So what good is all of that fancy hardware if you do not have the proper tools to really take your PC to the limits? Enter Tenomichi’s 3D Edit. A software utility that will finally allow you to take full advantage of what you graphics card has to offer.

Now that processors are powerful enough to decode more than one stream of video at once, and 3D graphics cards can render games with film-like reality, proprietary accelerated video editing hardware is starting to look outmoded. Enter Tenomichi’s 3D Edit, a video editing program that works in a revolutionary way.

In the prosumer video editing sector, the overall video-editing market leader, Pinnacle, has renounced the idea of accelerated video editing hardware. The breakout box supplied with its latest hardware/software combination Liquid Edition 6 Pro is nothing more than an input/output device, and the software relies on the PC’s processor and graphics card to do all the work.

The real-time mixing abilities of Canopus’s editing program Edius also show the way forward, and also what’s already possible with a streamlined software-only approach.

At the low end, video editors have had to make do with low-resolution previews rather than full-frame real-time rendering. But a newcomer to the editing software arena, UK-based Tenomichi, claims to have the answer in its revolutionary 3D Edit.

Like Pinnacle Liquid Edition, Tenomichi’s software harnesses the power of the system’s 3D graphics accelerator. But it does so at a much more fundamental level. In particular, it takes advantage of the power of DirectX 9 Shaders. These are algorithms that use the pixel-shader units in the graphics processors in modern graphics cards - designed to accelerate image processing. The latest graphics chips from ATI and Nvidia have 16 of these units, so it’s theoretically possible to render a lot of video effects at once.

But Tenomichi has gone one step further. Not only is DirectX 9 3D acceleration used to power the rendering of effects, it’s also used for the interface itself. The entire 3D Edit program has been created in Direct3D, the API used by most PC games titles. It’s even necessary to turn on anti-aliasing in the graphics card drivers to smooth the on-screen elements of the interface. So not only does 3D Edit have some revolutionary effects technology under the surface – it looks pretty revolutionary as well.