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09/21/2006
CanopTrox - The combining of two NLEs
Ever since the first realtime cards from Canopus and Matrox hit the streets with Adobe Premiere, adventurous editors sought ways to combine the systems. The reason for this, of course, is that neither solution could do everything that the other could do. The Matrox cards, had the 3D stuff licked, but for filters you wanted Canopus. Thus was born the CanopTrox system, our first hybrid NLE that used Adobe Premiere as the editing application and two hardware cards was born. It was tricky to get both cards set up together but the results were good. We actually found that the Matrox card would play realtime 3D effects on the Canopus clips and likewise we could apply Canopus filters on Matrox clips.
Today things are a little different, but many editors still want to use more than one NLE for various reasons. This request comes from Canopus editors quite frequently. Since Canopus abandoned support for Adobe Premiere, many loyal Canopus editors made the move to Edius. They've found that Edius is a very fast application that is easy to use. At the same time, many have watched as the Adobe applications have become more integrated. The newest Matrox card, the RT.X2 gives many benefits to Adobe and has features not found on the Canopus side like analog HD capture.
The good news is that both solutions can be merged again into a new generation of CanopTrox suitable for HD work. It is now more a matter of both NLEs coexisting on the same workstation than combining features inside of one application. On our modern version of the CanopTrox system, Edius is powered by either the Edius NX or Edius SP card depending on your needs. On the Matrox side we have the RT.X2 or Axio LE and the Adobe Production Suite. The workstation has to be built with components that will work well with both setups. So far we have found our Dual Opteron and Dual Xeon Woodcrest machines to do the job very well.
Because the codecs for both NLEs are loaded on the same machine it allows material to be moved back and forth between Edius and Adobe applications. The Canopus material for the most part can be moved around on the Adobe/Matrox stuff without any problems. The Matrox codecs don't currently play as nice, although this is mostly an issue with the RT.X2 and not the Axio LE. The coming new software release from Matrox should improve things though.
Ashley Guy
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