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Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme Pro Suite
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 | | (Click graphic for enlargement) Lots of real-time effects are available, including this Old Movie simulation that lets you adjust a variety of parameters. |
I noticed as I worked with the system that more real-time capabilities are possible if you apply the effects in a certain order. For example, the CPU-based effects, such as color correction, chroma- or luma-keying and motion control must be applied to a clip first, and then after that you can add a 3D move and still work in real time. Anything that uses the Flex 3D hardware needs to be added last, and then the full amount of real-time power can be realized. As far as flying boxes are concerned, there are various numbers of simultaneous effects that are possible, depending on the complexity of the moves you want to do. The easiest moves for the hardware to handle are what Matrox calls “move-and-scales,” where the frame or text is moved around and/or reduced in size. You can do five of those at one time. You can create two basic DVEs at a time, and those consist of simple spins or perspective moves. Or, you can create one Flex 3D DVE at a time, which lets you make spheres, page curls, particle effects and more, all with light effects and shadows. These are pretty complex to compute – heck, I can remember a time in the late 80s when the only way to create such effects was with a machine called a Mirage that cost a million dollars and required a full-time rocket scientist at the controls. No astrophysics required any more, though; just drop the effect on the clip and it flies away pronto, or better yet, modify the effect to your liking in that easy-to-use Matrox effect setup dialog box. I also like the way there is a solo button in that dialog box. This control lets you take out any other layers you might have already added and see just the one you’re working on, a feature that can greatly simplify a multi-layered extravaganza.
And, the Xtreme part of this package is its ability to go even beyond that, where you are still able to see a useful preview of your effects when they’ve exceeded the limits of the hardware. Similar to Premiere’s own software-based strategy that deals with the pesky previewing problem, the RT.X100’s “XtremePreview” gives you "graceful degradation" of your video, where you can still get a really good preview of all the layers interacting together in your NTSC pr PAL monitor, giving you a realistic feel for the timing of your effects. It does this by dropping a few frames here and there, but it’s still smooth enough to give you a good idea of what your final result will look like. It reminds me of the way Sony Vegas degrades as the layers pile up – keeping the workflow going even when you’ve hit the wall with the hardware capability.
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 | | (Click for enlargement) Media Tools let you capture footage automatically. |
Another part of this system that I have always admired, a hold-over from earlier Matrox RT versions, are Matrox’s Media Tools, consisting of the best capture utility available anywhere. Far better than what I noticed was flaky performance of the internal Premiere Pro capture facility when it’s working with the RT.X100 Xtreme, Media Tools give you true one-pass scan and capture, where there’s no pre-rolling or pre-scanning, and your shots are all captured in one fell swoop. You simply designate the in and out of the tape where you’d like all the shots captured, or tell it to grab the whole tape, and the thing’s off and running. You end up with a folder full of shots captured perfectly from beginning to end. Then it’s just a matter of right-clicking and selecting “export to Premiere” and a Premiere project is created for you including all those clips in their own folder. A cause for slight concern was that this feature still created a Premiere 6.5 project, but that didn’t matter because the project was immediately converted into a Premiere Pro project as soon as it was launched. Seems like that little bug would be easy to fix, Matrox. Even so, overall I think this Media Tools applet is the best capture software there is.
 | | Here's one of the gorgeous real-time effects you can create with the RT.X100 Xtreme Pro. |
Another likable aspect of this product is its ability to extensively keyframe all the effects. When you use a Matrox-specific effect or filter (which are the best ones, by the way), click on Premiere Pro’s Setup icon in the Effect Controls tab and Matrox’s interface for adjusting the effects appears. I like the ease of keyframing these effects in the Matrox interface, one to which I’ve grown accustomed over the few years of its existence. There are some Matrox filters and transitions I like a lot just because they’re fun, like the old movie simulation, and the wild particle transitions that look like broken glass and such. Others are far more useful, such as the blur filters and the tools that crop and adjust corners in real time – these are valuable utility effects that everybody who’s actually editing can use at one time or another. I also was impressed with Matrox’s real time chromakey tool, which was able to snap together a clean key without any trouble at all. I just clicked the Auto Key button and boom! The key was there, and it was clean. Matrox tells me this keyer is unique because it actually up-samples the clip to 4:4:4 color space and then executes its chromakey magic. The idea works very well and even preserves a shadow of your foreground subject in the shot if you want it to. Also included is the ability to run many of Premiere Pro’s effects in real time, but unfortunately, most of those are effects I wouldn’t be caught dead using, such as various wipes, slides and corny page peels that were pretty cool a couple of decades ago. But, on the positive side, my favorite Premiere Pro transition will also work in real time: The cross dissolve. And Premiere Pro’s awesome text tool, improved in version 6.5, is simply excellent and all its results work in real time, including text crawls and credit rolls.
One feature that makes this system move even closer to a truly Pro designation is its real time vectorscope, waveform monitor and proc amp capabilities when you capture from analog or digital sources. Another feature I really like is its ability to show you a realistic WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) preview when you’re using After Effects, Photoshop, LightWave and 3ds Max. Decidedly non-professional, though, are its unbalanced audio inputs and lack of SDI support. And while I’m in gripe mode, I have to complain about the sphere effect, which does actually work, but in my experimentations with it I got it to crash more often than I’d like. It crashed more often as a transition than when it was a filter, but still, this shouldn’t happen. And when it would crash, it would bring the whole system down with it, to the point of needing to be re-booted before I could use it again. This slight instability with this particular effect and occasionally a few others involving the Flex 3D hardware were the only glitches that kept me from thinking this system was perfect. I’m hoping this little bug will be ironed out by the next driver release.
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