Video Production Advice: Matrox MX02 on iMac

Vancouver Video Production Blog by Shawn Lam

Video Production Question

Hi Shawn,

I’m editing on adobe premiere CS5, and also AE CS5 on an iMac core i5 with 8 GB of DDR3 Memory, 1st : while i’m working on a Full HD project, by any simple changes of color levels or adding a dissolve, i have to render the shot to see it on realtime and by adding more filters and effects or using a dynamic link between AE & Premiere the render’s getting harder and the export is getting too too longer (about 25 minutes for exporting a 5 minute video clip !!!)
I am going to buy a “Mxo2 mini max” to solve the render problem and get rid of these render things,
Am i doing a right?!! or i need to upgrade my iMac to a core i7 with 12 or 16 GB of memory?
what do you think?

Video Production Response

Hi Amir,
Great questions. Yeah, you are doing it wrong. When editing on an iMac with Adobe Premiere Pro, your editing experience will be very unsatisfying. Editing on any computer, Windows or Mac that doesn’t have an approved NVidia CUDA card and to a lesser extent some of the Radeon cards on last year’s Macbook Pro laptops, means you are relying on the CPU in the computer to do all the video rendering and encoding.

This was ok when we edited SD video but with HD video there is almost 7x more pixel information and I find as editors we colour correct and apply effects more now than 10 years ago.

The CPU is also not as efficient at processing video as compared to a dedicated hardware solution like the Matrox RT.X2 which when paired with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, CS4, and CS5 offered real-time effects, accelerated exports, and other goodies like the Matrox IBP codec and HDMI monitoring. read more...