Lightning Speed, Indeed

	Lightning Speed, Indeed 844/Xe now in version 2.0, shows quickness, refinement, sophistication by Charlie White

	Let's hitch a ride on a new kind of editing system that's as at home with compositing as it is with pure cutting. It's a thoroughbred that's not quite broken in yet, but even at its tender age of 16 months, can already run like the wind. There are good reasons why Media 100's 844/X was code-named Pegasus during its incubation period. It's a kicking colt that can fly, and while growing up it has learned some impressive new tricks, resulting in its newest iteration, version 2.0. Here's our review. In case you haven't heard, 844/Xe is Media 100's response to the needs of two extremes of the editing and compositing market. At the high end, Irix-based compositing behemoths like Discreet's Flame and Inferno hold court, tipping the cash register at a cool $200K and up. They are able to process multiple layers of intricate effects at high resolution and without compression, much of which can be done in real time. At the low end of this, shall we say, vertical and horizontal editing market sits Adobe's ubiquitous software compositor After Effects, which can create lots of spectacular effects, but even with today's supercharged computers, can still take many hours to render uncompressed high resolution compositions. There's a problem at both these extremes, though. After Effects, although powerful, is too slow to give users (and more importantly, clients) instant feedback for the sophisticated edits and effects it's capable of cranking out. On the high end, Flame and Inferno are enormously powerful but are so expensive they're about to price themselves out of the video market, slowly edging their way, in my opinion, to the rarified air of only the swankiest of digital intermediate and film compositing tasks. As a result, take a look at this: There's a hole in this market big enough to fly a 747 through. That's where 844/X is beginning to shine. Therein lies the appeal of 844/X: It's built for the high end, but at a midrange price. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Priced at $65K complete with CPU and storage ($44,995 for boards and software), the system is capable of compositing four layers of uncompressed, 10-bit video at a time with no rendering. Attached to each of those layers can be a matte channel, real-time motion alpha key, real-time geometrics (scale, position and rotation), real-time transfer modes and color correction, thus giving you far more real-time power than you can get with conventional two-channels-and-a-key systems. Pushing pixels at a remarkable 200MB per second, it's packing bandwidth that can run with the high-end big boys. It uses this wide bandwidth to give it a unique advantage over systems that process multiple effects in one batch. 844/X processes its composites in groups of four, using a concept called recursive processing. 844/X creates render groups based on position in the timeline both vertically and horizontally. When a change is made to any layer, only those render groups above it on the timeline with the same timecode need to be re-rendered. In other systems, in such a situation the entire project would need to be rendered all over again when a single change is made anywhere. With those systems, that makes it so any changes, if even attempted, will be a costly proposition. 844/X's "group of four" concept helps out even more when changes are made, because it re-renders faster by handling everything in groups of four, recursively through the hardware. How is this done? There is some unique, custom-designed hardware that's responsible for all this power. Look inside the HP xw8000 workstation that is included with the turnkey version of 844/Xe, and you'll see three PCI boards that are strapped together, bypassing the PC's relatively slow PCI bus. These three cards make up the guts of the GenesisEngine, the breakthrough technology that sets 844/X apart from all the others. The hardware packs quite a punch, and is only beginning to be unlocked by the slick software that lets mere humans interact with it. The version 2.0 I tested offers usability improvements, new features, and can link up with yet another new hardware innovation called XBLUR, a Gaussian blur hardware card that adds yet another dimension to 844/X. 1 2 3 4 Next