In the world of video editing, there's simply no such thing as a fast-enough computer. Especially when dealing with HD footage, you can always use more processing cores, more memory, faster CPUs, faster disks—virtually every aspect of your computer puts limits on how efficiently you can edit video.
Matrox, a manufacturer of video processing devices for many years now, has added the MXO2 video interface to its product offerings. Coming in a variety of configurations, the MXO2 provides video and audio I/O capability and high-performance video processing software designed to accelerate editing tasks. The units with the Max option also include a hardware processor designed to greatly accelerate rendering to the popular H.264 codec—a format that is processor-intensive. There are several versions of the MXO2 to choose from, depending on your specific processing and I/O needs, ranging from the MXO2 Mini with consumer-style I/O connectors, through the MXO2 Rack MAX for $2,395. The system also includes configuration utilities that allow you to do color calibration for the monitor you are using with the MXO2.
The MXO2 units require support to be built-in to the editing application, and currently are supported by Avid Media Composer 6, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, and Apple Final Cut Studio and X applications. But in addition to these NLEs, there is also support for applications like Photoshop to send a snapshot of the image being worked on to the monitor connected to the MXO2, taking advantage of the color calibration to view a more color-accurate representation of your project.
I had the opportunity to take the MXO2 LE MAX unit (MSRP of $1,395) for a spin, and put it through its paces on several projects. Since this is an external processing unit, and because my main editing system is already pretty beefy, I decided to use this system in a way that I felt would best show off its benefits—accelerating video editing on my Sony Vaio laptop. I occasionally need to do remote editing at events like WFX, and waiting for hours for an on-site promo to finish rendering gets tedious. It would be nice to have a system that's as portable as my laptop and could be brought to shows to help with editing to both accelerate the final render as well as to speed up timeline playback.
Initial observations
The MXO2 LE MAX (to be referred to simply as the MXO2 from now on) is an attractive silver metal box approximately 13x10x2 inches in size. On one edge are the input jacks—RCA connectors for unbalanced analog audio in; XLR jacks for balanced analog audio in; an HDMI connector, BNC connectors for composite/component video, an S-Video connector for S-Video input, and SDI (both HD and SD). The construction seems quite rugged. These jacks are mirrored on the opposite edge of the unit for output, and power and PC interface connections are on an edge between the inputs and outputs.
Both Apple and PC computers are supported. The unit can connect to the host computer through either an internal PCI Express card, a Thunderbolt interface, or an ExpressCard/34 card (which is what I used with my laptop). Since I already own a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, I used Adobe Premiere as the test bed for this review.
Connecting the unit was very easy, and the first project I attempted was to do a capture from VHS of my wedding video. After configuring the MXO2 for what inputs I wanted to use for the video and audio capture, Premiere had no problem capturing the video.
I did a second capture of a friend's VHS wedding video, and this time, while the video captured fine, all I got for audio was a regular repeating impulse noise on the audio tracks. Eventually I rebooted the laptop, and successfully captured the video. I didn't experience this problem again, and don't know if this was a Premiere issue or an MXO2 issue.
In these cases, the video was SD, so not particularly difficult for a PC to play back. But I did see an improvement in playback smoothness while editing the two wedding videos. At one point when I added a title slide, Premiere had a software fault, and the offending module was one of the Matrox modules that supports the MXO2. It only occurred once, and is the only fault that occurred while testing the MXO2.
In rendering out the videos, the first video, which was one hour, 18 minutes long, rendered in one hour, 26 minutes—almost real-time rendering. This is a big improvement over rendering with just the laptop's processor.
HD impressions and more
After these projects, I switched to some HD work, using footage shot on my Canon XF300 video camera. This project was turning footage from a two-hour concert of the Raleigh Ringer's precision bell ringing organization into a one-hour Blu-ray disc. The footage was shot in full 1080p HD, 50 Mbps 4:2:2 MPEG-2 format.
In playing back the concert footage through the MXO2, I found that the MXO2 was not quite able to provide completely smooth previewing. However, it was definitely an improvement over using just the laptop without the MXO2—where the MXO2 lagged a little but basically kept up, the laptop would often drop down to 1-2 frames per second playback rate. So, this is definitely an improvement.
In rendering out the footage, I did a speed comparison between rendering with one of the Matrox H.264 HD templates and rendering the footage without the MXO2. For a clip that was 5:14 in length, it rendered in five minutes with the MXO2 (basically in real time), whereas the laptop by itself took 24 minutes to render out the same clip. This is clearly a huge improvement—20% of the unassisted rendering time. That's impressive. And it even significantly outpaced my six-core, 16 GB editing system when rendering the same file out to H.264 using Sony Vegas.
After editing together the concert footage I rendered out the one-hour concert footage using the Matrox H.264 template designed for creating Blu-ray “legal” media files. This resulted in an approximately 14 gig .264 file, with audio rendered as a separate WAV audio file. I created a project in Adobe Encore to create the Blu-ray disc, and attempted to import the video segment into an Encore timeline. After hours of waiting, the import failed. In doing a little research, I found a note on Matrox's website from June of 2011 stating that CS5.5's version of Encore has a problem with Matrox .264 files longer than about 4-5 minutes, and that Adobe was researching the problem. As of this writing (February 2012), there's no fix for this. The previous version of Encore is reported to work with the .264 files, so retaining your older version of Encore, if you have one, may be a solution. I do not have an older version, so I needed to use the second suggested work-around: breaking up the project into ~4 minutes sections and piecing them together manually in an Encore timeline. I did this, but found the time consumed by piecing a timeline together in Encore eliminated any speed advantage gained in rendering using the Max chip. It should be emphasized that this is an Adobe bug, not an issue with Matrox. Therefore, users of other disc authoring programs will not see this issue.
Another problem I ran into is that if my anti-virus program was enabled, playing back of the timeline would occasionally halt and require using task manager to kill off Premiere, and long renders would also freeze. Disabling the antivirus software while editing or rendering seems to have stopped this from happening. It's generally considered a poor idea leaving Antivirus software enabled while editing; this is the first time that doing so has ever caused me a problem.
The MXO2 also has some streaming features included, which were not tested. The MXO2 can connect directly to certain streaming applications, such as Adobe's Flash Media Live Encoder, providing an interface between your camera or switcher and the streaming system.
One last feature to mention is Matrox's support for its hardware. Instead of locking the entire hardware unit into one physical host interface, the company keeps the hardware separate from the interface card, enabling you to upgrade to new PC interface systems as they become available without having to replace the entire MXO2 system. And software upgrades are always free—when a new version of an NLE comes out, you don't have to pay an upgrade fee to Matrox for the new software to support it.
So—what's my bottom line? I love the fact that rendering was accelerated greatly and timeline playback was smoother. If your goal is to create Blu-ray discs with Encore, this would not be a useful solution until Adobe fixes its bug. Adobe's not been responsive in supporting the Matrox customers, as it's been eight months since the problem was documented on both Matrox's and Adobe's support sites. Adobe has informed me that the problem will be fixed in a future release, however no date has been given. But if you use Final Cut or Avid, this won't affect you.
If your primary goal is rendering out H.264 media for the Internet and you want to greatly reduce rendering time, this can be a very good solution. And if you need to capture from analog or digital sources, this definitely adds to its usefulness.
