Avid’s Xpress DV3 is compatible with other Avid systems.
LAS VEGAS – There are a lot of NLE systems out there, and I set out to find what was available for the PC, priced at under $2,000. I found that Canopus, Matrox, and Avid offer some powerful editing solutions at affordable prices.
The DVStormSE by Canopus delivered a lot of bang for the buck. Priced at $1,399 with Adobe Premiere, and $1,088 without, it boasts five realtime streams of DV and a lot of nice RT effects. Most of the filters and effects are very useful and I was suprised to find them in such a low-priced system.
Realtime slow motion and speed control looked good, with no jitter in forward or reverse. Motion tracking using the region filter allows you to hide someone’s identity while they are moving or highlight a moving object. Luma and chroma keys had automation that helped to make pulling good keys much easier. Also, the chrominance filters could be used to color one object in a scene and monochrome the rest. The coolest filter on this machine was the pencil sketch, which turns video into sketched looking lines.
I liked this card but you will need a fairly strong computer and drive system to take advantage of all that it offers. A 1.8GHz single processor with a dedicated 7200rpm IDE drive will allow you to do three streams in realtime. If you use at least a two-drive IDE array, you can get the full five streams.
The Canopus philosophy is based on scalable technology: buy one interface-card and update your system with software as it becomes available. Their card allows for realtime capturing through DV, S-Video and composite inputs, and realtime DV and analog output.
This new card from Matrox comes bundled with Pro pack.
Matrox rt2500
With the Matrox card, you don’t necessarily need a fast computer. I have run their RT2500 on a PIII 550, and had two streams in realtime with plenty of RT effects and titling. This is possible because they use hardware acceleration on their card, so the Matrox card is actually doing most of the work.
The RT2500 comes bundled with the new Pro Pack, which includes the productivity features most requested by users, including a WYSIWYG plug-in for Adobe After Effects, new realtime blur and mask effects, advanced keyframe control for all realtime effects and Matrox MediaExport for batch encoding Web streaming files. The RT2500 looks very good for the $899 MSRP.
This board is the next-generation RT2000, so the basic design is a tried and true old friend. I have used this card to edit broadcast commercials and corporate videos, and the clients were happy with the results. Matrox allows you to download new effects as they are released, so the package just keeps getting better.
The RT2500 allows you to take in composite and S-Video as well as DV, allowing for a wide range of editing. You can take in S-Video from a Beta deck and capture it as an MPEG-2 IBP in 4:2:2 colorspace, avoiding the 4:1:1 colorspace limitations associated with DV’s 1394 interface.
Avid xpress dv3
The new Avid Xpress DV3, priced at $1,699, is a software-only solution that requires at least a PIII 750MHz, or a Mac G4 computer to run properly. Each manufacturer posts a list of qualified hardware on their Web site for all of these systems. Failing to use this approved hardware list may or may not result in peak performance. The only way to be assured of top performance is to use a system certified by the manufacturer.
The Avid Xpress DV3 offers over 100 customizable realtime effects and multiple realtime video streams. You can preview a title, a dissolve, a color effect and a picture-in-picture simultaneously. You can customize every parameter of every effect and see it all in realtime, without having to wait to render while you are editing. When you are ready to export, choose one of the 25 import/export formats, then render and go, or output to tape. The DV3 software is compatible with other Avid systems, so you can work at home and take all of your project settings to a post house for finishing if you wish.
The basic DV3 has the Xpress video editing software; Boris FX LTD and Graffiti LTD for 2D and 3D effects and titles; Sonic DVDit! LE and AuthorScript for DVD creation; and Discreet Cleaner EZ for export of streaming media files.
Considering the low cost, these systems are amazing. They all can edit DV and have a good assortment of realtime effects. The DVStorm and the Matrox RT2500 can take in DV, composite and S-Video. All of the systems export the popular file formats for streaming video and making DVDs.
If you have a slower computer, you can use the hardware accelerator built into the Matrox RT2500 to get two realtime streams of video with a graphic channel, all for under $900. If you have a fast computer, the Canopus DVStormSE delivers five streams of DV for realtime viewing. For those of you who want to have affordable Avid editing and the option of loading your work into a large Avid at a later date, the Avid Xpress DV3 would be a good choice.
Also displayed at NAB this year was the Blade system from In-sync, makers of Speed Razor software. It is a multi-stream realtime machine that uses “Blade,” the new DV version of Speed Razor, which will be ready soon…but that’s another story.
