AJA on a MacBook Pro and Digi Beta

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

It’s the only game in town for the MBP until somebody releases an SD/HD card in ExpressCard/34 form (currently in development by an OEM provider, it seems).

It will work fine. The shortcomings are not specific to using the IO with the MBP, but rather limitations the IO has compared to the faster PCI-X/PCI Express solutions like Kona or Decklink. Among these limitations: more latency, no support in audio applications, random connectivity loss when working with AE or Motion, no Photoshop monitoring included, and above all, no HD nor HD to SD downconversion. A much bigger deal today than, say, two years ago. I have a hard time considering an SD only solution as a really great investment. Still, again, it’s the only working solution with the MBP today.

If you want to use the IO with your MBP, even with DV50 a 7.2 MB/s, you’ll want to take advantage of the ExpressCard port to add external SATA or FW800 ports (both available now). The internal drive is slow and the fact that you are already using it for system and applications make it even slower. This way, you could use a single external drive or even a small external RAID, connected through ESATA (ideally) or FW800. You could use this disk power to have more RT playback in FCP, or even for editing uncompressed.

It could be worth noting that, given the size of the IO and external drives, the idea of this combo being more portable than a tower is somewhat relative,isn’t it? Maybe going for the IO LD (sort of a half IO with just digital I/O and analog component outputs) could be a good idea since it’s half the size and you won’t be capturing Beta SP, which is the main reason for the other half!

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com