Glossy? Or no Glossy?

[Walter Biscardi]

I go for matte finish. Glossy is too much of a reflective mirror for my tastes.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Chris Poisson]

Hi Chris,

I disagree with Walter, I have the glossy screen and just love it. To answer your concerns though, I never heard that about compositing on an external monitor, except that the 15″ screen just seems too small after being spoiled by a 23″ ACD on my other system. So I DO use a 17″ Samsung to composite on with my MacBook, but if you’re stuck on the little screen, I don’t thing glossy will make THAT much improvement to your eye. But I do like the glossy and spent more than one visit to the Apple store trying them out before I bought.

Oh, and OT, I read your profile, Handbrake? That’s an awful, potentially illegal program. Run away!

Have a wonderful day.

[Jerry Hofmann]

If you want to run Color, you need the 17″… Won’t work with a 15. Screen res is too small.

I like the matte finish too. I think the whole idea of a laptop is portability, and I’d want to sit anywhere and edit. The reflections on the glossy are too reflective.

Jerry

[Jeremy Garchow]

Another vote for matte from me. I worked on a colleagues glossy a while back and I didn’t care for it. The overhead lights kept catching the screen.

Jeremy

[Chris Poisson]

Hi Jerry,

Even in the best situations, using a laptop is rife with compromises. They will never be what a decent tower is, we just have to decide what trade-offs we are willing to put up with. For me at the moment it’s what’s a decent HD iO that doesn’t cost as much as a good used car!

I tried the 17″ and I thought it killed the portability factor, way too big. Just me tho…

Have a wonderful day.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I tell you what.

A 17″ MBP (you have to go 17″ in my opinion), an ioHD, a Sonnet Express34 card, a port multiplied SATA raid and FCS2 using ProRes is a serious serious portable editing station. Serious. No it’s not a desktop, but for on the road portability it is totally awesome and fully capable and functional of top of the line video work and will fit into your overhead bin.

Jeremy

[Jerry Hofmann]

There’s no doubt about a tower running circles around a laptop… however I’ve found my laptop to be extremely useful… I teach with it, edit with it, log with it…

IMHO an IoHD will pay for itself just by putting it in your workflow. First, it’s portable, second it’s portable. Did I mention it’s portable? It’s a plug and play FW 800 device. So works with any intel machine without reservations.

Third, working in ProRes will save you a TON in array costs. That’s where it pays for itself. Uncompressed HD just is way too expensive for me to consider. I can capture it with my G5/Kona 2 system, but still takes up soooo much space that I just don’t see the point. ProRes HQ looks EXACTLY the same to my old eyes. I suppose that since it’s a smaller file ya have to be losing something, but if you can’t see the difference, I just don’t think that what differences there may be technically makes a wit of difference.

Lastly, it’s future proof… not a card in sight… take for example my Kona 2… won’t work in the new towers…

Sans that, I’d look at a Kona 3 or LH series card to capture to pro res… but no other solution in sight does what the IoHD will do. It lifts the decoding for monitoring from the CPU… It compresses to ProRes ON BOARD the box, again lifting this heavy lifting from your CPU. That’s why it’s perfect for a laptop/tower owner like me…. I can capture with my Laptop while editing on my 8 core… man this makes a lot of sense to me.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Jerry Hofmann]

P.S.

What you can’t do without another FW bus, is capture to FW drives with the Io HD…. just as it has been with AJA’s other Io lines.

FW drives are dead though IMHO.. eSATA rules…. so the problem you may have having to put the Io on it’s own bus is sort of moot for me. I’ll not be buying any more FW drives. ever…

CalDigit rules this arena too. They are develping some very cool things for MBP stations. Like faster external SATA cards. Right now, what’s out there is going to be constrained to about 100mb/sec…. The future holds much faster speeds for eSATA with Laptops.

Another small caveat is that it can’t deal with dual link HD. So the 20 people on the planet that use this format can’t use the Io to capture dual link HD… I suppose you could shoot it, then down convert it to HD SDI, then capture that as ProRes though… Course, this defeats the purpose of the dual link signal.

Jerry

[Chris Poisson]

Hey Jerry,

Well, I sorta got that covered, with a nice little 1tb eSATA RAID from Firmtek, so I have lots more possibilities than just FireWire on my laptop. Thanks for the info on Dual link, I’ll just have to avoid those 20 people!

Have a wonderful day.

[Chris Poisson]

Hey Jerry,

No arguments at all about the advantages of a laptop, ProRes, with you on all that, and the only thing I need selling on the iO is justifying the price at the present time. Like anything else, the price could come down, or someone else could introduce a competitive product at a lower cost, so I’m just waiting to see. I don’t have enough work for the MBP to justify $3500 at present. I can’t afford a Rolex or a Ferrari either. Not complaining, just waiting.

Thanks!

Have a wonderful day.