{"id":8,"date":"2007-10-09T23:24:49","date_gmt":"2007-10-10T06:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2007\/10\/09\/matrox-axio-le\/"},"modified":"2010-07-29T22:37:36","modified_gmt":"2010-07-30T05:37:36","slug":"matrox-axio-le","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2007\/10\/09\/matrox-axio-le\/","title":{"rendered":"Matrox Axio LE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matrox’s Axio<\/a> line of Premiere Pro based hardware solutions rewrite the application’s features much more so than most of the competing products.\u00c2\u00a0 With a focus on broadcast television output, as opposed to feature films or other less standardized workflows,\u00c2\u00a0Axio\u00c2\u00a0is highly optimized and accelerated for SD and HD, but supports no other frame sizes.\u00c2\u00a0 Axio LE<\/a> is their\u00c2\u00a0newest\u00c2\u00a0 product, positioned at the mid level between the Axio SD and Axio HD.\u00c2\u00a0 The Axio LE\u00c2\u00a0also has a recent\u00c2\u00a0firmware upgrade that allows 10 bit capture and processing of SD and HD uncompressed footage.<\/p>\n

The one\u00c2\u00a0Axio feature that I use the most, is Matrox’s somewhat proprietary HD compression format, MPEG I-Frame HD.\u00c2\u00a0 It supports full size and frame rate HD files at a constant bitrate, between 50 and 300Mb\/s, depending on your needs.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I use 100 or 150Mb\/s for projects going directly to broadcast video, and 50Mb\/s is useful for offline edits that will be reconformed uncompressed.<\/p>\n

Matrox also allows native editing of many different formats that Premiere does not otherwise support, including DVCProHD, P2 MXFs, XDCam MXFs, and HDV including 24fps.\u00c2\u00a0 In theory these all play in real time on the same timeline.\u00c2\u00a0 Real world results are a bit different, and I have experienced many performance problems when mixing these formats, but individually they all play back great.\u00c2\u00a0 My usually solution to this mirrors the Cineform<\/a> workflow, to convert everything into one high performance codec, specifically Matrox’s MPEG I-Frame HD codec.\u00c2\u00a0 Matrox’s wide file support allows me to make all of these conversions without leaving Premiere, although using a separate project for asset preparation is highly recommended.\u00c2\u00a0 This conversion\u00c2\u00a0process is also\u00c2\u00a0accelerated by Matrox’s faster than realtime exports of all supported formats.
\n
\nMatrox has done extensive work to allow their video effects to be accelerated by the system’s video card GPU, on Axio LE systems.\u00c2\u00a0 There are a limited number of supported GPUs, but they are budget friendly consumer gaming cards, as opposed to expensive workstation OpenGL certified cards.\u00c2\u00a0 This allows motion, opacity, advanced color correction, and many other effects to be processed in real time.\u00c2\u00a0 This realtime performance is their primary selling point, and allows for a lot of creative freedom.\u00c2\u00a0 Combined with\u00c2\u00a0native imports and realtime exports, this makes Axio a very efficient editing\u00c2\u00a0system as long as you aren’t trying to work too far outside the box.<\/p>\n

The MPEG I-Frame HD codec is hardware accelerated in all applications, but has very poor performance in systems without an Axio installed.\u00c2\u00a0 Matrox sell the M.key, a USB dongle to unlock that codec on systems without Axio Hardware, but using it for anything besides rendering to or from MPEG I-Frame HD will result in poor performance.\u00c2\u00a0 On the other hand, MPEG I-Frame HD is the\u00c2\u00a0only COMPRESSED codec I have ever gotten to playback in realtime\u00c2\u00a0with Iridas’ SpeedGradeDI<\/a> software, but only with the Axio card installed of course.\u00c2\u00a0 Matrox uncompressed files can be read on any PC using their free VFW codecs.\u00c2\u00a0 The fact that all supported compressed formats are limited to 8bit color is a significant limiting factor, as well as memory issues in larger projects. Timelines with more than about 10 minutes of edited material\u00c2\u00a0begin to exhibit performance problems, and until native 64bit processing allows for addressing greater than 4GB of Ram, that will continue to be an issue.<\/p>\n

Axio<\/a> is a highly accelerated editing platform for HD 422 work, but is not well suited for long form projects.\u00c2\u00a0 It is not going to help you online your film at 2k or 4k, or even process RGB data at 444 at all.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0It does however support 24fps footage and editing, so it could work well as an offline editor.\u00c2\u00a0Offlining your short film\u00c2\u00a0on Axio at 24fps offers some interesting advantages when onlining in Premiere Pro\u00c2\u00a0with a different solution, like Cineform 2K or Blackmagic RGB.\u00c2\u00a0 All\u00c2\u00a0titles, motion effects, and other Premiere specific edits\u00c2\u00a0should\u00c2\u00a0pass through automatically to the conform.\u00c2\u00a0 Axio will also\u00c2\u00a0probably be the fastest way to edit your 30 second spot, or 10 minute corporate training video, after shooting on HDCam or HDV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matrox’s Axio line of Premiere Pro based hardware solutions rewrite the application’s features much more so than most of the competing products.\u00c2\u00a0 With a focus on broadcast television output, as opposed to feature films or other less standardized workflows,\u00c2\u00a0Axio\u00c2\u00a0is highly optimized and accelerated for SD and HD, but supports no other frame sizes.\u00c2\u00a0 Axio LE […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[24,22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}