

This item is no longer available.
Review Summary
The Matrox MXO2 Portable Input/Output Card with MAX and Thunderbolt Ports is a device designed to provide all the features of an I/O card in a sturdy breakout box for your desktop. It's got connections for both professional audio and video, including an input and output each for HDMI, component video, composite video and Y/C (S-Video); for audio, there's dual XLR ins and four outs as well as stereo AES/EBU and analog audio I/O. In addition, you've got an HD/SD-SDI input and two such outputs. Your options for high-quality monitoring couldn't be more versatile. And of course, this MXO2 includes a Thunderbolt adapter, which supplies the blazing-fast connection to a computer for a data transfer rate of up to 10 Gb/s.
Designed for Mac laptop and desktop systems with a Thunderbolt port, this model features Matrox MAX, a technology that implements faster than real-time H.264 encoding for resolutions ranging from iPod to HD. It uses a dedicated hardware processor to accelerate the creation of H.264 files for Blu-ray, the web and mobile devices. By using specialized hardware acceleration, jobs are finished more quickly and system resources are freed up for other tasks. This technology allows direct export to higher-quality H.264 Blu-ray compliant files from Compressor.
Along with broadcast-quality audio and HD video input and output, the MXO2 provides calibration controls that include blue-only. Audio monitoring is a strong suit of the unit, as well: With six analog audio outs, you can perform full 5.1 surround sound monitoring. You also benefit from a wide variety of HD and SD workflows with Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro thanks to Matrox MXO2's 10-bit hardware up/down/cross-conversion scaling engine and support for a wide variety of file-based formats and industry-standard codecs.