Help with trying to go HD, emphasis on key matte

[Tim Kolb]

[gary adcock] “Yes,timmy the IoHD now properly works under FCP 7.01 and OSX 10.6.1 and later.”

Hmmm… AJA needs to update their website.

Just for the record…very few get away with calling me “Timmy”.

🙂

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Gary Adcock]

[Tim Kolb] “Just for the record…very few get away with calling me “Timmy”. “

please think of it more as a “Cartmanesque” salute as in “Timm-AAHH”

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, IL

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/adcock_gary/AJAIOHD.php

[Tim Kolb]

[gary adcock] “please think of it more as a “Cartmanesque” salute as in “Timm-AAHH””

LOL…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Matthew Causon]

Hello guys

My thinking was to use the Io Express to for video output and monitoring, (not between the Ki Pro and computer) the Ki Pro does not do this.

thx

Matty Causon
Phosphor
EMEA Business Management for AJA Video Systems Inc.

[Tim Kolb]

[Matthew Causon] “My thinking was to use the Io Express to for video output and monitoring, (not between the Ki Pro and computer) the Ki Pro does not do this.”

Well in that case, I’d agree.

Since in the earlier discussion the IO Express was tossed about as an alternative for the acquisition side (between the camera and ingest computer), I was still locked in to that line of thinking.

My bad, I stand corrected…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Steve Oakley]

this is really a very expensive way to go.

a MXO2 base model is $1595 which comes with both PCIe tower interface and PCIe/54 laptop interface. it will run on battery power – common 12V. the MXO2 LE is $1k and would work well here.

it takes HD in on analog component, HDMI and HD SDI – another words anything your camera puts out it takes, plus audio. its 10 bit. of course if your camera only puts out 8bit SDI digital, moot point about 10bit. ProRes can be either 8 or 10 bit depending on what you feed it. SDI and HDMI can be either 8 or 10bit depending on your source.

the problem with the IO HD is all the extra compression hits you take every time it goes in and out of the box. can’t avoid it. I don’t like adding extra compression hits for no really good reason.

with the MXO2 series product plugged into a tower, it can capture uncompressed video thru its interface, and compress to ProRes on the CPU. even standard prores should be more then good enough for most key work – assuming decent lighting.

also for the total $10k budget, there was no mention of anything else – like a tripod, audio, ect. I’d say a JVC 700 + MXO2 LE + basic camera support gear should squeak in for about $10k with careful shopping. ….and no one even mentioned lights and CK background.

Steve Oakley
DP • Editor • VFX Artist
http://www.practicali.com

[Mark Warren]

Hi Steve –

Thanks for the helpful info. Savings money is always appreciated. The MXO2 base model for $1,595 is definitely cheaper than the AJA box…although it sounds like I will need to purchase a Windows based laptop, so I can put the MXO2 card in. I only have a MAC Book Pro and MAC Pro. That’s fine…and it will still be cheaper than the AJA box.

Questions:

1. Will a standard laptop with 7200 RPM hard drive work for me? If not, will I need something faster? How big of a hard drive should I get?

2. Will I need any additional software to make this work? Other than what comes with the MXO2? My plan is to simply capture the uncompressed HD video on this new windows-based laptop with the MXO2 card and then transfer it to my MAC PRO for editing. Not sure how I will transfer at this point, but I’m sure I can find something that will work at a decent rate (firewire?).

In terms of my budget, I will have 10K…and I already own a great tripod, lights, green screen background, etc. All I need to buy with the 10K is an HD camera (with 10 bit audio and 10 bit HD/SDI output) and the ability to get the highest quality video to Final Cut Pro.

3. Once I get the uncompressed *.mov files from my new laptop to my MAC PRO, into FCP, do I simply set the Sequence Settings to Pro Res 422 and I’m good to go? Will it need to render the files in order for me to edit them?

Thanks again for your help.

Mark

P.S.: I’ll go check out the JVC 700.

[Matthew Causon]

The advantages of the Ki Pro and IoHD are that they encode Pro Res in hardware.

This means that the IoHD is qualified to capture Pro Res HQ on a MacBook Pro and that’s unique.

Given that you are doing Matte work the quality of Pro Res and it being 10bit I think would be important?

If you don’t want the Pro Res hardware encoding then the AJA Io Express is a great Io box that is cross platform and codec independent, runs off 12v power if you like and has and SRP of $995.

Best regards

Matty Causon

Phosphor

EMEA Business Management for AJA Video Systems Inc.

[Tim Kolb]

[Mark Warren] “1. Will a standard laptop with 7200 RPM hard drive work for me? If not, will I need something faster? How big of a hard drive should I get?”

Work for what?

If you’re ingesting uncompressed, you’ll need about 170 MegaBYTES/sec throughput (that’s for Y’CbCr…you’ll need closer to 260 MBytes/s for RGB in the case of dual link in an HDcam SR sort of work flow)…that’s RAID subsystem territory. No single 7200rpm drive will keep up with that…particularly a laptop drive.

I’m not as familiar with the Matrox products as I am with the AJA products, but a device that doesn’t have the compression function on board, moves that function to the computer.

You could get away with a laptop with the IO HD because it’s changing the incoming uncompressed signal to ProRes (about 25 MegaBytes/sec) before the laptop has to deal with it.

If you go with something that just brings the incoming signal in and passes it to the computer, the computer has to ingest the massive uncompressed bitrate and also encode to something in real time if you plan on using small drives. Even a stout laptop will have some challenges with that. Your tower could likely encode a stream of uncompressed to ProRes.

As far as the IO HD re-compressing on output…I don’t see how that would happen as the signal has to be uncompressed to travel out over SDI… Playing a ProRes timeline out through the IO HD via SDI would actually convert the ProRes to uncompressed.

…or am I missing something? I need the hardcore Mac folk to step in here and correct me if I’m off-base.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,