Matrox’s original MXO crashes the Direct DreamColor interface party

PVC TecnoTur by Allan Tepper

Many of our ProVideo Coalition readers already know that Matrox’s MXO2 family now includes four members, especially since I have covered them quite recently in my Direct DreamColor interfaces article. However, fewer of our readers may remember the original MXO device from Matrox, which is quite different from the MXO2 family members. The original MXO is still a current Matrox product, even though it doesn’t get nearly as much press lately, and it is not nearly as flexible as the MXO2-family devices. However, the original MXO “crashed the Direct DreamColor interface party” just after I made a product suggestion to the Matrox product manager and later tested it. In this article, you’ll learn how the original MXO differs from any MXO2 family member, the cases where it’s still an attractive —or the only— choice, how it managed to crash the Direct DreamColor interface party, and how it can even work with iMovie ’09!

How the original MXO differs from any current MXO2-family member

The original MXO differs from any current MXO2-family members in three categories:

Functionality
All current MXO2 family devices work both as an input and an output, which means that they can be used to capture video, as well as monitor properly and to “print to tape. On the other hand, the original MXO only works as an output, which allows to monitor properly or “print to tape”. Those are the main functional differences, all certainly not the only ones. The MXO2-family devices also do more hardware scaling, and offer optional MAX —for accelerated H.264 encoding.

8-bit only (24-bit color)
Unlike MXO2-family devices, which can input and output up to 10-bit video/30-bit color, the original MXO is limited to 8-bit video output, although you can certainly be editing 10-bit video with it. This only affects the output, which is often for monitoring only. As long as you are not going to print to tape, your material can still be 10-bit, even though you are only monitoring 8-bit/24-bit color. (See my DreamColor review to see the advantages of monitoring 10-bit/30-bit color on a 10-bit/30-bit panel, even if your source is 8-bit/24-bit color.) And even if you are going to print to tape, very few HD tape formats are 10-bit anyway. In the HD world, the only current tape formats I know about with 10-bit recording are D5-HD (in a particular mode) and HDCAM-SR (in a particular mode). Of course, it’s still better to be able to monitor actual 10-bit/30-bit color, but as you will see ahead, that’s not currently feasible with Macs that lack either an ExpressCard34 slot or a PCIe slot. read more...