Matrox Compress HD is a board with H264 chips designed to speed up encoding to both high def and standard formats.  Add one into your system and you should get near realtime encoding of HD material for Blu-ray.

We have had drivers for Compress HD for sometime, however, Matrox had always said that it would not work properly with their own RT.X2 and Axio cards.  Now with the release of the latest drivers it does. 

All you need to do is insert the Compress HD card (a PCI express 1 card) into your computer and then run the latest driver installation for the RT.X2/Axio.  Once finished you will also have a working Compress HD in the system.

Compress HD works as part of the Adobe Media Encoder - so to export using Compress HD just select your timeline and send it to AME in the normal way.  You then let AME encode the footage for you and drop these files into Encore.

The speed of encoding does vary depending on how complex your edit is and how many effects you have added, but for straight cuts it was at least as fast as real time - i.e.: 1 minute would take 1 minute to make.  Compare this to the speed of using just software where a minutes worth of original HD footage could take 4-5 minutes and you can see the benefit of using the Compress HD. 

• Compress HD will make footage in profile 4.0 and 4.1 - which means you can maintain the quality of your footage by using the highest datarates, and drop it to get more on a disc. Currently Compress HD only handles constant bit rate encoding, which is fairly typical for hardware based encoders.
• Since Compress HD works in the Adobe Media Encoder you do not send timelines to Encore for authoring using the dynamic link between Premiere and Encore.  This is a shame because the Dynamic Link is a useful way of creating a DVD or Blu-ray disc, however, it is also one of the things that has caused us the greatest problems in CS4, so many people do not use it.
• Compress HD works at either 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 resolutions.  This means for HDV users their timeline will be scaled to full HD for the Blu-ray disc.  Our speed tests have been done using HDV footage on an RT.X2 with Compress HD scaling the footage to full size - where it took 1 minute to make 1 minutes H264 footage.  Compress HD also handles 720P sizes - something with the equivalent for EDIUS, the FireCoder Blu does not.
• Compress HD also handles lower resolutions - so it will be faster at making your footage for an iPOD, for example.



Click here to download Matrox Compress HD information for PC

Click here to download Matrox Compress HD information for PC