With its headquarters in Dorval, Quebec, Canada, the company now boasts up to 550 employees worldwide. Through this significant growth Trottier—an electrical engineer by training—has been closely involved in every aspect of the business, helping to develop many of Matrox’s most prominent products.

In addition to his work at Matrox, Trottier has numerous other interests spanning various fields—such as climate change, energy, astronomy, and aerospace science. In 2000 Trottier and his wife Louise launched and funded The Trottier Family Foundation, which has dedicated its efforts to climate change. It has pledged $5 million a year for the next ten years to fund innovative projects with the goal of helping to reduce emissions in Canada by half over the next decade.

On September 6, 2019, Trottier acquired 100 percent ownership of the Matrox group of companies, including its three divisions—Matrox Imaging, Matrox Graphics, and Matrox Video. [On June 6, 2022, the Imaging business was sold off to Zebra Technologies to focus on Matrox Video’s core expertise: graphics and video processing cards.]

Trottier sat down with The Broadcast Bridge to discuss a range of subjects, from product development and compression to Artificial Intelligence and sustainability in the video production industry. For him, “the processes of producing video are the same as they've been for the last half century, but the ways to do it have changed dramatically.”

The Broadcast Bridge:  Let’s talk about your first product, the ALT-256, which was introduced in 1978. Those were the days of analog video. What were you trying to solve for customers with that card?

Trottier: Well, that was in the very earliest days of the PC. There weren't very many inexpensive graphics things you could do with a basic microprocessor. There were some workstations and higher end types of things, but they were quite expensive. So, we felt that there was a need for something that was less expensive and that could allow a microprocessor to display simple graphics. And it was successful.

However, we developed other cards before that. They were alphanumeric controllers, but we called them video rams. That's really what got the company going. The ALT-256 was very successful for us and led to many generations of graphics cards. We hit the big time in the late 90s, when we became one of the top graphics card companies.

The Broadcast Bridge:  You apparently still have a close hand in product development. What keeps you interested after 47 years?

Trottier:  I've been a technology and science geek since I was a kid. I love technology. And so it's one of the things I like about our industry and our business: that there's constantly technological change and evolution happening and fairly radical changes in technology that are occurring. There’s always new stuff and new challenges to keep learning. And I enjoyed doing that.

So I work with our engineers here to look at all these new technologies that are coming out and how we can use them for our product objectives. I get excited when I see that we as a company can do things now that you couldn't do before.

The Broadcast Bridge:  As far as company strategy, a lot of vendors seem to change their business based on the technology of the day. You don't seem to do that. You stay the course and gradually evolve. Talk about changing to meet customer demands versus staying the course.

Trottier:  Well, when you've been in the industry as long as I have, you've seen things. Back when I started my career back in the 70s, broadcast television equipment was analog. Then we had the transition to digital, which has led to HD, 4K and now 8K (and higher resolutions). These are pretty dramatic transitions, right? The equipment that's being used in the television industry today is still largely dedicated, hard wired, single purpose equipment.

However, there's a big trend now with computers and graphics processors and all these things that have become so powerful. Some call it commercial off the shelf (COTS) computing. If you know what you're doing, you can make what I call a “broadcast computer,” where you create a machine that can be reprogrammed to do pretty much any of the functions you want. You don't need a dedicated piece of equipment anymore. Customers want something programmable. COTS also allows you to have applications that can work equally well in on-premise computers or the cloud. The computing power that's in the cloud and on premise are essentially the same kinds of processes, including real time live production.

So the functions or the processes of producing video are the same as they've been for the last half century, but the ways to do it have changed dramatically.

The Broadcast Bridge:  You’ve gone from that early card to the current LUMA series of graphics cards based on Intel’s Arc GPU platform. I know it isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but I'm sure there's much more density and much more capability in this new card. Talk about that. What you can do today that you couldn't do back then.

Trottier:  Well, GPUs are so much more powerful now. You can do a lot more than just graphics or rendering video games. Today we're using GPUs to do video processing, special effects, keying, compositing and all kinds of video processing effects.

Another thing that you find in modern GPUs today, particularly with Intel, is they have codec engines built into GPUs. These codecs are completely independent processing units from the graphics engine. So you can do video encoding and decoding very efficiently, doing the things that really slow down the graphics rendering, in an independent engine. The only thing that's shared between the graphics engine and the video engine is the memory bandwidth.

The Broadcast Bridge:  Computer processing has gotten better, but it needs much more processing today to do what the new Matrox cards can do.

Trottier:  Yeah it’s the GPU that’s made all the difference. Today they’re using them in the cloud and all kinds of things for processing. But for video processing, with the Intel platform, if you want to do a high end vision mixer, you can do all of the processing on a GPU. That’s all part of what we're doing with our new LUMA cards. You’ll see new graphics products coming from us in the future that I think people will be very excited about.

The Broadcast Bridge:  What about the product development process? Can you develop products faster today than you could years ago?

Trottier:  I wish that were true, but things are changing pretty darn fast. When you have to accommodate major changes in technology as time goes on, you have to basically reinvent everything. And so that takes a little time.

The Broadcast Bridge:  We've seen a lot of consolidation in the industry among companies, some buying other companies and others merging their resources, but you've chosen to buy out your co-founder and run the company yourself. Why is it important for you to stay private in today's world of consolidation?

