I really have to sit and think about this!

The partner certified drivers for the Quadro cards for Adobe are only 32bit OS supported. The nVidia “Performance drivers” and others for the Quadro support 64bit OS’s. Will I see the same results or performance gains with the non-partner certified driver??

[Andy Prada]

Isn’t it interesting how everything seems to have come full circle? I still work with Avid (oh yes!) having done one of the first training courses at the National Film School in UK way back in the last century.

Avid was castigated by some because it relied on expensive proprietry hardware (cards, etc) that pushed it well outside the affordability path of many corporate and non-broadcast video makers. “Too expensive!” everyone cried as they soldiered on with less than perfect functionality and wrinkles to boot with various versions of alternative software. (myself included I might add)

Now we may be on the cusp of having so called Mercury engines that are only thus because they have a couple of mega quadro thingamajigs supporting them at a cost of $XXX and need a cpu the size of the pentagon to power them.

Wistfully I do wonder if we’d all be better off with a steenbeck and a little more imagination. Or maybe perhaps I should retire.