Matrox RT.X2 in the Real World: Part 2

(Click here for part 1)

The strongest first impression of the Matrox RT.X2 is the realtime HD preview to flat panel LCD monitor via the RT.X2''s DVI output. If your LCD panel has sufficient resolution, RT.X2 can provide pixel-to-pixel mapping up to 1920x1080. Preview is realtime during color correction and chroma keying, allowing much more accurate fine-tuning than possible through Adobe Premiere Pro''s own preview window. If lip sync becomes an issue, the preview could be invaluable.

You can access many of Matrox''s effects in After Effects, with real time preview to your preview monitor. Sweet!
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In addition to preview in Premiere Pro, you also get realtime preview in other graphics programs, including Photoshop, After Effects, and Encore—all obviously valuable when creating content for television display. With broadcast HD capable monitors easily costing in the thousands, HD preview alone could be worth the price of the RT.X2.

All these Matrox effects work in realtime.
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Matrox also provides 27 effects, plus a number of transitions, all fully keyframable, and previewing in realtime. I focused my attention on the ones that I use often in my productions, starting with color correction.

I found the Matrox color correction filter highly usable.
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The Matrox color correction filter is a three-way tool with a Master wheel and separate controls for shadows, midtones, and highlights. Like most color correction tools, you set the basic settings by clicking an eyedropper and choosing a region within the frame that''s supposed to look white. Matrox white-balances the frame, which you can fine-tune with manual adjustments, with a helpful splitscreen preview. Using the Reference and Match eyedroppers provided, you can also match the colors in multiple clips, an invaluable feature with multi-camera productions.

The auto adjustment seemed invariably dark to me, but I was able to produce great results using the Proc amp controls in the filter, which included brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue. I like Premiere Pro''s color correction capabilities, but was able to quickly produce equal or better results using Matrox''s controls, all of which previewed in realtime. Note that Matrox provides a secondary color correction filter that also works in realtime.

Matrox''s Chroma Key effect was very effective in Premiere.
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Matrox''s Chroma Key effect proved much more effective than Premiere''s native chroma key filters, about on par with After Effect''s Keylight Filter. Operation was pretty standard; use an eyedropper to select the background color, then adjust the hue, saturation, and aperture controls to optimize the key. Once you''ve eliminated as much of the background as possible, softness and spill removal controls let you fine-tune the result. Obviously, working with realtime feedback from the external preview monitor was a real benefit.

Matrox''s Old Movie Effect is a nice addition since Premiere Pro doesn''t have its own tool.
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The other effect that I extensively tested was the Old Movie effect, which is interesting because Premiere has no native effects that perform this function. I found the Matrox tool very flexible, with controls over noise, dust, streaking, jitter, flicker, and color gain and addition. With particle related effects, such as dust, you could choose a specific pattern, providing wonderful flexibility. However, this is one tool that could have really used overall presets such as '70s movies, or black and white, to speed your production. Of course, you can save your own customized filter applications as presets simply by right clicking and choosing Save Preset.

Overall, Matrox has been making supplemental effects for Adobe Premiere for multiple generations of professional level products. Most users will find them very intuitive and effective.

Table 1: Rendering time
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When it''s time to render, you simply choose Export to Matrox Media Encoder, which looks just like the Adobe Media Encoder, and even uses the same presets. To test performance, I used four different test scenarios, with results shown in Table 1.

In terms of procedure, I created each test sequence in a Matrox project using Matrox effects, then rendered using the Matrox Media Encoder. Then I created a new non-Matrox project, imported the Matrox project and substituted Adobe native effects for the Matrox effects, rendering via the Adobe Media Encoder. This gave me the closest equivalent to the Matox project that I could derive.

Here''s the multi-layer test, two HDV sequences from a ballet, a DV source chromakey clip and title.
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The first test was a four-layer production with two HDV layers, both color corrected, a DV green screen overlay and title. This simulates a project with lots of layers, both picture-in-picture and combining layers via the opacity controls. As you can see, when rendering out to an SD DVD file, the RT.X2 was more than twice as fast as Native Premiere Pro. Interestingly, however, when exporting to Windows Media Video files (at 1Mbps) the results were nearly identical.

Next I produced a four-minute multi-cam project with two HDV streams, both color corrected, which meant that neither Premiere nor Matrox needed to scale the output. Encoding to a Blu-ray compatible HD MPEG-2 stream, Premiere Pro was actually slightly faster than the RT.X2.

My last project was a mixed two-camera shoot—one DV, the other HDV—with the output scaled to HD for output to the same Blu-ray compatible MPEG-2 stream. Here, the RT.X2 was again substantially faster than Premiere Pro working alone.

What do I take from this? From a rendering perspective, it appears that the RT.X2 is most helpful when applying multiple layers, or when scaling video to higher resolutions, but only when producing MPEG-2 files. If your projects fit within these definitions, expect significant timesavings during rendering. On the other hand, for many simpler projects, or multicamera projects shot with a common format, you probably won''t see any acceleration of encoding at all.

Overall, I''m very impressed with the RT.X2. It''s the most cost-effective HD monitoring solution that I''ve seen, and the effects I tested were at least as effective as those of Premiere Pro, if not better. Though most of my multicamera projects these days use a common format, the preview capabilities and rendering time improvements afforded by the RT.X2 will definitely help me to stretch my creative wings.

I appreciate the assistance from Jeff Pulera, producer of the very helpful training DVD Matrox RT.X2 Revealed, which you can find at www.sharbor.com. The DVD saved me many hours of trial and error, and would be a big help to
any first-time users of the RT.X2.