AJA io XT with Thunderbolt (For Jeremy!)

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “Have our roles reversed? You used to feel like the bad guy for your opinion that FCPX deserved more consideration than it got, and now I feel like the bad guy for my opinion that Thunderbolt has been over-hyped in a few key areas.

I have said, over and over, that Thunderbolt is a cool technology and a game-changing big deal because it enables workflows on laptops that were previously only possible on massive desktops. I get it, Jeremy, and I agree with you about how important this is.

I’m not trying to slam Thunderbolt, but there are a couple things swirling around our conversations about Thunderbolt that I think are important to keep in perspective. I’ve been critical or questioning in a few very specific areas:
Thunderbolt adds new expansion options to laptops and small desktops, but expansion is not the only value-add workstations offer. While many people will be able to move entirely to smaller and cheaper computers, some will still benefit from traditional workstations. It would be a tragedy if the arrival of Thunderbolt ultimately means the departure of the Mac Pro.
Thunderbolt is 4x PCIe, but Mac Pros have a couple 16x PCIe slots. With the existence of 8x and 16x PCIe devices, Thunderbolt has not completely eliminated the need for PCIe expansion.
Thunderbolt devices still take up space. Of course there are still space and weight savings with a laptop over a desktop, so while mobility is greatly increased, we should be clear that a laptop with a gaggle of Thunderbolt peripherals will still require space and power to operate.
Not every Thunderbolt demo is cause for amazement and celebration. Eight-spindle RAID 0 is a risky configuration, no matter how it’s connected to the system, and in terms of Thunderbolt throughput, it’s old news. The Promise R6 is a far better system for production use and has been delivering amazing speed to laptops for months without chewing up 4 of the 6 devices supported on the bus. Other similar RAID enclosures will be joining it on the market soon.

None of this means I don’t think our new capabilities are impressive, or that we shouldn’t be excited about them. I just think that as Thunderbolt devices actually begin coming to market, we need to start considering practicality, too.

High-speed storage on a laptop is a good thing. High-def video capture on a laptop is a good thing. Both of them together, at the same time? A very good thing!

3D on a graphing calculator? Nothing short of amazing.
“

And all of that is fine.

When I started out with my own money, I had a laptop and an AJA io,, then it was a DVCPro HD deck and was cutting HD over firewire. On a laptop. I have not looked back since.

Thunderbolt represents this idea again, but at much higher quality, much higher bandwidth with much more capability and diversity.

That is the reality, and I’m not ashamed or scared to admit it. I don’t feel bad about getting excited, even if it doesn’t quite add up for most people.

Itself, the ioXT looks to be a bad ass little device, too, and rather affordable for a ton of capability and flexibility.

Jeremy

[Richard Herd]

All with OpenCL, does this mean you can daisy chain several of the ioXTs and gain speed rendering compressing and so on?

There’s so many new things I’m not sure I’m keeping up.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Richard Herd] “All with OpenCL, does this mean you can daisy chain several of the ioXTs and gain speed rendering compressing and so on?

There’s so many new things I’m not sure I’m keeping up.
“

Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

It would be awesome if the ioXT offered this.

Aja’s nab2011 tech preview showed Riker, which was an extrernal PCIe 2 box that had a swappable outboard processor. I’d imagine it could do things like standards conversion on capture, or have an avc-I encoder, or….the sky’s the limit.

I do hope that one day an honest to goodness hardware accelerated file encoder comes out of it. Hand it a bunch of tapeless files, and turn them in to a high or low res proxy for editing/finishing/platform handoff, whatever.

Time will tell.

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

I can tell you one real crappy thing about Thunderbolt. And I’m an official 3 week hardcore user running it on a brand spankin new i7 27″ iMac topped out with FCP 7 and a matrox thunderbolt adapter. Running video off the Promise R4 8tb in Raid 5 config. More speed than a 32bit FCP app can handle for sure.

Anyway, been hoping for the Intensity Extreme to come out. But at the moment it’s vapor hardware. So I go the matrox tb adapter so we could audio mix and watch the show on a real HD monitor. What I had been doing, just to give the client something to look at when they were here, was hook up a mini display port to hdmi adapter and run FCP out to the hdmi monitor through that. It was a progressive project, so it actually looked pretty good. Just not as smooth as a real monitor, and the color was a little off I think.

