by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

Stephen Schleicher
Producer
sschleicher@digitalmedianet.com

Last week we took a look at Final Cut Pro 2.0, the non-linear editing system from Apple. In it we reported that one of its most beneficial features over version 1.x was its real-time capabilities. Of course, you're not going to get real time out of the software alone; you need hardware to do that. So this week we're going to take a look at the card that brings realtime to Final Cut Pro 2.0—the Matrox RTMac.

Matrox has been making editing and capture boards for Windows systems for quite a while now, and this is the company's first foray into the Macintosh platform. The RTMac was announced with a lot of fanfare at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in 2000, though it failed to materialize until this year.

The pitch was this: Imagine the first real-time, dual-stream video editing and capture board for the Macintosh, including a breakout box and support for both a studio monitor and a second computer monitor, plus out of the box support for Final Cut Pro, all coming in at just under $1,000.

Not a bad pitch.

I think the whole Macintosh editing community has been holding its breath for the last year or so waiting to find out whether the RTMac would live up to expectations. So has it? Well, let's put it this way: After we received our review unit, we bought two.

What it does
We've been using the RTMac in the DMNTV studio here at Digital Media Net for about a month now. We produce a weekly series that, in its history, has been edited in a number of high-end systems. When Final Cut Pro 2.0 was released, we wanted to give it a shot; we also wanted to give the RTMac a shot, since our studio's Macs have fallen a bit behind the megaHertz curve, and render times can be a bit annoying.

Of course we fell in love with Final Cut Pro 2.0, as you can read in our review of it here. At the same time, we became dependent upon the RTMac. After all, who wants to give up real-time capabilities once he's gotten used to them?

The RTMac doesn't make everything in Final Cut Pro 2.0 run in real time. It's geared toward transitions and supports just a limited number of them, as well as some support for audio filters. These include:

• Dissolve: Cross Dissolve
• Iris: Cross Iris, Diamond Iris, Oval Iris, Point Iris, Rectangle Iris, Star Iris
• Slide: Band Slide, Box Slide, Center Split Slide, Multi Spin Slide, Push Slide, Spin Slide, Split Slide, Swap Slide
• Wipe: Center Wipe, Clock Wipe, Edge Wipe, Insert Wipe, V Wipe.

It also supports real-time motion effects for a video or graphics layer, including scaling, rotation, position, cropping, distortion, drop shadow and opacity. And it supports real-time display of single-layer Photoshop files, as well as JPEGs, PICTs, Targa files and TIFFs, as long as they're created at 720 x 480.

In general, the first audio filter you apply to a track does not need to be rendered, but subsequent filters do (such as combining 3-Band Parametric EQ and a Compressor Limiter, etc.).

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