True Real Time editing???
 

What software/hardware is necessary to do 100% RT editing? I was at the mac store yesterday and I weas playing with FCP. It seemed that half of the transitions had to render before I could see them. Was I just not doing it right? Is their a true RT editing solution?

There are some RT Effects, but they are limited by the processor speed and amount of ram installed. this page on Apple's site does a better job explaining than I can. If you have questions, post back and I'll try to answer for you.

Is there additional hardware(ie RTmac by Matrox) that will help in this area? If that RTMac card doesn't help then what is it used for?

RTMac was used in OS 9.2.2 for RT effects. However, I don't know if final drivers were ever released for OS X. Beta version drivers were available for a long time. You might want to check Matrox's website.

What is the advantage of a Mac G5 over a pc with a Matrox rtx100 card? It seems that the pc may be better...

The advantage is the features of FCP HD. There really isn't another editing package quite like it. AVID and Vegas come close, but for my workflow FCP has the best set of tools available. How important is RT effects for your workflow, what do you want to edit?

I want to save time. I dont want to wait for things to render every time I make an adjustment.

I am going to be doing event videography. Mainly weddings.

Most the latest NLEs now will allow you to get preview RT. You can throw whatever effect/transition on and you will see it play back in real time. If the effect is too intense then you will see degraded quality.

FCP does this and drops frame if it cannot handle the effect.
Vegas does this and drops frames too. You can scale the window down to get a cleaner preview without dropped frames.

I don't know about Premiere and Avid, but they probably have previews. With Premiere, you can get hardware acceleration cards to make it faster.

There's also Edition, which is the NLE that needs the least rendering. You get 1 layer of RT for every 600mhz of Pentium processing power, acceleration from your graphics card for certain effects, but most importantly it has background rendering. If your NLE isn't doing anything it will render in the background.

You should try the demos for all the programs to see what you like.

2- You may also want to consider DVD encoding speed. On the PC side, you have a wide range of encoder choices. I believe Cinemacraft encoder is the best combination of quality and speed (I don't know this for sure though).

Or... you can get a cheap PC just for encoding. Check sites like gotapex.com for a hot deal on a Dell 4600. Throw a gigE card in and get a switch and away you go. You may want to setup UltraVNC on that computer to control it remotely (so you don't always need a monitor or keyboard on it). Or get a KVM switch.

3- The RTMac is pretty useless when you have a dual G5.

i take it your a mac guy, if so great i love fcp...

but if you have no preference the only REAL RT software i have ever used was edius...it pc based...but if you want rt out put to firewire, not Previews, but the real stuff this is it, it requires no hardware but a 1394 card, sure it has some quirks and can't hold a candle to FCP features, but the basics are there 3d, transitions, whitebalance, color correction...

on a 3.06 laptop i get layers of effects and transitions basically never render...

on a side note i do use avid express pro frequently as well...

again if your mac guy, it ain't worth it...