Interview: Matrox Unleashes RT.X100
| Interview: Alain Legault, VP, Product Development, Matrox Video Products Group |
| Matrox is now shipping its newest real time DV product, the RT.X100. DMN's Charlie White spoke with one of the driving forces behind development of the RT.X100, Alain Legault, VP of Product Development of Matrox Video Products Group. Using a new graphics architecture the company calls "the power of X," the $1099 hardware and software package combines hardware-assisted real time effects with additional effects processed by the computer's host processor, together resulting in better real time performance. Legault had lots to say not only about this latest release, but outlined the implications of its improved technology for Matrox's higher-end products as well. |
Legault: We shipped the first RT.X100 units last Friday [7/5/02]. We exceeded our own expectations. We shipped a few hundred cards on Friday and several thousand have been going out this week, actually.
DMN: We were expecting them to ship July 15th.
Legault: We have great feedback so far from users and reviewers, and I think we'll have a good success with this product. We expect to build quite a few in the coming months.
DMN: So what do you think is the strongest new feature of the RT.X100?
Legault: I think it's really the architecture. The "power of X" that gives us something that nobody else has done before, which is a mixture of the software and hardware architecture together. We came from hardware-based products, the real time devices in the past, and some companies came out with software-based products prior to us doing that. But I think what's unique about this product is its hybrid approach where we mix software and hardware together, getting the best out of both worlds. High performance of the 2 gigahertz-plus processors from Intel and AMD and the hardware 3D graphic technology that we developed called Flex3D.
DMN: When I was watching the demo of this new card, it seemed like there were a lot of things you could do at the same time. You were using a 2.4GHz P4 machine with 512 MB of RAM, and I guess that just begs the question, what if I had a dual 3-gig machine, what additional things could I do that I didn't see with the 2.4GHz P4?
Legault: Our architecture is made to be scalable, so everything which is happening in the host side, you'll be able to do more stuff in parallel. We validated the product now to achieve a certain set of real time capabilities, all in parallel, like two video streams and two graphic streams with a bunch of filters like field-based slow motion, the chromakeyer, lumakeyer, and color corrector. We're expecting to do more in the future. As the processors get faster from Intel and AMD, we expect to have additional releases that will bring more filters and more streams to the product.
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DMN: When I was watching the demo the other day, I thought I saw more than two video streams. Is it that you haven't validated more than two video streams or can it not do that at this point?
Legault: The product is currently designed to achieve two video streams in real time. If you're trying to do more than two video streams, you have to render than section, but we use our turbo-DV compiling engine which works at near-real time speed, so you still get very high performance when you do that.
DMN: Say, for example, you're dissolving from one piece of video to another, and then say you put another track on the timeline and use the transparency controls to half-fade to that at the same time, will that just not work -- will a graphic come up that says you have to render -- or are you saying that you can't guarantee it won't be able to play back to DV in real time?
Legault: What you described is something we can do in real time, which is the ability to have a fade control in each layer. What I said is that we can achieve up to two video streams and two graphic streams at the same time on the timeline. If you exceed this capability by adding a third graphic layer or more than two video layers then you get a red bar and that section would need to be rendered.
DMN: So what about MPEG-2 exporting? Someone sent me a note the other day saying that they didn't think the quality of the MPEG-2 import and export was as good as what you used to have in the RT2500, although now the MPEG-2 can be exported in real time. Is it the same quality as before?
Legault: There's no compromise in the quality. Far from it, actually. The way we are encoding MPEG-2 in the real time Print to Disk is with the use of the C-Cube chip, which is the encoder that we've used in the past on the RT2500. I don't see why there would be any difference in quality in the new product. It's using basically identical software. What you have to understand is that although there is significantly new software in this new product, the "power of X" being a new architecture, we also leveraged all the software we could out of the RT2500. A lot of the heritage from the RT2500 found its way into the RT.X100. We preserved the C-Cube chips for the real time DV encode, which is the real time out to 1394, as well as the real time MPEG-2 print to disk, it's basically the encoding technology that came from the previous product.
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