In recent years video production has been radically changed by the influx of lower-priced non-linear editing (NLE) workstations. In the early 90s NLE computers were mostly proprietary machines, they were clunky and slow, they were very expensive--selling in the $100,000 range--and they were very likely to need professional setup and training to operate. This is no longer true. HiTech Trading makes it possible to buy a much more powerful machine that holds many more hours of footage and is much easier to learn on, for less than $5,000.

Some History:
In the “old days” (more than 10 years ago) video was typically edited using three or more video cassette recorders hooked up to a switcher or edit controller. The editor would assemble his master tape by choosing bits and pieces from any of the two or more source decks. This was a laborious process and if changes were made the user, typically, had to go back and start all over. Once the master tape was assembled it would then have to be copied onto yet another tape for dubbing (known as a dub master) which resulted in a slight loss of quality and an additional amount of time.

Then, non-linear editing (NLE) came about, offering the ability to make changes to video like a secretary edits a letter with a word processor. Video editors were thrilled. They foresaw being able to create multiple takes or versions of a program and letting the client choose the one they liked best. Even better, if a change was necessary they did not need to re-create the entire program. They could simply make the changes to the existing program in the computer then record it to tape. This saved massive amounts of time in the expensive edit suites.

Reaching the Masses:
But it took nearly a decade for desktop video editing to reach the masses. As computers have gotten much faster and cheaper and non-linear video editing has grown more popular, a number of manufacturers have begun offering professional-caliber capture cards at affordable prices. Matrox has recently raised the bar significantly with its RT.X family of capture cards featuring real-time effects generation and MPEG encoding.

The bane of most NLE systems is the time it takes for them to “render” the transitions. (Rendering refers to “computing the changes” made to the video and outputting the final video stream to disk.) Many systems offer a form of real-time preview so that you may get an idea of how the finished product will look, but still need to “render” the video to disk once all the edit decisions have been made. The faster your computer, the faster it renders but it is typically still a 1/3 real-time process. In other words, 1 hour of video would take 3 hours to render.

The RT.X100 performs all functions in real-time--one hour of video takes one hour to write to disk. Combined with the inherent power of non-linear editing, this ability is driving more and more editors into using NLE systems.

Affordable Prices:
Hi Tech Trading builds turn-key NLE systems built around the Matrox RT.X100 platform. Featuring the industry leading Adobe Premiere 6.5 video editing software and loaded with a DVD burner, massive hard drives, and the rock solid Pentium 4 processor, these systems are ready to tackle NLE video editing right out of the box. They also build AVID and Pinnacle based systems.

Contact Hi-Tech by phone at 888-354-2509 (ask for the sales department), or by email at hitech@videoequipment.com. Remember to identifiy yourself as a collegebuys.org member.

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