Anyone using an AJA io/la with a Mac Book Pro to do Uncompressed 8-bit

[Jeremy Garchow]

I do not have a MBP, but I have a Powerbook 1.67 that I take on location with my io LD and it works wonderfully. dv, dv50, 8 bit uncompressed SD, it’s all doable. I have a 2 disk SATA enclosure, but cannot do any sort of RAID on it at all. One single SATA drive seems to be enough to handle 8bit uncompressed. I cannot do 10 bit uncompressed. I’m sure with an MBP, you MIGHT be able to get yourself a 2 disk SATA RAID and be able to edit 10bit uncompressed SD, when the express/34 cards come out.

Jeremy

[Kyle High]

Thanks Jeremy, I’ve been looking for 32 bit express SATA cards and have only found them for PC’s. Hopefully they will be out soon for the Mac. Just curious… why do you use SATA drives instead of Firewire? I’m leaning toward the SATA solutions myself after hearing a lot of nightmare stories about firewire.

postman

[Jeremy Garchow]

I bought them in anticipation of getting a MBP although I am not going to get a MBP until all apps that I use are universal. I could have survived with a FW800 drive, but this way I will be able to expand as the laptops are expanding. Also, with the enclosure that I got (i got a 2 drive Firmtek enclosure from Maxx Digital), I can swap out the drives as I need to. I bought it with 2 250Gig drives, but can swap out to lower or higher capacity drives. It’s nice to be able to buy a drive or two for a specific job, then pull those out, put them on a shelf and put in new drives for a new gig and away I go. At the time of purchase (this was before the 17″ MBP with FW800 was announced) I thought that fw800 was a thing of the past for Apple. It looks like they revived it in the 17″ model, but I would still choose to use SATA with an express 34 connection as the preliminary reports say that a 2 drive SATA RAID and an express/34 card will be fast fast fast for laptop land. I will use the onboard fw400 port for my io LD on the MBP just as I do on my powerbook.

That’s my reasoning, however faulty it is.

Jeremy

[Bob Zelin]

everyone is waiting for the new Firmtek 2 port card to come out for the MAC Book Pro –
https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2sm2-e/

this product will allow you to get your 2 port SATA array into the MAC Book Pro, and do 8 and 10 bit uncompressed SDI as well as DVCProHD on two Seagate or Hitachi SATA drives, on your laptop. This is the same drive enclosure that Firmtek currently sells, that works great on the current G5’s (both PCI-X and PCI-E). You MUST stripe both SATA drives together RAID 0 to get reliable playback of 8 and 10 bit uncomressed SDI and DVCProHD, using nothing other than Apple Disk Utility. The ability to have a terabyte of storage for about $1000 is pretty amazing.

I hear that the new Firmtek will be out in about a month – but who knows (for the MacBookPro). I believe the Firmtek card will be cheap – about 80 bucks.

Maxx Digital (Ron Amborn) sells all this stuff.

Bob Zelin

[Kyle High]

I looked at the Firmtek gear and that seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. Hopefully I can convince some people at my church that this is the way to go.
Thanks guys… this is exactly the kind of info I was looking for.

postman