Matrox Announces Matrox RT.X2 Professional Realtime Native HDV and DV Editing Platform

It was at the London Video Forum when I first got the inkling from Matrox that they were going to introduce a scaled down version of the Axio platform in the near future. Then a few days later in mid-February they announced the Axio LE. With a US price of $4,500 I felt this was a bit pricey for the vast majority of non-commercial video producers. The Axio LE is capable of editing almost all the current broadcast formats in an either native or uncompressed mode. Great for broadcasters but where was the HD Editing Platform for the lower budget corporate and social producers and serious video enthusiasts? Well, on April 18th Matrox introduced the RT.X2. Packaged with Adobe Premiere 2.0, it is priced at $1.995 in US or around £1,200 in UK.

At the moment, Matrox are not stopping production of the RTX 100 / 10 series and hopefully will be continuing to update drivers where necessary. So what do you get when you purchase a RT.X2 platform?

Realtime multi-layer workflows that combine HD and SD material from analog and digital sources

Realtime Matrox Flex CPU effects - colour correction, speed changes, chroma/luma keying and many more

Realtime and accelerated Matrox Flex GPU effects - 2D/3D DVE, blur/glow/soft focus, shine and many more

Native HDV and MPEG-2 4:2:2 I-frame HD editing and DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, and MPEG-2 4:2:2 I-frame SD editing

Realtime mixing of HD codecs and SD codecs on any timeline

Realtime high-quality hardware downscaling for SD output from an HD timeline

Accelerated export to DVD, multimedia formats including Flash Video, and Adobe Clip Notes

WYSIWYG for Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, Autodesk Combustion and 3dsMax, eyeon Fusion, and NewTek LightWave 3D with dynamic Alt+Tab switching

Composite, Y/C, HD/SD analog component input and output

Full-resolution HD monitoring on an inexpensive flat panel display via independent DVI output

For a limited time, owners of Matrox RT.X100 can upgrade to RT.X2 at a special price. Details regarding all promotional offers can be found on the Matrox website.

Native HDV editing is very demanding on processing power but less demanding on storage. I guess running the RT.X2 will take some of the load from the CPU but at the moment Matrox have not published any system recommendations. These and lists of validated computers, motherboards, and GPUs will be posted in the support section of the Matrox website shortly.

Matrox should be shipping May / June.