realtime hadware accelerators are they becoming obselete?
 

Im buying a new system for editing and considering matrox RTX100 and Canopus Eduius NX hardware acceleration cards.

My new system will be minimun 3GB dualcore PC or AMD equivalent. It's becomming apparent that i may not even need the hardware accelerator cards as these high spec pc's have enough grunt to provide some real time editing anyway.

Are solutions like the RTX worth the money or am i better off to just edit using premiere 1.5 and a decent system?????????

Thanks

It depends on the length of your projects, and the number of effects you use. If you mostly do shorter projects, then you'd definitely have less need for a hardware card. But if you do longer projects (as I do), with at least one effect on every clip, then a hardware card can be a real asset. I hate to think about the time and disk space that would be required to render my hour long projects.

Besides, it's just nice from a creative standpoint during editing to be able to get instant feedback by seeing my titles, images, and effects like dissolves, slow motion, color correction, etc., instantly, in full resolution on my TV monitor, no rendering required.

See this post I made in another thread for more information on the benefits of the RT.X100 (many of the points would probably also apply to the Canopus DVStorm2 as well): http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost....40&postcount=2

The "real-time" that software NLE makers such as Adobe advertise is not true real-time. It's actually a real-time preview. You must render before exporting to tape. Canopus Edius and Ulead MediaStudio Pro are two exceptions among software editors, in that they can do true real-time, including exporting to tape, without a hardware card.

And of course, avid utilizes its MOJO as a digital nonlinnear accellerator for realtime work.

the BIG problem with most accelerator cards is the are just for DV, no HDV.
unfortunately as you mentionned, DV can be edited perfectly well with a good P4@3.2ghz, while HDV still need room for improvement.

That's what makes the Edius NX a leap forward. It is both a DV and HDV accelerator. And it is expandable. Today you can get an HD component output daughter card. Now you can watch your gorgeous HDV footage directly fromt he time-line IN REAL-TIME on your 60 inch plasma HDTV!!

Want even more reasons to buy Edius NX? How about a real-time HD encoding module. All Canopus is waiting for is an optical HD standard - and the chips to support it.

One thing Canopus has always done and contunues to do better than anyone is fuse the power and performance of hardware, software and CPU power for unprecedented levels of real-time performance and stability.

For $999.95 Edius NX w/ Edius Pro 3 software is an investment with HUGE long term returns. http://www.videoguys.com/ediusNX.html

Gary
Videoguys.com

one thing that i'd be looking at with that edius nx solution is the titlemotion pro package that comes with the expansion pak(?)... from what i've seen of older versions of titlemotion pro, it's not easy to learn, but the output is gorgeous, and it typically comes with a bunch of preset titles and lower thirds layouts... it's also a tab-based editor that you'll really learn to appreciate if you need to re-work a lot of the same titles over and over again.

Your creative talent will improve dramatically if you save your cash for the entire creative suite including after effects. I've been hardware free for 2 years now with no regrets. Mind you it was east to move away since the hardware board maker I previously used decided to create their own edition of an NLE that has 0 compatibility with the major software titles.

It also depends on your definition of hardware accelerators. Pinnacle, errr Avid (Liquid series) uses the GPU on DirectX 9 video cards as its accelerator along with dual processors.

With a dual core/processor machine and a beefy video card, SD is a breeze and HDV works.