Trottier:  Here at Matrox we've had that debate off and on for years, because we’ve been in business for a long time. Last year we did sell a good piece of the company, another division we called Matrox Imaging, to Zebra Technologies [for $875 million], which was a very good move for us and I think for Zebra and for our employees.

Changing to a public company has its own challenges. When you're working through certain technological transitions, like we're doing right now, it's not always obvious to the public investors that these things are going to work out and that it’s worth the risk. Because sometimes you have to invest a significant amount of money to fund this level of re-engineering. Unless they have patience.

So, with Matrox, if a product works that’s great. If it doesn't work or takes more development time, well it's my money. I’m a private person and by nature, an introvert, and I prefer doing things this way. I am ready to invest in cutting-edge products even if the cycle from idea to revenue is very long. Sometimes, public companies are less patient. We also started recently to invest in some smaller companies with technology that's kind of synergistic with what we're doing.

But in terms of going public or selling, I'd rather keep doing what we're doing. And if someday somebody comes along and offers me a huge amount of money for the company like they did for Matrox Imaging, well, maybe I won't say no. But I'm still having fun, so we're staying the course.

The Broadcast Bridge:  The area of cloud computing has caused great disruption in the video industry. Would you say the IP infrastructure design is more acceptable to accountants or chief engineers? Why?

Trottier:  I think it's still early days in the broadcast industry for cloud computing. There's a lot of technical challenges that need to be solved to make it truly efficient. And that's part of what we're doing right now at Matrox Video. I do believe that there will be very major cost savings and benefits from that once the necessary plumbing and engineering has been done to make it seamless and efficient.

We all know what the workflow benefits are. I think that’s pretty clear. If you have to buy all that equipment to outfit a studio, it's very expensive. But if you can spin it up in the cloud and use it as you need it, that's a very efficient way of doing things operationally. And that's just one of the benefits that the cloud offers.

The Broadcast Bridge:  Matrox offers a product in this category called ORIGIN. Is real-time, live production in the cloud a reality in today’s latency-laden landscape? Is better compression the answer? Explain.

Trottier:  We’re working hard on how to reduce latency to make it usable and we think we're on the right track. I think we will achieve that. But, you know, it's a work in process right now. We're in the midst of doing this. And one of the things about ORIGIN, the architecture of origin, is that it lets you use things that run faster than real time to shorten the total time. So that typically is a normal on-premise broadcast thing. Every piece of equipment that you have, has maybe at least a one frame delay. You have to time everything up and cascade everything with at least a frame latency. A lot of computer processes can be operated asynchronously, and can run faster than real time. So one of the philosophies behind our ORIGIN project is to allow you to use these asynchronous processes that run faster than real time and end up shortening your signal delivery time.

I think compression is a big part of the future of cloud production (and video production in general) and technologies like JPEG XS and H.264 (AVC) are working very well. We’ll see how it all shakes out.

The Broadcast Bridge:  The Trottier Family Foundation has placed a high value of solving climate change and in the past year we’ve heard a lot about sustainability. Setting aside the climate benefits, how does focusing on sustainability benefit those in the video production industry specifically. Is there a financial cost?

Trottier:  Well, there are a lot of different ways we can address that. I think that one of the big trends we're seeing in the television industry today is what we call a kind of remotely distributed or decentralized production.

This is a big environmental benefit because it means that your talent and your technical staff don't all have to travel to one location. They can operate from wherever they are and control the equipment and the processes and so on. That's one take on it. Another one is this idea of using COTS equipment that can be repurposed and reprogrammed to do multiple functions. So you don't need as many different pieces of equipment and you are expending less energy.

The Broadcast Bridge:  Some production companies are concerned it's going to cost them money. Is it going to cost my company more money to build out systems that are sustainable?

Trottier:  I think it's the opposite. It's actually a big cost saving. And certainly I think the trend to decentralized production is becoming a big wave in the industry because people are saving money by doing that. These reprogrammable computers are still not as well developed as they should be, but we're working in that direction. And I think you will see people get away with using a lot less equipment.

The Broadcast Bridge:  And the environment will be saved because of it? Theoretically?

Trottier:  Theoretically.

The Broadcast Bridge:  Next topic is artificial intelligence. What’s your opinion about the use of AI in the video production industry? Are there things that we have to be careful of in our industry?

Trottier:  Well, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that particular issue. I know there's people out there that think, “AI, is going to take over the world and destroy humanity.” I don't believe that the technology is going to do that at all. I'm skeptical, but I do think it definitely has a value in the broadcast industry. And there are many, many different things you can improve with AI.

An example might be where you're trying to compress video in real time. You can use AI to look at images and figure out what's the best parameters to use. These program parameters we're using today with things like JPEG 2000 or H.264. There are many parameters and adjusting them and getting the best result is an art. It’s very complex. So you can use AI to do a better job of adjusting all those parameters to get the most efficient compression that you want. It could be used to recognize certain patterns in the pictures or archiving video and automatically creating metadata of what it is you're archiving. This is instead of having to type it in a huge number of things.

The Broadcast Bridge:  So, is the future bright for video production? Are you optimistic?

Trottier:  Yes. I think there's more and more video being produced all the time and more and more video being consumed. So the sky's the limit.