Matrox RT.X100 Video Capture & Editing Card Review

review posted September 2003

Barely a year after the introduction of the RT.X100, the successor to the RT2500, Matrox have released the RT.X100 Xtreme which is not really a new card but a major upgrade to the drivers of the existing card. The RT.X100 itself fared extremely well in reviews all over the world winning many Best Buy awards from a variety of online and offline editors. In addition to features of the RT2500 the RT.X100 - released in Q3, 2002 - offered real time output via Firewire and real-time MPEG-2 capture and encoding. It also supported real-time chroma and luma keying, a new colour correction filter and full colour balance adjustment. It did require a powerful PC. That hasn't changed.

The RT.X100 Xtreme: 

Existing users of the RT.X100 get the update to the RT.X100 Xtreme free of charge. Users of the older 2000 and 2500 cards are charged for the upgrade to the RT.X100 Xtreme.

Matrox are continuing to champion their "Power of X". This is essentially pointing to the scalability of the product but should also be taken as a warning: Give this baby a lot of power, a fast processor, fast RAM, fast hard disk, fast everything. Saying that, the performance of the RT.X100 in a top of the range PC by today's standards is indeed impressive. Like it's predecessor the RT.X100, this product has had enormously favourable reviews all over the world. 

Advantages of the RT.X100 and RTX.X100 Xtreme: 

• Real-time scan and capture.
• The RT.X100 has TurboDV which delivers very-fast DV output rendering when you exceed the real-time capabilities of the card.
• The RT.X100 offers a huge selection of real-time, fully customizable 3D effects. 
• The RT.X100 delivers advanced real-time chroma & luma-keying. It offers spill suppression, shadow preservation + an "Auto" button that makes chroma-keying easy.
• The RT.X100 delivers advanced color correction with an "Auto" button that simplifies the process. It also supports a Final Cut Pro-like three-way color correction no other PC-based product offers.
• The RT.X100 has what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) support for some third-party products.
• The RT.X100 offers real-time support for a variety of character generation tools including Premiere Titling, Title Express, Title Motion, Title Deko and more. 
• The RT.X100 accelerates batch exporting in a variety of standard formats including Real and Windows Media formats.
• There is no 4GB file limit for files captured with the RT.X100.

Disadvantages:

• The Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme does have higher system requirements. 
• You have to install Windows XP before you put the Matrox card in (page 11 of the manual). And if you ever want to reinstall Windows you'll have to break the warranty seal on your PC to pull the Matrox card out. We really don't like this. 
• The Matrox product has no audio input. There's the inconvenience of using a separate soundcard, having extra cabling and synchronizing the audio to video.
• To maintain a real-time environment you do have to perform some tasks in a defined order i.e. CPU effects before DVE effects. The new drivers are an improvement but this is still a restriction.
• Maximum simultaneous real-time graphics layers limited to four, and maximum simultaneous real-time video tracks limited to two.