Product Reviews

Matrox's RT.X100 has been our recommended video-editing card for almost a year, but this month it looked like it could be replaced by Pinnacle's capable Edition PRO 5. Fortunately for Matrox, the X100 had a major driver update in the nick of time.

While the hardware remains the same, the new drivers add greatly to productivity. The original RT.X100 had strict rules over what could be output in real-time, beyond which you'd need

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to render to see what your editing looked like. But Xtreme allows more effects to be mixed in real-time - two layers of video and four of graphics, and possibly more on powerful systems.

When real-time capabilities have been exceeded, you still get a reduced frame-rate preview in most cases, making editing much more fluid. A couple of new effects have been added as well - Move and Scale for multilayer picture-in-picture, and Old Movie for creating an antiquated film or TV look. Sonic ReelDVD Studio is now included together with DVDit! SE, adding Dolby Digital audio DVD encoding.

As processors and graphics cards increase in power, AGP-based solutions like Pinnacle's Edition could forge ahead of PCI editing cards like the RT.X100. But, for now, the Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme's improved productivity plus hardware real-time DV and MPEG-2 output maintain its position as our A-Listed video-editing card. Best of all, existing users can download the update for free, and RT2x00 owners can trade up for just £399.