Re: NORMCO still has it...

[lagoon] "If you want to check it out yourself: Do a easy timeline:
V1 video, colorcorrection
V2 skyreplacement with moving alpha, gauss blurred
V3 DOF (Focus) with a mask above it to bring the umimportant parts in the image out of focus, gauss, anyone?
V4 moving typo, if you want with drop shadow.

Try for 30 sec.
Now for 30 minutes.
The do this daily.
And forget the render :)
Thats our reality here since years, thx to 844/X."

I will try this when I get a chance. I garantee you it won't take 6 hours. Let me point out that 10-bit uncompressed gaussian blur (by itself w/o the other streams and filters) give complete RT playback on my box without rendering. A for the multi-strem/multi-filter project you described, the thing with RT extreme is that most of those I wouldn't even have to render until I was ready to master to tape. Since that (in this case) would take more than 30 minutes anyways, spending an additional 20-30 minutes to render is not a big deal for most people. Humans generally have to eat lunch at some point, right? If I were you, I'd be more concerned with the 30 minutes it takes to make a tape, and be wondering why optical or tape decks with handshake data transferring at speeds faster than real-time are practically non-existent. Why isn't there a Digibeta deck with a Firewire800 port that can playback and record at 4x? That would save us a hell of a lot more time than RT gaussian blur would.

For you, the 844/x seems like a very good choice. You seem to have one very important client who demands exceptionally fast turnarounds and you need to do the same thing every day. But for me, I don't need 30 minutes of footage with multiple filters applied every single day. We cut commercials and movie trailers. Our timelines are generally less than 2 minutes.

Let me ask you this though. What if you didn't do the same thing every day and the work you did required more flexibility like ours does? What if suddenly you need to work in uncompressed HD? Or what if a client brought a bunch of DVCProHD tapes from a shoot and you wanted to edit natively in DVCPro codec in order to avoid recompression and wasting 10 times more drive space than necessary? Suddenly, that $50k RT hardware becomes totally worthless for those jobs. That's the kind of situation I never want to be in.

I just wish Media 100 did what Apple is doing. As someone else mentioned, what Apple did with Motion is the future. The rendering power of consumer video cards is phenomenal and Motion taps into that. Have you seen a modern computer game? It's incredible what kind of RT hardware ATI and Nvidia have been making all along for a few hundred bucks. The problem is that AGP is one-way traffic, so with Motion the RT effects only show up on the computer monitor. When AGP is replaced by PCI-E (which is two-way), then things are really going to change. And all we'll have to do is buy some FCP/Motion upgrade licenses and some G6 4.5Ghz Macs (which we'd probably end up doing even if we were still using M100).