Matrox Facilitates Adventure TV Productions

TV Technology by Buck McNeely

CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO.—For nearly 30 years we’ve produced a syndicated outdoor adventure series that features hunting and fishing excursions around the world. The series, “The Outdoorsman”, is distributed internationally and is seen on more than 500 TV stations and cable networks.

We do all of our own shooting, editing and post production, and have developed a workflow that lets us meet our deadline of producing a weekly show. We rely on Adobe Premiere Pro running on a PC workstation, backed up by a Matrox MXO2 Rack MAX. Everything passes though the Matrox unit, as it provides all the connections and flexibility we need. It handles SDI, HDMI and analog HD I/Os, as well as XLR for audio I/O with direct 7.1 surround sound monitoring. Everything is right there on the unit so we don’t have to deal with messy breakout cables hanging out of the computer.

STREAMLINED WORKFLOW
Our workflow consists of taking footage from our Panasonic DVCPRO HD’s SDI output and sending it to the MX02 Rack so we can use the full-raster Matrox MPEG-2 I-frame intermediate codec rather than work with a thin-raster 1394 file transfer. We’ve found that the Matrox codec gives us very high-quality footage and is a less processor-intensive way of working, making editing smoother when you’re dealing with multilayer sequences.

Once editing is completed, we use the Matrox MPEG-2 codec as the rendering codec to ensure that “flattened” files maintain high quality when we’re exporting or transferring to tape. It’s also an effective archiving codec for material that we may want to use in the future. The “MAX” feature of the Matrox unit comes in handy too for accelerating H.264 encoding for delivery to the Web. read more...

Check out these items featured in this post and available to BUY NOW at Videoguys.com.
	Matrox MXO2 Rack MAX with PCIe & ExpressCard Adapters $2,396.00			Matrox MXO2 LE Desktop Kit with PCIe Card $995.00			Matrox Mojito MAX $995.00