The future has arrived
The first shipping PCI Express cards were 3D graphics accelerators such as Nvidia’s nForce 6800 GT and ATI’s Radeon X800. These are mostly of interest to gamers, but Matrox gave a convincing demonstration at VideoForum 2005 that its own first PCI Express graphics card, the Parhelia APVe, would appeal to those wanting to edit HD or HDV footage.Matrox paired the triple-head PCI Express card with Ulead's MediaStudio Pro 7 software on a PC with two monitors – and the card was also feeding out full HD to an HD broadcast monitor.
Pinnacle's Liquid Edition editing program can take advantage of virtually any PCI Express graphics card to increase the video processing bandwidth, as it uses the graphics chip for real-time rendering of some effects.
The latest version, Liquid Edition 6.1 (see DVdoctor review here), is reckoned to be able to mix four streams of HDV at 720p resolution in real time on a 3GHz Pentium 4 system fitted with an ATI PCI Express graphics card.
gain a benefit from using PCI Express-based graphics instead of AGP
PCI Express slots are now fitted to a range of PCs costing less than £1,000, so the groundwork has already been laid for the introduction of a new generation of real-time video editing cards – though it remains uncertain which video editing hardware firms will take this route. In the prosumer arena, our money's on Canopus and Matrox – the arrival of Liquid Edition 6 showed that, in the prosumer arena, Pinnacle is planning to leave all the work to the graphics card and one or more CPUs. JM
