Jason Dunn
07-21-2006, 09:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=3192' target='_blank'>http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=3192</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Five years ago, despite the growing ubiquity of FireWire, if you wanted to edit video seriously on your PC you were still better off with dedicated hardware. But times have changed, and dedicated hardware just hasn’t been able to keep up with the burgeoning power of more general components like the graphics card and CPU. So most video editing companies have moved as many editing tasks as possible over to software, in order to take advantage of faster GPUs and processors. One product which was starting to look a little jaded in this context was Matrox’s RT.X100. Although this could still give you dependable real-time editing when mixing two, or on a good day three DV files and a title layer or two at the same time, it couldn’t go beyond that. This was because a fair amount of the effects processing and video encoding was still being performed by the editing card itself. Although you could rely on the performance for this reason, it also meant that a faster processor would not give a significant increase in abilities, and your graphics card wasn’t being used at all."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/3192-1.jpg" /><br /><br />I don't do enough video editing to warrant a hardware video rendering card, but if I was doing it all day having the added speed boost would be vital. Editing standard definition video is slow enough on most PCs, editing HD would likely bring any of my systems to their knees.