25. Conclusion - Low Price, Complicated Installation

The Matrox RT2500 video editing system targets hobby filmmakers and semi-professional users and costs $999 retail. We recommend purchasing the card as part of a complete system. This does away with the bother of installing the retail solution. The price would then depend on the hardware used with it. In our upcoming Building a Digital Video Capture System - Part II we review the RT2500 as part of a complete system so, keep an eye out for this review this week for that assessment.

In the meantime, the advantage of this card is its ability to edit videos in realtime, as long as the DV and MPEG-2 formats are the data formats used. Producers can save a lot of time in this case. This is, however, offset when converting file formats after capturing and exporting files. The computer's CPU still has to execute these functions, taking up a lot of time here. A whole slew of plug-ins come bundled with the Adobe Premiere 6.0 software package. The export tools for RealPlayer, Windows MediaPlayer, Apple Quicktime and generic MPEG-2 streams (Ligos LSX) are particularly helpful when distributing video productions over the Internet.

The card edits signals at a level that rivals studio quality movies, making the value side very attractive. The RT2500 runs under Windows 98/ME and 2000.

Sources

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