Videomaker Expo Digitizing & Capture Card Panel and Buyer's Guide (page 2)

Chuck Peters
(Videomaker)
Let's talk about render time. Just say that word and everyone kind of shivers. Rendering has always been an issue with video. There's a myth that nonlinear is fast. You plug your footage in, you make your edits and you re done, right? No. Not until you press Render, then you go away for a few hours. Later you come back to see if your finished product rendered out how it should. If not, you make an adjustment and render again. We ve all been there. Can you speak to render time? Is there a solution that you have, or at least, something that we can go and do while we re waiting? And what about the latest industry jargon? Can you explain terms like "real time" and "faster than real time?

Stephen Davies
(Matrox)
First of all, I think you brought up a good point. Nonlinear editing is considered fast. But, for many editors out there, nonlinear editing is not even appropriate. If you shoot your material in sequence that it will be presented and all you need to do is cut, then don t buy a nonlinear editor. You re going to spend more time capturing your material than it would take you to produce your entire project in an analog domain. Having said that, Matrox has a number of "real time" nonlinear products. By real time, I mean, they can play back two streams of video at the same time. Because anytime you need to do any kind of transition, short of a cut, you need to be playing two streams of video at the same time, you have to deliver two video streams to the switcher simultaneously. We can do all of our transitions in real time, all of our dissolves in real time, 2D effects, picture in picture in real time. 2D transitions, squeezes, wipes, that type of thing in real time. We have five keyers on board that are all real time: two chromakeyers, two luminance keyers and an alpha keyer available in real time. Color correction available in real time. Color effects such as posterization and mosaic and tinting effects available in real time. The key thing with the DigiSuite family is all the effects are available all the time on all layers simultaneously in real time, with no rendering. So if you do one, you re not negating the other. You can do all the effects and stack them up and maintain real time. There are going to be times you re going to render. Nobody is going to do everything in real time. For those times, it simply boils down to computer power. The faster your computer, the faster you re going to get it done.

Rob Hawranko
(Pinnacle Systems)
Well, in the days of old, rendering used to be a really bad word. It used to be a dirty word. It's the one problem that all of the manufacturers here have really worked hard to solve, because if you get your project laid out and it takes two evenings to render, then you save no time going to a nonlinear application. Essentially, it depends on your hardware. We have real-time capability where we funnel two streams of video and enable you to do effects between those two streams without rendering.
If you can t afford that dual-stream product today and you just want to get started, our DC30 product has a feature called miroINSTANT Video, that actually only renders changes or transitions. So it doesn t re-render things that don t need to be rendered. It's not real time, but it's as close to real time as you can get without a dual-stream card. The other option we have, for any product we have out there in the Pinnacle line, is a product we just announced, called Free FX; essentially, it's a 3D effects generator, and it's near real time. It essentially not relying on our hardware on our board as much as it relies on your processor. But you can get 3D effects in near real time, with just a software application. So again, it boils down to price point and functionality, and how much you can invest in your system to get to take the rendering thing away.

Ralph Messana
(NewTek)
As Rob said, back in the old days, it took probably a minute to render a single dissolve, and that was not very useful. The thing that always bothered me is, I can handle waiting a minute or 15 seconds to render a dissolve. It just bothered me that every time I made a change to that dissolve, I had to re-render to see how it looked. Our Video Toaster system in 1.0 provides real-time previews. As soon as I put in a dissolve or transition, I can scrub through that area and see what it looks like. Once that's done, I can move on to the next area and do what I have to do and at the end of my project, render just the transitions. That's in version 1.0. As I said before, our system is capable of four streams. Probably sooner than most of us think, we re going to be going to dual streams, with real time DVEs; LightWave generated DVEs that can have motion blur, depth of field, all kinds of stuff that nobody has in a DVE engine. Because we re the first product that's using the computer to do everything. It's the first product that's using the CPU to do the effects, effects that you normally see being done with dedicated hardware. So even though we re going to be dual stream very shortly, our render time now is very quick, because a lot of times when you re rendering, the intense part of the rendering is uncompressing the video, moving it to RGB color space, manipulating it, and then recompressing it.
Our system's already uncompressed. So we don t have to uncompress two frames, convert them to RGB, manipulate them, and then recompress them back to YUV. It's all uncompressed already. And next year at NAB we ll be shipping a 16-input live switcher. As Stephen said, some projects are not right for nonlinear. If you ve got a four camera shoot of a play, do that linear. It doesn t make sense to put four hours or eight hours of footage onto your hard drive to do a play or something that was shot multi-camera.

Jim Holland
(FAST Multimedia)
Everyone has mentioned, and I think all will agree, this is much less of an issue than even a year ago. Certainly, much less of an issue than it was three years ago. Every time I get a new computer and I do a project, and I hit the Render button, I m surprised at how little time I m looking at. There's a couple of things I recommend. One of them is use the CODEC that's assisted by the hardware. That's always going to help you, of course. And keep the size of your projects reasonable. As far as what FAST is doing to address render times, we re recommending you go with the best hardware you can get. It's all about the speed of the processor.

Jeff Bierly
(Digital Origin)
Digital Origin is constantly optimizing. We re a Software CODEC, so we do everything in software. The beauty is, this time last year, CPUs were maxing out at like 350MHz, where now you re hearing 600MHz. So Moore's law, real fun in computers. The faster you get, the faster you get to real time and beyond. Also, processor technology is like Apple calling theirs Velocity Engine; Pentium III with the MMX architecture. When you plug into those types of vector rendering assistance types, you re going to see things accelerate quite a lot. The nice thing about software is that as soon as you put it in a faster computer, it runs faster. What a concept!

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