April 10th, 2000

[3:00 PM] At Long Last, Matrox Announces Support For Macs (Gamer's, Don't Celebrate Yet) by Staff Apple and Matrox Video Products Group have announced the first support for Macintosh products from Matrox. Matrox is the maker of the popular G-Force line of 3D accelerators that compete toe-to-toe with 3dfx's Voodoo products. Apple and Matrox have announced the RTMac which is designed to allow real-time video editing, and marks the first such offering from Matrox. According to Apple: Matrox Video Products Group and Apple® today announced the first PCI video card for real-time digital video (DV) editing on the Macintosh®. The RTMac, architected by Matrox and Apple engineers, is tightly integrated with Apple's award-winning Final Cut Pro™ video creation software to provide real-time editing, effects and compositing. Fully configured systems are expected to start at under $5,000. "With our incredibly fast Power Mac G4, award-winning Final Cut Pro software and innovative FireWire technology, Apple is the platform of choice for desktop video editing," said Philip Schiller, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The combination of the G4, Final Cut Pro and the new Matrox RTMac card provides the most powerful, real-time editing environment on a personal computer." "We are extremely excited to be working closely with Apple to bring real-time DV editing to the Mac," said Alain Legault, vice president of Product Development for Matrox. "Matrox recognizes Apple's commitment to desktop video and is proud to partner with an industry leader." In addition to real-time DV editing, the RTMac PCI video card, available this summer, supplements the built-in FireWire® capabilities of the Power Mac™ G4 with composite and S-Video analog video capture and export; provides support for a second computer display for extended desktop real estate, and offers full-quality, real-time video playback and resolution on a computer display and NTSC/PAL monitor simultaneously. Matrox has not yet added information about the unreleased product to their Web site. The Mac Observer Spin: This is an important development for Apple to remain competitive in the video editing market, a market that Apple remains strong in despite the presence of beefier Windows NT offerings from companies like Matrox. It will be very interesting to see if Apple adds The RTMac to its BTO system at The Apple Store. We hope that they do. It can also be hoped that Matrox will eventually bring support for its line of 3D accelerators to the Mac. Perhaps that Announcement is being held for the E3 Expo coming up, or MACWORLD New York in July. Note that Apple recently pulled out of E3 citing too many other events they were attending. In any event, we welcome Matrox to the Mac market with open arms and wish them substantial profits! Matrox - Apple