Award-winning Matrox CompressHD card featuring Matrox MAX technology speeds up HD H.264 file creation for Blu-ray, Flash, YouTube, and other web formats
Matrox Video Products Group today announced support for the Matrox CompressHD H.264 encoding accelerator card in conjunction with the Matrox Axio LE and RT.X2 realtime editing platforms. Continue reading »
ACT ONE: THE RUSH JOB
An old and favored client called me on a Wednesday afternoon asking for a production of a short instructional video, and a 30-second spot. The scary thing was that I had to deliver a broadcast spot, a broadcast 6 minute instructional insert program, and in the end, a couple of web streams all by the following Monday morning. Yikes! It wasn’t even written yet. Double yikes! Continue reading »
MacVideo by Rick Young
Wayne Andrews from Matrox talks about the importance of H.264 Continue reading »
Video compression has come a long way from the days of using Cinepak on a Quadra 950 tower and the old NuBus slots. For the most part, the wars between online formats has been settled with Flash leading the way. But behind that Flash Player is often H.264 encoded video, ever since it was introduced with Flash 9 in December of 2007. Even video powerhouse YouTube is pushing out H.264 video wrapped in a flash player. If that’s not enough, one of the officially supported video formats for Blu-ray is H.264.
So from on-line video (SD or HD) to high end Blu-ray DVD’s, h.264 is a huge player. It’s all good, right? Well, mostly. Have you ever compressed an h.264 video file? It can be unbearably long. We first started running into this bottleneck when we switched from doing mpeg-1 client web approvals (something that was very fast to compress and widely compatible) to h.264. We switched mainly because we wanted to post high resolution web approvals for our clients at higher quality, and MPEG-1 just wasn’t cutting it. H.264 really filled that need. But even a shorter video, say 10-15 minutes could take 60-90 minutes to compress on a Quad Intel MacPro, and some of our videos are more in the 30 minute range. If you have the time, leaving it running overnight is no big deal, but most of the time we’re doing these web approvals close to 5 or 6pm and they needed to be posted and sent to the client that same day. Waiting around just to finish a web post feels like a waste of time (although we did minimize this to some degree using LogMeIn as covered in my previous post). read more…
