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

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.

"Matrox Axio, in combination with the Adobe Video Collection, delivers a high performance HD editing solution optimized to meet the needs of video, film, and broadcast professionals," said Steve Saylor, vice president of Digital Video and Audio products at Adobe. The combination of Axio and Premiere Pro allows users to edit HD as if it were SD - in real time with astonishing flexibility."

"With more than 300 units already out the door and new orders coming in every day, it's clear that we have a phenomenal success on our hands with Matrox Axio," said Lorne Trottier, president of Matrox. "The combined strength of the Matrox Axio hardware and the Adobe software provides the industry with a powerful HD/SD editing system at the right price point. The unprecedented realtime performance and smooth workflow are already changing the way the industry approaches HD editing."

User quotes: What customers are saying about Matrox Axio
"This is the most stable V1.0 (or any version) I have ever seen from a hardware platform running under Premiere," said Paul King from Australia in a recent Creative Cow forum posting. "...Do yourself a favour and go and have a look at this FCP killer."

"The editing responsiveness of Matrox Axio is truly amazing. Even with all that extra realtime power, editing in Axio mode is as smooth and without delays as editing in Premiere native mode. Scrubbing/playback/JKL/trimming, etc. are flawless," said Elie Zakaria of Reel Media Technologies, Richmond Hill, Ontario. "For now I'm still editing and producing video for broadcast in SD, however the demand for HD is growing and I'm happy to know that when I'm ready, I can just buy the Axio HD breakout box, switch in a matter of seconds and, voila, have instant HD!"

"As a medical education/training content creator, I need to efficiently shoot, edit, enhance the media to optimally enhance learning, and distribute in a format suitable for ready access. My prior experience with 1080 HD post production involved scheduling very expensive editing suite time. Equipment costs alone far exceeded any budget that I could dream of securing," said Michael Migden, M.D., The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. "With Matrox Axio I get 10-bit HD (and SD) quality and smooth workflow using multiple realtime layers, Matrox's 3D DVE's and tight integration with Adobe After Effects. My final projects are exported in Windows Media 1080P format for HD streaming distribution to a large number of clients over a LAN. Using Matrox Axio has meant the return of full control over all of my HD post-production. I enjoy telling my colleagues that I now do everything, start-to-finish, 'in-house' on my own PC workstation."

"We needed a new editing system but were not quite ready to be burdened with the cost of converting to High Definition," said Cliff Potter, senior video producer, Ergometrics & Applied Personnel Research, Inc., Seattle, WA. "Matrox Axio has given us the flexibility to work with current standard definition projects, deliver them to DVD and help ease the transition to HD at the pace our clients dictate."

"As a freelancer, the Axio platform has truly allowed me to raise my game in not only the editing world but also in terms of preparing for complicated post production sequences," said Oli da Costa, Digital Content Creator / MD, Vital Media Facilities Ltd., Soho, London. "On a current job, I'm developing a complex multi-layered video with SD source material shot against green-screen. Before having Axio I would have had to pre-process all the media in a separate compositing package frame-by-frame just to see if a sequence worked. Thanks to Axio's realtime green-screen with the auto key button that intelligently adjusts the key with soft edges, spill removal, and shadow preservation, and its ability to work with multiple layers of video with chroma-key in realtime, I can prototype all my effect shots and save myself hours before committing the effects. This way I can try out loads more options for the sequences and have full online quality (or graceful quality degradation if I push beyond the 6-stream video layer limit) whilst still saving time over doing it all in post."

"When the power supply in my Edit 6.0 system failed recently I was trying to finish up six local car commercials. I had not been doing any client work on my Axio because, as a rule, I don't believe in putting paying clients' projects on unreleased systems, but I've had no choice but to rebuild my spots from scratch on my Axio. WOW, what an eye opener! Regardless of the stellar results I've had in beta testing and demoing, I'm even more impressed now than ever before," said Larry Sherwood, owner and editor at Sherwood Post and Production Studios. "Six layers of animated graphics, including one layer that's an animation series of TGAs, plus two layers of 8-bit uncompressed SD video with DVEs and color correction - all combined in real time! As great as this system is for HD, it totally rocks in SD. I'm glad in a way that this all transpired. There's nothing like a reality check to see what really works and what doesn't."

Key features of Matrox Axio HD
Matrox Axio HD is ideal for facilities doing HD post-production, those doing a mix of HD and SD projects, as well as those just getting into HD. Users get ultra high performance editing in all formats.