There was a time when Pinnacle dominated the PC video-editing market. But, after its initial success with the DV500, the advent of sophisticated realtime editing seemed to leave the company behind. While it was a good product, the company's Pro-ONE arrived when competitive products from Matrox and Canopus had been available for some time. The Pinnacle Edition PRO 5 is an entirely different matter. Taking the technical lead again, Pinnacle has released the first semi-professional AGP editing card. Don't confuse this with the ATI All-in-Wonder or Matrox Marvel products of old. The Pinnacle Edition PRO 5 is aimed squarely at those who are serious about their video editing.
Ironically, the actual underlying hardware is essentially an ATI RADEON All-in-Wonder 8500 DV, although the breakout box is Pinnacle's own design and integrates FireWire as well as analog video. Installation isn't as smooth as you'd expect for such a standard graphics card. Two dual-processor systems cause problems, although it installs without a hitch in a more modest Athlon XP 2500+ PC. The card itself has an auxiliary power input, but you only need to connect this if you want to attach external FireWire-powered hard drives.
The benefit of AGP is massively increased bus bandwidth over PCI. Effects transformations must be performed on uncompressed frames of video: while DV only requires around 3.6MB/s, uncompressed video takes around 30MB/s. Products that combine CPU effects with hardware effects acceleration, such as Matrox's RT.X100, send frames of uncompressed video back and forth across the PCI bus. But PCI can only handle 133MB/s, which is part of the reason for the realtime editing limitation of two simultaneous streams of video often found on the previous generation of editing cards. Using AGP 8x, the Pinnacle Edition PRO editing card can call upon over 2GB/s bandwidth -- enough for several streams of uncompressed video.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, how the software's built on top of that has a major effect. The first hurdle is learning Pinnacle's own editing software, Edition (reviewed September 2003, page 60), which you'll either love or hate. Premiere users will find it a steep learning curve, as aside from having a timeline, it works very differently to the Adobe software. Once you're used to it, however, it's full of professional features and shortcuts and is exceptionally responsive. The overall interface and workflow haven't changed radically since Edition DV 4. Capture via analog or DV is performed using an integrated logging tool, which operates either on the fly or by creating in/out points for batch capture. There's no automated DV capture, however, as found in Matrox's Media Tools or Pinnacle's own DV Tools.
However, editing is where realtime capabilities come into their own. Here, the Pinnacle Edition PRO works very smoothly. Pinnacle claims it has included 1,000 realtime effects. While we didn't have the patience to count them all, there are certainly a lot on offer. They're divided into two categories – those that use the ATI GPU for rendering, and those that use the host CPU. Some are available in both flavours, such as basic 3D transformations.
The main interface just offers the standard 2D and 3D effects, a CPU-based colour corrector, and a selection of ‘Classic' effects that aren't realtime at all and will entail background rendering. All of the latter have individual icons. Open up the effects library, however, and the range does appear to be almost limitless. The options are much more exciting than those available with the Pro-ONE, including everything from simple picture-in-picture to stained glass, blurs, mosaics, explosions, posterise and keying. You've also got the more radical Hollywood FX 5 3D transitions and Alpha Magic gradient wipes to call upon. There's no auto white balance, however, and the Pro-ONE's handy image stabiliser is missing too.
On the test system, we could put together three layers of video with 3D effects in realtime, but once we added more effects or video layers the frame rate dropped to somewhere between seven and ten per second. However, this was still very usable for editing and didn't impede workflow. Matrox's RT.X100 with the new Xtreme drivers offers a similar experience but with lower preview frame rates even on a dual Athlon MP 2400+ system. The Edition PRO should scale with faster CPUs too, although GPU performance is fixed by the ATI hardware, which is already a couple of generations behind the company's flagship 9800 Pro. Those who can do without the analog I/O might want to opt for the software-only version of Pinnacle Edition 5. It costs $1,550 and offers the same level of realtime effects using your current AGP graphics card and complete scalability as faster hardware arrives.
When it comes to output, all options are built directly into the Edition. You can record back to tape from the timeline over FireWire or to analog VCRs, although only the latter is in realtime. DVD authoring is fully supported too. An integrated DVD Wizard adds an extra DVD track and a menu template. Once the look of the DVD is finished, another button takes you through MPEG-2 encoding and burning. Unlike Matrox's X100, however, there's no hardware support, so encoding is far from realtime.
Overall, though, the Edition PRO 5 is a quantum leap for Pinnacle, and lays down the gauntlet for Matrox and Canopus. It's a very productive editing environment and well worth considering if you need to get a job done quickly.