Paul Dutton sees the day dawning when the power of graphics cards is at last used in video editing to carry out most effects processing
At the turn of the decade, the DVdoctor organisation set up stall at various trade shows across Europe, working to promote desktop video editing at a time when the market was buzzing with news of the launch of two new-generation video editing cards - the Matrox RT2000 and Pinnacle DV500.
The Matrox was a two-card package (one AGP card and one PCI), while the Pinnacle used a single PCI card. Both offered far more sophisticated input/output functionality than anything before and, thanks to their on-board hardware Codecs, allowed previewing of edits in real-time.
But, even while John Ferrick and I were using these two cards to demonstrate the possibilities of video editing at the CeBIT show in March 2000, it was apparent that John had a clear vision of what the future should bring. Way back then, he turned to me and said, “Of course, all these fancy real-time editing effects ought to be handled by the 3D engine on the graphics card, to free up the PC’s processor to do the things that it’s best at doing” – and, ever since, DVdoctor has been evangelising that idea, though with only limited success.
Matrox’s RT2000 transformed by degrees into the RT.X100 Xtreme Pro – but this is a PCI single-card solution. However, Pinnacle’s DV500 led onto something more like John had in mind - Liquid Edition Pro, which was a marriage between an AGP in/out card and a powerful, fully-multi-threaded editing program, Edition, developed from Fast’s purple program.
But the real-time performance of video editing cards continues to be held in check. Effects processing on the RT.X100 Xtreme Pro and Liquid Edition Pro rely strongly on dedicated hardware Codecs, though now paired with rudimentary 3D graphics engines.
And, the expansion slots in which editing cards sit still have major limitations. The bandwidth for 32-bit/33MHz PCI is only 132MByte/sec and, while Pinnacle’s solution is AGP-based, the fastest available, 64-bit/66MHz, 8x version of AGP is 2.1GByte/sec. That’s a lot faster, of course, but it’s still not fast enough.
June, though, sees the arrival of PCI Express. It’s been touted as the most significant update to PC architecture in the past decade and is set to replace both the PCI and AGP slots. Unlike today’s PCI, each Express slot enjoys its own dedicated bandwidth and has the potential for two-way data transfers of up to 8GByte/sec – four times greater than AGP.
Keep that figure in mind while I tell you that, recently, Bob Crabtree and I were given a demonstration of one of the most exciting and revolutionary video editing programs I've seen this decade – Tenomichi’s 3D Edit. This program, still some way from completion, uses the AGP card to carry out virtually all effects processing.
Consequently, it will, I believe, when run on a PCI Express graphics card (and used in conjunction with one of the massively powerful CPUs we already have today) be an even more dramatic step forward than the RT2000 and DV500 were at the turn of the last century.
Amazingly, a basic version of the program is likely to come as standard with a number of graphics cards, and this powerful free software could give desktop video editing the biggest boost it’s ever had.
The software’s potential is, of course, tied to the power of the graphics card and the fearsomely fast DirectX 9 graphic processors in the AGP cards just introduced by ATI and Nvidia will help to unlock it. And, the program will grow in sophistication and creativity as graphics cards become more powerful and as the speed of PCs’ central processors grows ever faster.
All this might bear out John Ferrick’s uncanny foresight and be great news for video editors, but it casts a shadow over editing-hardware makers including those, such as Pinnacle and Matrox, set to introduce PCI-Express-based solutions and used to selling at prices that could be untenable with the arrival of 3D Edit.
