Matrox Axio Realtime Multi-Stream SD and HD Editing Platforms Now Shipping!

[Elie]

Montreal, Canada, - July 13, 2005 - Matrox ® Video Products Group today announced that the Matrox Axio™ family of realtime HD and SD editing platforms is now shipping worldwide. Matrox Axio is designed to give users the highest finishing quality, coupled with the most comprehensive realtime feature set, at an affordable price point.

Matrox Axio makes Adobe® Premiere® Pro the foremost realtime HD and SD editor for demanding broadcast and post-production environments. It features no-render HD and SD finishing in compressed and uncompressed formats, superior color correction tools, advanced realtime effects, and a full range of analog and digital audio and video inputs and outputs. It incorporates Matrox Flex 3D and Power of X technologies to leverage scalable CPU power with the explosive performance of dedicated 3D graphics hardware to provide the ultimate SD and HD editing experience.


Want to read more check out...

http://www.matrox.com/video/press/releases/axio_shipping.cfm

[Elie]

Now I have been testing the SD and have played around with the HD version when I was at Matrox and here are my comments...

Matrox have taken the AXIO or the new hardware to a new level, basically the realtime rules are open, you can stack 4 (or more) uncompressed 10bit video streams and 6 graphics on the timeline, mind you you need the storage, a cool Fibrechannel storage solution will give you that kind of sustained throughput in order to acheive those layers.

In my case I only have two 300GB SATA drives in a raid 0 configuration, and I managed to get 5 DV25 layers + 3 graphics in realime including effects on each layer When I get my storage (hence my post in the general hardware forum) I will be able to do even more to the options are very much open.

Everyone thinks because Adobe dropped bundling with thrid party hardware companies, that Matrox and others alike may be in trouble, well the AXIO ships with the video collection 1.5 which includes Encore, Premiere, Audition and After Effects Standard, and let me tell you, I thought the RT.X100 was tightly integrated, the AXIO is even more so, meaning you no longer have a seperate effects GUI that launches when you want to make modification, now ALL the effects are part of Premiere's look and feel.

The effects are awesome, colour correction has a ton of extras which will allow for even more precision, and to add, you now have a secondary colour correction to do things like colour pass, and colour changes etc, of course all the stuff like auto white balance etc is all there.

The 3D effects are amazing, smooth and crisp thanks to the on boar GPU (Parhelia 256MB)!!
One particular effect called "realtime surface finish" basically adds texture and bumpmapping tot he video which is truly amazing!!

More to come

[Dr Mordrid]

Now all someone needs is $7500 USD for the SD and about $11,500 USD for the HD

Dr. Mordrid

[Fluff]

Does the Axio HD support H.264 in hardware? Not that I can afford these products.

[Sasq]

remind me again of these in about a year....
first mission is a nice HD camera with under water housing....

[landrover]

Does it support Sony IMX-mpeg? It has to if Matrox seriously want compete on the broadcast market.

[SpiralDragon]

looks like a great pice of HW..... however... if matrox realy want to get in the game they should start suporting other products than premier..... with these cards they should go to higher end products like FCP and maybe broker a deal with AVID (though i find it unlikly)... unless Avid ends up buying matrox... well avid is on a buying spree these days.. m-audio... pinacle... and pinacle has some intresting subsidiaries... stienberg most notably....

i mean seriously..... very few profetionals in the film, documentary and broadcast markets would consider using Premier .... eaven the independants.... especialy since Avid and FCP are readly available at competative prices..

[landrover]

Avid certainly won't buy Matrox for Axio. They've got Adrenaline, which is an impressive piece of machinery. But I agree with you all the way that Matrox shouldn't focus on Premiere all the time. The problem with these high-end pieces of hardware is that they are specifically targeted at one software environment. Unlike Avid, Pinnacle (becoming a part of Avid sometime these days) and Canopus, Matrox, having no editing software of it's own, always choose Premiere for this.

B.t.w. I saw that Axio doesn't support IMX. A pity.

[Elie]

Hi Guys...

The good this about the AXIO is that the codec is software based unlike the Digisuites, this means that if there is a demand for a specific codec like the ones mentioned above, they will add it easily.

Currently the AXIO is at release 1.0 give them sometime I mean look at the RT.X100 Matrox keeps adding features for each release and the Digisuite is at release 7.0 or higher I think.

Anyway, this is just the begining, and so far so good