Matrox RT2500

Matrox's RT2000 (see Reviews, issue 68, p169) has been PC Pro's video-capture card of choice for over a year, but it's always had one drawback. The RT2000 forces you to use the included G400 graphics card because it's required for processing the video special effects. For video professionals, this isn't a massive drawback, but it does put more powerful graphics adaptors out of your reach. Dual monitors require a second PCI graphics card, and more powerful 3D acceleration isn't possible at all. Fortunately, Matrox has realised the limitation and released the RT2500, which is essentially an RT2000 on one PCI card, with the G400 chip upgraded to a G450. This leaves the AGP slot free for your choice of graphics card.

If the RT2500 was just an all-in-one PCI version of the RT2000, it wouldn't really warrant a review. However, since releasing the RT2000, Matrox has constantly updated its drivers, so that the RT2500 is a substantially more powerful product than the RT2000 was initially. The driver set is now on version 3, called Matrox Video Tools 3 (MVT3). This is what Matrox provides in the box with the RT2500. The third-party software bundle is a little different too. Premiere 6 is now the editing software, rather than 5.1c, Sonic DVDit! LE has been upgraded to version 2.3, the titler is now TitleExpress RT 1.26 instead of Ulead Cool3D 2.5, and there's the all-new Ligos LSX-MPEG LE output plug-in.

At the video-acquisition stage you now have two options. Capture from within Premiere remains and is the only option if you want to use analog sources. However, you can now also capture directly to IBP MPEG-2, ready to burn straight to DVD, although not via FireWire. If your sources are purely digital, the MediaTools applet lets you acquire all your video without the overhead of having Premiere in the background. It will even scan your tape during capture and pull out the in-camera edits as separate clips.

Editing is where the most impressive enhancements have occurred. Matrox has constantly been adding effects capabilities to its RT range. MVT1 offered 2D/3D transitions, page curls and organic gradient wipes. The first two could be used as filters on superimposed video layers as well. MVT3 also has particle and tile transitions, which split the video into segments or square tiles respectively. The new distortion effects employ the G450 chip's 3D bump-mapping capability to render video with the appearance of frosted glass or flowing water, which can look great in the right context. All three can be used as filters as well as transitions. One new effect is available only as a filter - colourisation. This can be used for sepia tone or colour correction, but can't make video black and white for some reason. However, all of the Matrox effects have highly configurable borders, soft edges and drop shadows. Transformations such as resizing and rotation, plus cropping, can be keyframed too. This almost makes the RT2500 into a compositing tool with real-time capabilities. Extremely useful for more everyday editing tasks is the real-time support for over 60 native Premiere transitions, such as cross-dissolve and non-additive dissolve. Premiere 6's audio mixer is also supported in real-time.

Titling was one area that let the original RT2000 down, as Ulead Cool 3D had to be used as an external application. Now that TitleExpress is provided as a plug-in instead, titles can be edited without leaving Premiere. Placement is made even easier, as this latest version of TitleExpress exports the frame at the current time marker in Premiere as a background in the titling app. TitleExpress titles can have any Matrox effect applied to them too and still be in real-time, making it easy to create title sequences with panache.