GlacierDVS Matrox RT2500. (Editing Computers).

 
$2,549 
 
GlacierDVS Inc. 
5636 Quartz Court 
Helena, MT 59602 
(800) 321-7631 
www.glacierdvs.com 

We're tech-heads here at Videomaker and really enjoy mucking about inside computers now and again, upgrading hardware and improving performance. A few years ago you could save a few dollars by building your own editing system, but the newest turnkeys are so affordable that you can't really save money building your own editing PC, especially if you factor in the man-hours of labor. This is particularly true when building a highly integrated real-time turnkey system around the Matrox RT2500 card, which has a long list of system requirements. For our money and time, we recommend getting the RT2500 in a turnkey system. With an integrated dual-head display card, the GlacierDVS Matrox RT2500 turnkey system is a reasonably priced and competently executed example.

Aqua Ice

The first thing we noticed when we took the tower out of the box was the stylish aqua- and silver-accented case and the matching silver mouse and keyboard. Although the lightweight keyboard and non-optical mouse were rather inferior, the case itself was solid metal and well made, with distinctly quiet power supply and case fans.

Hooking everything up was not unduly difficult and we liked the integrated Matrox G550 dual-head display card. Once you've edited on two monitors (with a third NTSC monitor for previews), you'll wonder how you ever managed with only one. GlacierDVS included a somewhat helpful setup pamphlet and a short VHS System Introduction video that we really appreciated. Even so, we did not initially connect the RT2500 audio cable correctly to the Sound Blaster Audigy card. The audio output from the card also exhibited a quiet but very high-pitched squealing noise from some type of interference within the box. We suspect that moving the card to another PCI slot would have fixed this (it was adjacent to the RT2500 card).

Capture

IEEE 1394 DV capturing via Premiere, both in Movie and Batch Capture modes, worked well. The audio was significantly out of sync with the video when displayed on the computer and television monitor during capture, but this was merely a minor annoyance and did not adversely affect the captured footage. DV footage was captured to Windows AVI files using a Matrox DV codec. A corresponding WAV file was also captured, since the RT2500 does not support interleaved audio. This was transparent to the user, however, and when we inserted AVI files onto the timeline, the audio accompanied it, just as if the audio had been included within the AVI file.