Matrox MXO2 Mini MAX

[Peter Rush]

Hi - anyone experience of this Matrox I/O and H.264 encoder?

I have recently upgraded my system i7/CUDA Nvidia/WD Caviar Black disks/Windows 7 64bit etc and upgraded from 1.5 to CS5.5 and am finding that playback from the timeline and exporting for DVD still not as smooth (timeline) or fast (exporting) as i'd like

I used to use the Matrox RTXtreme and was impressed by it's performance

Cheers

Pete

[Greg Clark]

I use to use the RTX2 card with CS3 but now that I have CS5.5 and my Nvidia GTX card I can easily edit using two monitors in the same way as I did with the RTX2 as long as I am using the Hardware acceleration setting in Premiere. I was told you don't need a Matrox MXO2 unless you are using three monitors.

[Peter Rush]

Hi Greg - yes I was told that by Matrox as well - I'm just finding timeline playback not as smooth as with my old RTX - even with 16GB RAM and hardware accelleration on. Even when viewing a rendered preview! - final render files are ok though so no problem there

I can live with that though, but what would really help would be to speed up encoding for DVD - it's about twice as quick as my old system but I've heard that the MXO2 is 5 times as fast

Pete

[Greg Clark]

Pete what I did a few years ago was purchase a 11 Tower DVD burner. It saves so much time and because it has an HD built in you can easily make more copies if extra orders come in.
I do miss the RTX.2 presets but the stability from CS 5.5 is fantastic. The H.264 encodes quickly when making a Bluray disk. I would love to get a small Bluray Tower. I am aggressively pushing clients to own a Bluray player with great success.

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Peter,

I have tried the Premiere "second monitor as HD preview" trick, and was not impressed when running Premiere in Mercury software-only mode, very poor frame rate for AVCHD playback. Running in GPU-accelerated mode, preview is "pretty good", but still a bit jerky or not quite normal looking. Running the output through MXO2 Mini via HDMI to a 1920x1080 display looks perfect.

Some editors might think that the preview they see is ok until they see it compared to Matrox output which is "true video" then the difference is apparent. Remember that computers do not output interlaced video, so when working with 1080i for instance, the Premiere preview is not really the true end result and it shows.

Just yesterday, we had a client come in with a RED camera and I had the opportunity to load some of his .R3D clips into our MXO2 system (both 2k and 4k formats) and they play back just fine through the MXO2 Mini using a 1920x1080 project preset in CS5.5. Pretty impressive, wasn't sure if that was going to work!

While MXO2 does offer some acceleration of certain Adobe effects, and does provide smooth playback, it does NOT accelerate MPEG-2 output, so should not make a difference in DVD output speeds.

As for the MAX option, mixed feelings. It is GREAT for laptops, Macs, older computers that need help with encoding speed, but the latest i7 systems with Nvidia already do a pretty quick job of H.264 export, so the benefits are minimized in that situation. Unless you want to do direct to H.264 capture, then that is a cool feature with MAX, taking HD video straight from camera to "H.264 for Blu-ray", ready to burn!

MAX does not accelerate editing in Premiere, it is just for the H.264 exports.

MXO2 hardware also provides output preview from After Effects, Encore, Photoshop, has hardware up-down-cross convert, and Matrox plug-in effects, so beneficial in many ways.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor

[Steve Oakley]

I think the quality of the MXO2 MAX encodes is still better at lower bit rates then the software encoders. pretty much everything here runs thru it. I've got 8 core towers and i7 c4 iMacs and the difference between these systems is equal to 5%.

[Andrew Smith]

Wish I could find the link, but before I purchased I watched through all the video reviews and there was one guy from a production company who stated that encoding to h264 with Max gave him files where the quality was just as good .... but with half the file size.

Andrew