I'm a gadget guy / early adopter / techno-junky. That's just all there is to it. Three years ago, I bought a Matrox RTX 100 Extreme Pro for myself for my birthday. I bought it before they even added "pro" to the name, although there is no difference between mine and the "pro" version.
It was the best digital video editing peripheral you could get at the time - everything from realtime 3D digital effects to realtime chroma keying, four simultaneous video layers, the kit, the kaboodle, and then some.
When I got it home, I found I had to upgrade my home computer in order to get it to work. I went all out - and my system now 3 years later is still pretty close to being top of the line. I picked up everything - crazy fast hard disks, the top of the line CPU, the fastest RAM, best sound card, etc. I even went through three motherboards to get one with the right chip set.
After several weeks, I had this thing installed and ready to go. Turns out I had to spend another $1500 on the Adobe Video Bundle to do everything I was sold on. What the heck - it's my birthday right? And there has to be some great business uses for it.
Well, three years later I still haven't done much. I learned a lot about video editing, but there is SO much to learn it's like picking up a whole new profession. I'd work on things for a few days here and there, but there was never time enough to actually complete a project.
In the mean time, I picked up an even better video card because the ATI I had didn't play nicely with my Beryl setup. I didn't even bother checking out the Matrox card after I upgraded. I knew it would be a hassle.
I finally got around to it today, and it was a nightmare. I had to uninstall/reinstall premiere and the Matrox drivers/software about six times. When it finally did work, the scene detection in the Matrox software failed and Premiere crashed while editing. After the crash, it looked like more re-installs were coming so I decided to just have a go at it without any matrox goodies - using the Adobe Video Suite all on it's own.
Years ago, I actually paid for a copy of Scenalyzer Pro. I found the registration e-mail and downloaded the latest version. It imported the clips perfectly fine.
I brought everything into Premiere Pro and threw all the clips together with default transitions, along with a simple title and fade in. Go figure you can't keyframe position with Premiere Pro 1.5, so I couldn't even reposition the title bar. After searching for a while, I decided to skip my effect idea - it wasn't worth more than a few minutes to set up.
So from Premiere Pro, you have to get the Video into Encore (of course skipping any effects you might want to add via After Effects). Unlike every other "cooperative suite" moving from one app to the other means that I have to export the end result from Premiere first. The help file recommends an MPEG2 file.
It wanted 22 hours to get this accomplished for a 57 minute wedding video! Cancel that, there has to be another way. Exporting to AVI takes about 22 minutes.
I bring it in to Encore and a) it doesn't auto-insert chapters at the end of clips, b) there's no way to insert chapters at defined time intervals, and c) the interface is anti-intuitive. It takes me a while to figure out how to get the video menus added and configured and a while longer to figure out what I actually have to select to configure a reaction to the DVD menu remote.
Burning the DVD takes over an hour because it had to be "transcoded" whatever that means.
In the end, it's a bad DVD. I didn't bother normalizing the volume, smoothing the video motion out, or spending any time customizing the DVD menus or titles beyond the default templates. I wouldn't feel bad except for the fact that I spent several thousand dollars on equipment and an entire day putting it together.
Next time I'm just going to buy a Mac. Adobe has all kinds of power, but you sacrifice entirely too much in user interface. The Matrox Card was just a waste of money, time, and energy.
If you're thinking about high end video equipment/software to build some great effects... save your money and your sanity. Just get a Mac.
Talk About PCs are no good for Video