So got the tb adapter and it wouldn’t work. Nothing. Dead. Plugged, unplugged, rebooted, reinstalled, etc. etc. Just dead. So I swapped tb cables with the promise raid, and low and behold it appeared I had a dead tb cable. So I plugged the cable into clients laptop and it worked. Hmmmmm. Looked on the internet and some crazy person was complaining that you could plug the cable into the iMac backward and the tb adapter wouldn’t work. I figured this guy must’ve hammered the thing in because it’s not supposed to fit backward. But it does. It damn well does. That’s a quality Apple machine. You can put the dang tb adapter in backward and it hardly gives notice. Just slips in. WHAT the F? And the cables just barely get in deep enough to make contact. Better duct tape your connections to the back of your iMac because move that screen enough to pull on them and wham, there goes your raid. Disconnected improperly. Can you tell I’m annoyed at the thundercrap today? So this loosey goosey connection is supposed to be daisy chained to all sorts of stuff with cables everywhere just waited to get tapped and pulled out? Or put in backward? Lost 3 hours troubleshooting that today.

[Matthew Sonnenfeld]

I for one have actually already ordered my IoXT and I’m looking forward to it immensely. Let me say why…

I made the switch to Adobe CS5.5 in October with a switcher bundle that included a Matrox MXO2LE MAX. I was told that everything should work and that it was a good way to go. It’s January 28th, 2012 and we’re still waiting on working MXO2 drivers for CS5.5. I do have the Thunderbolt adapter and with FCP7 everything works fine. I even got myself one of HP’s new 24″ LED IPS monitors with HDMI for the Matrox’s picky monitoring requirements. But with everything, I still can’t actually edit in Adobe.

I stuck with the Matrox because I heard over and over that new drivers were coming and when I looked at offerings from other vendors, there was nothing else that I actually wanted in the price range. When I saw that the IoXT was shipping I made some phone calls, and I’m exchanging the MXO2LE MAX for the IoXT. With everything that has happened in the last year, I just want a system that works and will be forward thinking. As I run off of a 17″ MBP primarily, this seems to be the way to go. MC6 somewhere down the line may be in my future as well, but for now, I like the offerings of what comes in the Adobe box. I’ve messed with FCPX and I think I’ve given it a fair shot, but I just don’t like the feel.

I’m not looking forward to giving up the H.264 acceleration of the Matrox but plenty of people get by without it. And if I decide I need it again, let there be Thunderbolt. I’ll buy a Sonnett chasis and put a CompressHD card in it. Next purchase on my list though will be a Thunderbolt RAID. I’m just waiting to see what comes out of G-Tech and CalDigit. I personally like Thunderbolt. Yes the cable is a little unsettlingly small and kinda chintzy feeling, but what it offers is great. Maybe third party manufacturers will make locking Thunderbolt cables and that would definitely be nice. I think that ultimately, the best place for Thunderbolt would be as a complement to a regular desktop workstation. If the question is, can you get serious work done on the road, with serious files, and feel good about not being at your desk, the answer is yes.

It all depends on how you want to work. You can get the Pegasus R6 and work off a desk with a laptop, of you can use the LaCie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk and still stay compact and take the sacrifices that may come with that. Options will expand and that’s what will make all the new technology worth it.

Panasonic HPX170 P
2011 Macbook Pro 17″, 2.3 Ghz Quad Core, 8GB RAM
Matrox MXO2 LE with MAX
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, Final Cut Pro Studio 3, Avid Media Composer 3.5.4
The College of WIlliam and Mary

[Mitch Ives]

[Jeremy Garchow] “In one of my computers, I’ve had a Kona 3 in there for many more years than it should be allowed to have worked. I can choose to use a PCIe box and that Kona3, or buy the ioXT which is daisy chainable (some other io boxes aren’t) has more capability than my Kona3 and has a suggested price of $1495. “

Same here… and yes the IoXT has a lot going for it, especially at $1495.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Jeremy Garchow]

Another small piece of speculation, the ioXT drivers start at v10!

In all seriousness though, it’s probably to bring parity to the rest of the AJA line which is already @ v10.

Makes you wonder though….

[Matthew Sonnenfeld]

I agree. It does make you wonder. But I too would assume this to be part of unifying the AJA drivers. Making things easier with drivers is always welcome.

There’s been a lot of talk lately on these forums about everything following FCPX but I just don’t see the reasoning. Sure Apple does it but their bread and butter are the iPhone and iPad. Consumer products. I’ve seen it on the Adobe Prelude thread and now about AJA (a joke or not). I just feel that when a company is built on professionals, with products made exclusively for professionals, that’s where they will stay.

With adobe, it’s like saying that photoshop elements would replace photoshop. But elements never would because its never been seriously accepted as anything and doesn’t outsell the real deal unless you count it being bundled with the Wacom bamboo, etc. iMovie and the iLife suite outsold FCP. It made sense to Apple. The same would not be so to others.

Panasonic HPX170 P
2011 Macbook Pro 17″, 2.3 Ghz Quad Core, 8GB RAM
Matrox MXO2 LE with MAX
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, Final Cut Pro Studio 3, Avid Media Composer 3.5.4
The College of WIlliam and Mary