Matrox DigiSuite MAX vs. Matrox RT2500: The $5000 Difference
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Another advantage of DigiSuite LX MAX over the RT2500 is its ability to work well on a storage area network (SAN). If you're unfamiliar with this concept, a SAN is a group of computers linked by very high speed cables, sometimes gigabit Ethernet, sometimes Fibre Channel, that allow a group of producers and artists to share common storage and work together on the same project, and sometimes on the same timeline at the same time. Files no longer need to be transferred from one station to another. In a broadcast environment, for example, a feature story and a promo using the same footage could be created by two different editors on two different workstations, while a third artist uses the same footage to design composites and titles. In a media studies classroom, all the students can use the same footage to create their own version of a story. The professor can look in on any one, at any time to check progress. The next day, any student can access and continue working on his project from any workstation. In a post facility, one editor could be compositing video segments for a DVD while an artist uses the same footage to make motion menus, and a DVD author pulls it all together on another workstation. A fourth station could be dedicated to handling the time-consuming burning process. All work from the same media, never copying or transferring files.
Because DigiSuite can buffer frames, with its onboard 32 MB memory DigiSuite is a good SAN citizen, and it doesn't require drives that are striped any proprietary way -- standard NTFS formatting on NT or Windows 2000 will do. Added to that, it reads and writes standard AVI files, so you could, for instance, read and create DigiSuite files in After Effects or Discreet Combustion, and not even have the hardware present on that machine. When you rendered your After Effects composite, you would simply use the DigiSuite software codec, then access that finished file from a DigiSuite-equipped workstation. Then that DigiSuite could be the gatekeeper of the project for the other users on the SAN. And, using Fibre channel, it's fast enough to feed frames for editing over a network. [an error occurred while processing this directive] DigiSuite also includes plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and LightWave 3D animation systems, so animators on the workgroup can join in the fun, too. DigiSuite will take your 32 bit animation, and render it to 2 AVI files -- one is a 24 bit file containing the info and the other has the Alpha channel information, making it easy to composite that animation over another video source. Another plus is that with this plugin, you can see the active window on a PAL or NTSC monitor, letting you see the actual colors with which you'll end up. A similar plug-in is included that works with After Effects, where you can preview your After Effects comps in an NTSC or PAL monitor. After you're done, the finished product tucks nicely into your Premiere timeline.
One serious limitation of DigiSuite LX and DTV, and the RT2500 also, is their choppy frame-based slow motion. Even though it's in real time, I think it's unusable. But wait! There's a workaround that was shown to me by Matrox gurus, and even though it requires rendering, this will make the slow motion usable in any of Matrox's products. It's done by force-rendering. First, use the real time slow motion preview to help you decide where the shot begins and ends -- that'll give you a good idea of which speed looks best. You'll notice that it looks pretty bad in its real time, frame-based state. You need to change that to field-based motion, which looks much smoother. In Premiere, place a filter on the shot, any Premiere filter, go to Effects Controls and assign a 0 value to that filter. You'll have to render it, but hey, at least it doesn't have that jittery, shaky look. We can only hope that the next version of DigiSuite LX and DTV MAX will do away with this herky-jerky-looking effect -- unsafe at any speed, I say. If you use a lot of slow motion effects you should look at the DigiSuite LE MAX, which features field-based speed changes in real time.
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