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Blackmagic or Kona?
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[Cutter Stevens] “Lastly (and most expensive )the Matrox Axio was designed for realtime functionality, if you need your project done and done fast this card set has all the realtime effects and transition you’ll want and many you’ll never use. You will be limited to single link and a few other short comings”
Except that card is designed for the Adobe CS suite, not FCP. It’s a Windows based solution.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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We are currently running three of the Matrox AXIO HD boxes and CS3. The Matrox Hardware is excellent.
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[Pat McGowan] “We are currently running three of the Matrox AXIO HD boxes and CS3. The Matrox Hardware is excellent.
“That’s what I said. Matrox AXIO is for CS3, not Final Cut Pro. As this is a Final Cut Pro Forum, the Axio really doesn’t apply here.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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My vote is for the Kona 3 w/it’s nice up/down/cross conversion abilities.
-A
3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1) -
[Pat McGowan] “We are about to set up a FCP station on a Mac Pro. Looking for pros and cons for Blackmagic vs. Kona for I/O.”
Pat
as you have seen the majority of the higher end users here on the Cow all say the get the Kona card and there is a reason.One is reliability and support. With nearly a dozen full time tech support staff AJA is situated to assist in a timely fashion. They offer advance replacement – if something goes wrong, they send you a new product before you can even return the old one. In the US that takes one day, in Europe and Asia the distributors maintain inventory for this purpose.
The other big point is that these are the same tools used across the board in our industry, Aja OEM’s versions of their card to Avid for DS, and the stock LHE card is compatible with DS Assist and is one of the only 3 party video hardware products available for mainstream avid users without having to pay avid pricing for.
Autodesk also uses OEM versions of the Kona/ Xena card in the big iron solutions like Flame, Inferno and even with the 4K Lustre Color Correction.
So the answer is why shouldn’t you use the best tools available for your work. While I understand that often it is a matter of dollars and cents, one thing that I keep reminding people about is how much time does it same me and how much is my time worth?
When my workflows needed the hardware scaling and realtime conversion support I calculated that having a Kona 3 card instead of the BMD products saved me something of 2-3 hours of time a week that I was not waiting for rendering for the all things the BMD cards did not do.
That decision was reinforced when my workflows passed 1080 for 2K and 4K projects, then the card became essential, I personally have never had any other product work as easily and as simply with DPX, Phantom or Arri files than I have with my Kona.FYI – I believe that every leader here in the FCP forum uses one type of Kona product or another as their main video card
gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production WorkflowsInside look at the IoHD
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/adcock_gary/AJAIOHD.php -
Pat –
When I set up my first Mac system the Kona 3 was not out yet. At that point the bang for the buck pushed me to use BlackMagic cards. I now have 2 systems running with them and they have been flawless for about 4 years. The BlackMagic cards are cheaper, some significantly so, and do have an advantage with analog I/O. However, if I were starting over I would probably go with the Kona3 based on it’s up and down conversions and it’s ability to be a “pass thru” converter when going from deck to deck via SDI. Aja does have superior tech support, but BlackMagic is not bad in this area, just not as good.
You might be tempted to tip your toe in the water with the cheaper Blackmagic solution, but if you add another Mac the two cards are not compatible in terms of the files they digitize.
Good luck.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
ummm, Walter, I get that part dude.
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[walter biscardi] “Used to be an occasional audio crackle when you started playback, so you would stop playback and re-start, but that’s been gone for a while now.”
the black magic multibridge extreme did this for awhile as well…..annoying!
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I end to favor Kona products both on the bench and in the field for their reliabilty and the fact that Aja stays on the ball in terms of driver versioning/issues.
The guys at Aja get back to me literally within minutes and I know them on a first name basis.
I’m also a big fan of the work they put into their control panel and utility apps.
BMD is good, but it’s a back-end issue and from my experience the guys at Aja have my vote.
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Refreshing the subject…
What If I don’t need all this conversions up and down?
I tell you how I use my FCP.Mostly I work with commercials. I grab the footage from betacam into FCP, export shots as targa frame sequence. Then i work in AfterEffect or Nuke, render effects as uncompressed mov and get back into FinalCut for Editing to Tape.
I need KONA or Black Magic is all I need?
Thanks.
BTW I work on Kona right now and I think that downconversion in FCP from HD to PAL is not working so well on KONA, the best result is when I setup a PAL sequence and re-render whole thing.
Regards
Kamil
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