Hooking up different formats to Io-HD

[Bob Zelin]

I was planning on hooking the M25U deck to the Io through the HDMI connections. This should take care of the audio/video part, but it just occured to me while reading other posts on the Cow that I have NOT accounted for machine control for this deck. Whoops! Any suggestions.

REPLY – you can use the firewire port to control this VTR. I have only seen the Y Pb Pr component signal from the HVR-M25U used with firewire control, I have never seen anyone use the HDMI port AND the firewire port at the same time. I have no idea of what will happen, or if the AJA will allow you to select this combination. Think about the HVR-1500 for your next budget. Great VTR.

Also, once we get XDCAM F75 deck, we will hook this up through a Firewire port as well. I figured an additional PCI Firewire card will handle this. But please confirm this for me: since the XDCAM interface is basically a file-to-file transfer process, I assume there is no serial machine control involved. Am I correct?

REPLY – correct

Will there be any conflicts in having the Io-HD hooked up on one Firewire bus, and the XDCAM F75 hooked into another Firewire bus?

REPLY – not if you have another card in the MAC Pro, like the Sonnet or SIIG that has been tested with the MAC Pro.

Bob Zelin

[Tim Allison]

Bob Zelin said:

REPLY – you can use the firewire port to control this VTR. I have only seen the Y Pb Pr component signal from the HVR-M25U used with firewire control, I have never seen anyone use the HDMI port AND the firewire port at the same time. I have no idea of what will happen, or if the AJA will allow you to select this combination.

Bob,

This contradicts what I’ve been reading on other posts. If I provide machine control to the M25U through a Firewire port, doesn’t that mean I will have two different sources (the Io-HD and the M25U) that are asking the Mac for serial machine control information t the same time? Other posts have clearly stated the the Mac is not intelligent enough to sort all of this out.

[Forrest Burger]

I’m not sure if the same holds true for the io HD, but I freelance for a shop that uses an io LA on an older G5. We control a Sony HVR-M10U HDV deck with a PCI firewire card and digitize through the component output of the deck. We just created a new easy setup that uses firewire (Actually the DVCPro HD firewire setting works best, believe it or not) as deck control.

I’m assuming, or hoping…that the io HD will work the same way since I have one on order. My plan is to purchase a PCI-e firewire card for my Mac Pro for deck control and digitze from the HDMI out of an HDV deck into the HDMI port of the io HD…unless I hear it won’t work.

Forrest

[Tim Allison]

Forrest,

You’ve had the same idea that I had…connect a HDV deck to the Io-HD via the HDMI connections. But how do I provide machine control?

Gary Adcock wrote the following on another thread:

The IoHD uses the serial protocol over FW and delivers that serial control via the 9pin or LTC ports – having more than one device like that on your computer is not a good idea, as FCP is NOT smart enough to deal with 2 conflicting serial controls functions over the 2 different FW connections

Blame the FW protocols for the inconvenience, ALL devices that can control via serial over FW need take over the entire FW bus when working in SD and now in addition to the serial control we are also talking about the larger file sizes HD content, People are going to have to change how you work.

I know I can input/output video/audio and provide machine control to a BetaSP deck through the Io-HD. But, coming from a Sony M25U HDV deck, can I input the video/audio through the Io-HD HDMI connections, while providing machine control directly to the Mac through a separate Firewire cable? Based on what Gary said above, I cannot.

Are there any other ways to provide machine control to the HDV deck?

[Forrest Burger]

Hi Tim…

I think the key might be adding a PCI-Express firewire card, which are pretty cheap. This would hopefully provide deck control on a bus other than the firewire bus that is io HD is using.

It works with the io LA, but the io HD may be another story. I’m trying to avoid purchasing an HVR-1500, which has RS-422 control and HD-SDI out…I would like my next purchase to be the new Sony XDCAM-EX camera to gradually move upward.

Forrest

[Tim Allison]

But even if it is on a different Firewire bus, I still think FCP will interpret it as two conflicting demands for serial information. The software is going to scream, “I’m confused. I’m just going to quit, and go home.”

I’m like you…that HVR-1500 is starting to look tempting. At least it has RS422 machine control. I can buy a cheap RS422 switch/router from Markertek that will switch from BetaSP to HDV to XDCAM-HD at the touch of a button, depending on which machine I need to control at the time. Plus, it would allow us to easily master back to HDV tape if/when we need to.

[Forrest Burger]

Well, as I posted earlier…we’re running an io LA with FCP 6.0.1 with complete deck control. The io LA is plugged into the firewire 400 port on the back of the G5 and the HDV deck is plugged into the PCI-X firewire card and there is no conflict…FCP seems to be happy!

[Tim Allison]

But, do you have another tape machine plugged into your Io-LA (like a Beta deck) that requires machine control?

Hopefully, the Io-HD will work like your LA. That answers my questions and solves my problems.

[Forrest Burger]

We do have a beta deck plugged in that runs on RS-422. Sorry I forgot to tell you that!
We just simply switch between easy setups depending on what we’re digitizing.

[Gary Adcock]

If I provide machine control to the M25U through a Firewire port, doesn’t that mean I will have two different sources (the Io-HD and the M25U) that are asking the Mac for serial machine control information t the same time? Other posts have clearly stated the the Mac is not intelligent enough to sort all of this out.

this is correct – Bob is mistaken (though not often)

It is NOT possible to have 2 serial devices firewire control on one computer at the same time.

Adding a second FW bus only works for drives not decks or other units that maintain control.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

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