MacVideo by Rick Young

Wayne Andrews from Matrox talks about the importance of H.264

Wayne Andrews from Matrox runs through the latest encoding technology, including accelerated H.264 encoding for Mac towers and Mac laptops with Express 34 slot. Matrox MAX technology is provided as an option with MXO2 products or as an H.264 accelerator PCIe card for the Mac. Matrox MAX technology uses a dedicated hardware processor to accelerate the creation of H.264 files for mobile devices, the web and Blu-ray discs. By using specialized hardware acceleration, jobs are finished with superior speed to the technology used by Apple in the creation of H.264 files. Matrox CompressHD works in systems with or without a video I/O device. The encoding technology works with direct integration with Apple Compressor on the Mac. Matrox claims the MAX technology allows direct export to higher-quality H.264 Blu-ray compliant files from Compressor.

Key features of Matrox MAX technology
• Faster than realtime creation of H.264 files, for resolutions ranging from iPod to HD, at bitrates up to 50 Mbps
• A specialized, dedicated hardware processor liberates system resources for other tasks
• Accelerated encoding for Blu-ray, PS3, Apple TV, YouTube, Flash, web formats, and mobile devices including iPhone and iPod from various video sources including 2K files
• Direct integration with Apple Compressor to simplify workflow
• Creation of Blu-ray H.264 files that can be authored in Adobe Encore CS4 or Roxio Toast 10 and burned without re-encoding
• Support for Apple Qmaster to take advantage of multiple systems with a Matrox MAX processing engine for distributed encoding across a network

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