USER REVI EW | 3XS EVOLVE NLE 4K
“PURCHASING FROM SCAN IS A PLEASANT EXPERIENCE TOO”
Purchasing from Scan is a pleasant experience, too. The units are built to order, so they can be modified and customised as you like. At each stage of the build process you are sent details and photos, and the units are given a comprehensive test and burn-in after completion. You get a three-year warranty, with any repairs in the first year being carried out on-site, and technical support is available both online and (shock, horror) on the phone seven days a week – another great advantage of buying from a bespoke, UK- based manufacturer. It’s hard to criticise the Evolve NLE 4K. It’s powerful, good value and stable – within the limits allowed by Windows 10 and certain NLE software packages. 3XS/ Scan has made a sensible choice in fitting a high-end graphics card to a powerful, but not top-of-the-range (ie expensive) CPU. This tailors the computer very well to the demands of video editing and effects, without driving the price too high, though I would suspect a lower spec machine would be adequate if you are solely an Avid user. The purchase experience, customer support and build quality are exemplary – and I love that little puddle light.
IMAGES Attention to detail inside the Evolve bodes well for its performance
difference on a day-to-day basis. There is also a little puddle light at the bottom of the front panel, which lights up the carpet. It’s of no use at all, but it’s cute. The computer is loaded with I/O. There are eight channels of audio output, two USB 2, six USB 3.2 (four of them Gen 2), HDMI (up to 4092x2160 at 24fps) and a Gigabit Ethernet port. There isn’t any Thunderbolt (which doesn’t work well under Windows anyway, in my experience) but the Gen 2 USB ports handle up to 10Gb/s. Those two top panel USBs are 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gb/s). The graphics card can support four monitors at up to 7680x4320 pixels, with three DisplayPorts (v1.4), an HDMI (2.0b) and a USB Type-C connector. The computer comes preloaded with Windows 10. If you need to restore the Operating System at any time, Scan has velcroed a recovery USB stick to the power supply inside the machine. It’s an example of the attention to detail that is obvious when you buy a computer from them. Scan has also, mercifully, stripped out most of the cruddy ‘trial software’ that gets installed with Windows, so the machine is lean and clean from the outset. ESPECIALLY FOR EDIT This Evolve is, of course, sold as an edit computer. Avid Media Composer is not great at utilising the full power of workstation-class machines like this, but those few effects that
benefit from meaty hardware (like blurs in the Paint tool and reversing video) worked well. Rendering the timeline was only limited by the speed of reading the video from disk, so small projects that fit on the 1TB internal SSD would be super-speedy – rendering from a NEXIS attached by Ethernet would be more-or-less real time, as usual. At the other end of the spectrum, DaVinci Resolve is capable of wringing every ounce of power the hardware will offer, so the Evolve is a brilliant platform. Playback of 4K ProRes and Blackmagic Raw material was smooth, and I got bored of adding blur nodes long before the computer ran out of the power to play them. An old project that stuttered on an old Mac Pro with four external NVIDIA K5000 graphics cards played effortlessly on the Evolve. Rendering projects was astonishingly fast – again having the source footage on that fast, internal SSD makes a big difference if you can manage it. Resolve really pounds the hardware, so long renders force the cooling fans to rev up a bit, but the unit never gets loud. Like Resolve, Adobe’s Premiere Pro is much more capable of using the hardware it’s running on and, again, it flies on the Evolve. BEST BUY? All that power isn’t cheap, of course, although the £2999.99 (inc VAT) asking price is value for money, given the extraordinary performance.
64 DEF I N I T ION | OCTOBER 20 1 9
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