Export H.264 from Avid MC5 with MAX

Little Frog in High Def by Shane Ross

Maximum…Max. I’m talking the Matrox MAX system…the H.264 encoding engine in their MXO2 with MAX product line, and the CompressHD card. You might have thought that this only worked on the APPLE stuff…Compressor and FCP. But no…it works on the Avid Media Composer side too. Because the Matrox MXO2 Mini is designed to work as a monitoring option for MC5.

OK, here’s the situation. You are done with your cut and you need to submit it for client/producer approval, and they want you to post a QT movie with timecode for them to watch. It’s a 30 min piece, the time is 3:30 PM, and the client would like to see it before the end of the day. What are you to do? That was the situation I was in last week, and I’ll tell you what I did. The twist to this story is that I was on my laptop. So no power from my tower on this one.

First off I must tell you that if I did things the normal way…or one of the two normal ways…this would have taken 3:24:18…that’s three hours, 24 min, 18 seconds. I know this because I tested it later on…just to see. Well, that was the timing it took exporting directly from the Avid as H.264, 640×360. And when I tested exporting a Quicktime Reference and using Sorenson Squeeze, it took 3 hours 12 minutes. Compressor (because I have Final Cut Studio on the same system)…3 hours 18 minutes. All of those would have put me past my deadline. And if I was on my tower, I could have used Compressor and Q-master to utilize all my processor cores to do this. But, I wasn’t on my tower, and if you don’t have Final Cut Studio, or a tower with multiple processors…what are your options for the fast encode from Avid Media Composer?

MATROX MXO2 Mini with MAX!

Last year Matrox and Avid got together and made the MXO2 Mini work as a monitoring solution for Avid Media Composer 5. read more...