Users who purchased the first wave of digital video capture/edit systems reveled in the idea of seamless full screen video streaming from their AV drives and RAID arrays. Although they were able to capture, edit and play back to tape, they still had to suffer through the endless minutes of rendered transitions, titles and effects; making pots of tea and cleaning the office while they watched that hated gray render bar plod along like an ancient tortoise across the screen.

Well wait no longer, ye beleaguered editors! Matrox has introduced the RT2000 -- “RT” meaning “real time” -- a capture/edit/recapture system that utilizes dual streaming to end your rendering woes.

The $1295 system, made to be installed in Pentium machines running Windows 98, consists of an RT2000 codec/capture card, a Matrox Millenium G400 Flex 3D display card, a handy breakout box to capture and play back various analog video sources, and all the necessary cables to get you hooked up and running. Support for Windows 2000 is scheduled for the third quarter of 2000. Why not Windows NT 4.0? Matrox explains that the RT2000 will not run under NT4 because RT2000 is based on the new DirectX and WDM (Windows dynamic media) technologies that aren't supported under Windows NT4. So for now, it's Windows 98 or nothing. Oh well.

Installation of the cards is easy and straightforward, for those of you used to popping cards in and out of your PCs. The minimum CPU requirement is a 300 MHz Pentium II (with a 100MHz Front Side Bus), at least 128 MB of RAM (can’t ever have enough of that wonderful stuff), open PCI and AGP slots, a separate, sizeable hard drive for AV content, a 16 bit sound card and a CD-ROM drive for software installation. One fact worth noting is that the separate A/V drive must not be your system's boot drive. It can be an EIDE drive, though. So you have a choice between SCSI and EIDE. Beyond that, it also wouldn’t hurt to have an NTSC video monitor to view your footage while you capture and edit. By the way, a notable feature that's not usually available on systems in this category is the ability to view your footage on both the computer monitor and NTSC monitor at the same time.

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