Interview: Matrox Unleashes RT.X100
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DMN: How do you look ahead to what's happening next? You almost need a crystal ball in order to decide what sort of products are going to be wanted and needed six months or a year from now. What is your philosophy when it comes to that?
Legault: Our philosophy involves a couple of things. I think the most important one is to listen to our customers. If you look at the RT.X100, those products were designed by reading the user forums. Really. Or talking to our customers and getting the comments from the reviewers -- people who all looked at the previous product, which is, in this case, the RT2500, and said, well, this is a great product, but what about having color correction? I remember you saying in your review that out of those three products, whether it was Storm, the Pro-ONE, or Matrox, that all had low-quality slow motion, you said that frame-based slow motion was awful, and we needed field-based slow motion. So we listened to you, and now it's part of our product. So there's a lot of that, listening to the customers and hearing what they would like to see next. And then we have to look at the technology that will exist, that is about to exist. Watching what Intel is doing on the processing, watching the bus architecture. The computers migrating from PCI to PCI-X, and stuff like that. And the operating systems. So, basically watching the progress of a lot of different technology and trying to understand what would be the most cost-effective way to provide the features customers ask for, given the progress of that technology.
Now, having said that, the risks are that things are moving fast, and what we like to do is to make a product that has fairly quick cycles. What I mean by that is that if you look at our RT products, we designed the product every year and a half or so, and we try to avoid dragging out the design process over four or five years. In that case, you think of a concept and then things evolve so quickly that by the time you get there things have changed and they're not where you expected them to be. It's easier to take smaller steps but more often. That's what we've tried to do with our product lines in the last three or four years, with some good success. Other people have embarked on some major "revolutionary" designs that after 22 ASICs, five or six years of development and $20 million later, they say, "here's our product," and sometimes those products, although they looked interesting five years ago, might be a bit off of what people would like to see now.
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DMN: You're talking about Media 100's 844/X, aren't you?
Legault: Well, I guess that's one of them, yes. I could have said the same thing about Play [Trinity], this thing we read about for so many years, but by the time it really came out, it wasn't exactly the product people were hoping for. Things have evolved. When Media 100 began their design, which must have been several years ago, they may not have expected that the Intel processor would be so damn fast by now.
DMN: Because now you can do a lot of the things they're talking about doing in hardware, in the processor?
Legault: Yes. And you don't really leverage that. That's a philosophy that we adopted which seems to work out well for us. But again, the customer is key. If you do what the customers are looking for, they can only like it.
DMN: So the three big players in this lower-end DV market are Matrox, Pinnacle and Canopus. Do you see a forth competitor coming up? Is there anyone else on your radar screen that might be able to match the three that are at the top at this point? What about DPS?
Legault: No, we don't see DPS as being a competitor in our product line at this point. Some people are asking themselves right now what is the value in buying a hardware-based product versus a software-only product. Now you can find some software alternatives, whether it's the Xpress DV product from Avid, software-only Final Cut Pro, Vegas Video, and others, so I guess what I have to tell these people now is that our product combined with Premiere, we're now bringing even more capability to the table, and everything is done in full resolution in real time, and for $1099 it's very competitive. But there are people asking themselves that question. I think our answer is a good one right now. That's where I see our competition right now. But I'm not seeing a fourth PC-based hardware vendor.
DMN: This is a hotly competitive market. I think your company has fired a shot across the bow of the others, now they're going to have to respond, aren't they?
Legault: Yes, and I'm sure they're not sitting idle. I'm not discounting them. I'm sure they've been caught a bit by surprise by how extensive the feature set is of our new product. I think everybody sort of expected us to, and I read this so many times, "these guys are doing an RT2500 with DV-out." And I think they expected that, and they saw that, and I think our "power of X" architecture took a lot of people by surprise.
Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist for the past eight years, White is also an Emmy-winning producer, video editor and shot-calling PBS TV director with 28 years broadcast experience. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.Prev 1 2 3 4
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