Best I/O Card Oppinions

[Paul Del vecchio]

I really like the Matrox MXO2 family of products. Very portable, great price, and they work great. We have an MXO2 LE here at the suite and we’re thinking about adding an MXO2 Mini for outputting on another suite, as we don’t need all the inputs and outputs in that suite.

Combine this with CS5 and a Quadro FX 4800 card and you’ll have a great suite with amazing performance.

Just my opinion though.

Paul Del Vecchio – Director
https://www.PaulDV.com

[Ty Yachaina]

I do like Matrox a lot, I’ve used RT.X2 and I’m defiently a fan of it. Havent heard much about MX02, but i know the mini is quite affordable.

I wish i could afford the Quatro card (its about 4K, right?) i dont think the slight performance boost would be worth that much.

As for CS5, defiently…

[Paul Del vecchio]

The Quadro FX card is actually $1449 on Mac, $1549.99 on the PC.

PC:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133252&cm_re=quadro_fx_4800-_-14-133-252-_-Product

Mac:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133281&cm_re=quadro_fx_4800-_-14-133-281-_-Product

Pretty damn good if you ask me. Also, you can get this card and get some pretty good performance out of it so I hear:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133256&cm_re=geforce_285-_-14-133-256-_-Product

and it’s a lot cheaper.

As far as Matrox, look into the Mini and see if it suits your needs, if not the Matrox MXO2 LE is the next step up for about $950.

Paul Del Vecchio – Director
https://www.triple-e-productions.net
https://www.pauldv.net

[Brian Louis]

[Tyle Renake] “I’m thinking of installing Edius on my PC. is there any I/O products that work with both programs?”
If you are going to use Edius you need to use one of Grass Valley’s products like HDspark, HDstorm, NX, etc, it wouldn’t work with PC stuff thats cross app, like MX02, BlackMagic, AJA, and GrassValley has no solution for laptops either, I use a MX02mini for Production Premium on a laptop and desktop, easy to switch, I use the laptop version and have a ExpressCard 54 adapter on the desktop, the cheapest device for Edius desktop monitor output is the HDspark/HDMI out, it will co-exist with BlackMagic products and the MX02

[Tim Kolb]

I know cost is always an issue on anything you buy these days, but AJA products have served me quite well.

The IO Express is a product that is external…similar to the Matrox external products. It’s a very clean signal. I think the pricing is generally competitive.

As far as a workstation card…I’ve used the AJA LH line for some time now. Again, the signal is textbook clean, and it works very well with Premiere Pro.

(I also run 2 Quadro cards as I use 4 displays…and a really fast display card with a lot of cores makes a difference, even under WXP 32 in CS4. Of course, the approved Quadro cards or the GTX285 will make a much bigger difference in CS5…)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Ty Yachaina]

I havent heard much news about CS5 as of yet, but the reason everyone is saying it will be so much faster with these cards is due to it being 64 bit, right?

Maybe theres a new feature it has that i havent heard of…

[Paul Del vecchio]

64 bit is one of the reasons. Another is that it has a new feature called the Mercury Playback Engine. What that does is it uses your graphics card to help out the CPU or free up the CPU. If you have a powerful graphics card like the Quadro FX 4800 or the 5800, it uses the cores of the graphics card to essentially play back the footage. The strain is taken off the CPU and put onto the GPU.

Paul Del Vecchio – Director
https://www.triple-e-productions.net
https://www.pauldv.net

[George Sey]

A basic firewire card works very good and previews REAL TIME with Edius and will co-exist with any other card. Talking about buying a video card for $1450 to enable you free your CPU makes no sense. Beacause you want to use the CPU and Ram. Let’s hope CS5 uses all the power of the 8 CORES and the big Ram.

[Paul Del vecchio]

It makes perfect sense actually. It does the heavy lifting and processes effects such as color correction, blurs, glows, etc. They are more power (have many more cores) than the CPU. You really need to watch the videos to really check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xso6CGdsl2c

Paul Del Vecchio – Director
https://www.triple-e-productions.net
https://www.pauldv.net

[George Sey]

This brings us to the big question. Do we invest in a Quad Xeon Extreme with an average video card or an average CPU and a Mercury card?