Next time you hear someone moan about how awful movies look played over a 28.8 modem, tell them to stuff a Targa 2000 RTX digital video board into the nearest empty slot in their CPU and please quit whining. Indeed, while your average Web producer is squeezing video down to its most anorexic thinness, the RTX goes the other way, allowing the capture and output of a blasphemous amount of digital video – 500K per frame. That's right; if you have the hard drives to take it, the RTX will capture video at 15 megabytes per second!
The quality is so breathtaking that one Web weenie who bought an RTX has been seen reading Variety, wearing a beret, and waving a riding crop around à la Steven Spielberg. Indeed, you can set up a full-blown editing studio simply by slapping the RTX into your Mac or PC and plugging in your cameras and editing decks (talent and imagination sold separately).
What sets the RTX apart from competing systems is its real-time abilities. The dual-buffer design means that in the right configuration (i.e., a disk array and editing software), no more rendering is involved in digital videomaking. Not only is it astonishingly cool to watch your tracks fading, wiping, and spinning out transitions in real time – ye gads! – but this also removes the last blemish from the face of digital video: render wander. This is the first dual-buffer system with a street price under 10 grand (the suggested retail is higher).
With all that speed and power – not to mention the low price – it's no wonder that the RTX has become the most popular digital video board on the market. If you're using a new Sony, Panasonic, Avid, D-Vision, Montage, or Scitex editing system, an RTX has been OEM'd as the video board at the heart of your setup. That's not bad company to be in.
Truevision Targa 2000 RTX: US$10,995. Truevision: (800) 411 8335.
This article originally appeared in the November issue of Wired magazine.
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