You must apply the software based filters first to your clips and then add the hardware based ones. The software filters include the speed control, colour correction and chroma key. If you apply a hardware effect/filter to a clip before adding one of these software based filters, you will not get realtime DV output. You could always shuffle your effects around but basically this can be confusing - I tend to just click the render command. I can't see why Matrox could not identify the hardware and software filters differently.

Real-Time Colour Correction
Some form of colour correction has been available on previous Matrox suites but the panel included on the RTX 100 contains no less than 18 different controls. To start with you get the 4 processing amp controls – hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast. Then you get a powerful colour balancing tool that gives you RGB colour correction with the ability to adjust just the shadow, mid tone, and highlight levels. If this were not enough you can also can adjust the black, white and gamma levels on the input, and black and white levels on the output. However there is a better feature - the auto white balance. I found the auto white balance eye dropper superb. You click on Auto White balance panel and up comes an eye dropper - drop this on some white in the original scene and click and 90% of your colour correction work is done.

Wearing my professional hat for a moment, we were shooting with four cameras. During daylight there were no problems but at night we had a combination of HMI, tungsten and fluorescent lighting. Every camera produced a different colour. However one click of the auto white balance and "where did the colour cast go?" Occasionally I did a minor tweak afterwards but as I said earlier this one control did 90% of the work. As it is key frameable it is quite possible to iron out the colour change you would get if you panned from the window to the log fire. Personally I feel this is one of the most useful and best controls on the system.

Real-Time chroma & luma key
Depending on the type of editing one performs this control may be used frequently or not at all. I think, personally, I have used chroma keying once. The control was very accurate and easy to use. Although I rarely have a need to do any keying, I did spend some time playing around with the controls. Every so often my keying signal went black. Whether this was a bug, I do not know. The new Xtreme drivers seem to have overcome this problem. Some time ago I was at a back to back comparison of the Canopus and RTX 100 systems. To my mind the RTX 100 was equal or better on every aspect except one. I felt the Canopus produced better keying results. This was about a year ago and then if your editing requires a lot of chroma keying, I would have recommended the Canopus system. However now with the new Xtreme drivers, I feel there is little to choose between the systems.

Video Effects and Transitions
If you like fancy transitions then the RTX 100 has a lot of them! The only problem is that we now have so many effects / transitions that it is difficult to remember what they all do. I tend to stick to about 3 groups. As I mentioned before one of the distinct advantages over the earlier systems is that you can add several effects on one or more tracks and still play back in real time.

Matrox are very good about making available updates. These come from two sources - from Matrox themselves and via other users. Matrox, as far as I know, is the only company to host a site where individuals can swap effects. It is at www.fxzone.matrox.com - by the way it is free of charge but you need to be registered. Some of my favourite effects have come from this section. The Matrox effects are now included in the Xtreme package however there are quite a collection available from other users. I will be dealing with many of these in the next section.

Other good features of the RTX 100
There are so many other features but due to time constraints, I am going to stick with the ones that I tend to use.

One feature I find very pleasant is the real time firewire output - no more waiting for the the project to render before recording it to tape. On earlier systems the "Record to Tape" was a very random affair. On the RTX 100 the record is frame accurate i.e. you can specify the actual time code you want to start the recording. You can even do a frame accurate tape insert edit - i.e. insert editing into a prerecorded tape. Personally I find this works better using the same camera as did the original recording.

If you are into making DVDs the RTX 100 allows you to export in real time directly from the Premiere timeline. From there you can pick up the DVD compliant MPEG 2 and author your DVDs. There are many authoring packages available. We will be reviewing some of the more affordable ones over the next few months.

Over the next few months we hope to review some of the other systems on the market including the RTX 100's little brother the RTX 10.

Building a RTX 100

What's Xtreme about Xtreme

Back to Page One

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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