REVIEW: Matrox RT.X2
Studio Monthly by Bruce A. Johnson 
HDV Editing with More Horsepower You have to admit, there’s something compelling about Adobe Premiere. While there’s no drought of capable PC-based editing software, Premiere holds the singular distinction of being the only one to have third-party manufacturers building accelerator cards for it consistently. I edited for years with Premiere 6.5, using a Canopus DVStorm card with great success. At the same time, Matrox and Pinnacle were also in that market. After Canopus decided to drop support when Premiere Pro came out, it was time to make a choice. Happily, Matrox stepped up to the plate with not one, but two solutions: the previously reviewed Axio (November 2006) and its slightly little brother, the RT.X2. So what separates the Axio and the RT.X2, now in version 2? Well, it basically boils down to support for uncompressed HD video. Like many of us in the editing business, RT.X2 tops out at HDV editing, a job it does without breathing hard. Given enough underlying computer and graphics-card horsepower, there isn’t much in the basic Premiere Pro toolkit that you can’t do in real time, in two layers at once in HDV, and many more in SD. read more...
HDV Editing with More Horsepower You have to admit, there’s something compelling about Adobe Premiere. While there’s no drought of capable PC-based editing software, Premiere holds the singular distinction of being the only one to have third-party manufacturers building accelerator cards for it consistently. I edited for years with Premiere 6.5, using a Canopus DVStorm card with great success. At the same time, Matrox and Pinnacle were also in that market. After Canopus decided to drop support when Premiere Pro came out, it was time to make a choice. Happily, Matrox stepped up to the plate with not one, but two solutions: the previously reviewed Axio (November 2006) and its slightly little brother, the RT.X2. So what separates the Axio and the RT.X2, now in version 2? Well, it basically boils down to support for uncompressed HD video. Like many of us in the editing business, RT.X2 tops out at HDV editing, a job it does without breathing hard. Given enough underlying computer and graphics-card horsepower, there isn’t much in the basic Premiere Pro toolkit that you can’t do in real time, in two layers at once in HDV, and many more in SD. read more...
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