Re: New bundle - RT.X2 with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 Upgrade

I think Cineform's codec is as good as any of them - DnxHD, ProRes, even Matrox MPEG I-frame. It's just that any transcoding is going to affect the quality slightly, and the key to maintaining quality is minimizing unnecessary transcoding steps, and using uncompressed codecs if necessary. if you are color correcting, 10-bit will help maintain your effective bit depth. As we all know, multiple transcoding steps, especially using compressed codecs, will rapidly turn HD video to mush.

Matrox's RTX2 is a unique product - specifically tailored to HDV and P2 editing without a pro deck (HDCAM, D5, DVCPRO HD). There are many people out there who have no intererst in HDSDI or $40K+ tape decks. So a Kona or a Xena card have limited usefulness to them. They just want to shoot, edit, and deliver a Blu-Ray DVD or other digital file on a data DVD. The RTX2 is perfect for them, with software features identical to, and performance close to Axio.

RTX2 software is now on version 3. I suspect, like any card, eventually it will become obsolete. But it just came out last year, and it's FPGA technology can be upgraded in the field. I'd give it another 4-5 years at least.