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Matrox MXO vs Aja IO HD
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Does the Io HD play nice with FW 400 devices you might want to capture from in native DV or DV50? I assume it would as the 800 bus should be separate from the 400 bus. My biggest disappointment with Io is its inability to share the 400 bus with decks and camcorders. I get tired of having to exit FCP, switch my FW A/B switch, reopen FCP and choose the appropriate Easy Setup. It would be nice to have both connected and available via Easy Setups as you can with Kona.
Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com -
[Lee Berger] “Does the Io HD play nice with FW 400 devices you might want to capture from in native DV or DV50? I assume it would as the 800 bus should be separate from the 400 bus.”
Well, as we know the FW800 and FW400 bus are the same bus. The solution? Don’t use firewire drives. Get eSATA…they have cards for both the towers and the laptops, and they are FASTER than firewire. Or, if you MUST use firewire, get a FW card for the Tower or laptop…they make those.
Shane
Littlefrog PostGETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
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I use both the MXO and AJA products, and I really like the MXO for my MBP laptop, especially when outputting DVCPROHD to HD projectors in theatres. I have also been using it with my Octocore, since I have been waiting to see if I want to spring for another Kona card or IOHD for it. Most all of my work is P2 now, so the Matrox solution is serving me just fine. I really like my AJA products, but I do believe the days of needing machine control and tape ingest are disappearing quite rapidly. AND the beta drivers for the MXO are working in Leopard RIGHT NOW.
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[Shane Ross] “Don’t use firewire drives. Get eSATA.”
Thanks Shane. AJA’s Io HD FAQ says that you can use FireWire drives if you install a FW PCIe card but it says nothing about using tape FW tape machines or camcorders. This is the problem with Io where you can’t capture via FireWIre while the Io is connected, even if if you use a FW PCI card. AJA’s Io solution is to swap 1394 connections or get a FireWire A/B switch. Unfortunately if you swap or switch while FCP is open it will crash. What a pain. While I have an XServe RAID, I have been able to capture to FW drives using the Io without any conflicts.
Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com -
I have an AJA IO and for viewing HD I thought of getting a Kona 3 card. I’ll be inputing P2 card data DVCproHD. I’m on a G5 2,7 with 2.5 megs of ram. maybe going to the intel 4 core G5.
What do you think of the Kona 3 with the 17″ Panasonic HD/SD LCD Monitor.Thanks
Peter -
But for anyone with a recent MBP with the NVidia card, the MXO isn’t an option at all for now. I’ve put off buying a MBP until Matrox fixes the problem (which has gone on for months). The MXO also doesn’t work with Color or Premiere Pro CS3. Tehy say they’re working on it all, but it’s been months since the MBP w/NVidea card came out.
Ed[Christopher Wright] “I use both the MXO and AJA products, and I really like the MXO for my MBP laptop, especially when outputting DVCPROHD to HD projectors in theatres. I have also been using it with my Octocore, since I have been waiting to see if I want to spring for another Kona card or IOHD for it. Most all of my work is P2 now, so the Matrox solution is serving me just fine. I really like my AJA products, but I do believe the days of needing machine control and tape ingest are disappearing quite rapidly. AND the beta drivers for the MXO are working in Leopard RIGHT NOW. “
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It really depends on your workflow, but for a lot of people, they will never need to ingest anything from HDSDI. P2, XDCAM, HDV, AVCHD, and most of the other newer formats other than the very high end stuff, support firewire, or USB connections which don’t require an I/O box. If this is the case for the forseeable projects you are working on, spending an extra $2500 bucks on something you don’t need seems like a poor purchase decision.
I am a big fan of the MXO. I think most people don’t really understand what is so cool about it, but, remember, it’s a lot more than just an output device. It is limited in that it can’t feed out an HD and an SD signal at the same time, but it does some other very cool things. Among the coolest is that it turns your normal external LCD screen into a production monitor, through color calibration functions, and in the case of interlaced footage, it makes your progressive LCD monitor display footage as interlaced, meaning that it plays back the fields in separate scans, for smooth scrolling, and in freeze frame, jumps back and forth between the two fields. These features alone make it worth the money to me. As far as output options go, it gives an incredibly accurate output since it interrupts the quicktime stream before it hits the video card and gets converted from YUV to RGB. It also assigns every frame a timecode stamp, so if quicktime is generating 75 fps, and your output is 60i, since every frame is stamped with the appropriate timecode, when it reconstructs the 60i output, it knows which frames to delete to be completely accurate. Also, since your monitor is calibrated accurately, you know that what you see on your external monitor, and what is recording to tape are the same. It also carries up to eight channels of AESEBU through the HDSDI. By the way, it handles any HD signal fine through the HDSDI, since that was a question.
All of that is just on the Mastering side. On the Presentation side, you can feed a video screen capture, or partial screen capture out of your machine to any of the outputs. This is very useful for doing instructional videos, or any time you want to capture something on your computer.
To call the MXO simply an output device or scaler, is really not doing it justice. It is not a one trick pony, and it does stuff that no other product on the market does. It is not an I/O device, though it has some very advanced Output functions.
If you need I/O, then the AJA IO HD is an excellent option. If you only need output, and might have use for some of the other functionality, or just don’t want to spend the extra cash on the IO HD, then I’d definitely go with the MXO.
Hope this is helpful,
Heath Firestone
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Yes for different flavors of output, the MXO is hard to beat. As far as Color and PPro support, I don’t use Color, I use Magic Bullet Looks, so that isn’t a deal breaker for me. Also Leopard support for PPro isn’t even available from Adobe until December (if we are lucky!), so that point is moot. I’m sure Matrox will have a working driver for PPro by then. The new MBP Nvidia driver is an issue, but I’m sure they are working on that as we speak. I was just ecstatic that they already have the Leopard drivers working on both my Leopard machines already! I will be screening a HD feature with it in less than two weeks!
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[Lee Berger] “Thanks Shane. AJA’s Io HD FAQ says that you can use FireWire drives if you install a FW PCIe card but it says nothing about using tape FW tape machines or camcorders. This is the problem with Io where you can’t capture via FireWIre while the Io is connected, even if if you use a FW PCI card.”
Why would you have the I/O HD connected if you are capturing via firewire? I wouldn’t…doesn’t make sense. If you connect via the I/O, then have that connected. If via firewire, disconnect it.
The COOL thing about having the i?o HD capture via firewire 800, is that you can then use FASTER and better suited drives for capturing to. eSATA drives like the CalDigit S2VR Duo or HD or Sonnet 500P. Or better yet, get the HD Pro and with a PciExpress 34 card, you can capture to a RAID 5 box and get 190MB/s read write.
Personally, I’d never capture ProRes to firewire drives.
Shane
Littlefrog PostGETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
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Matrox has known that the MXO doesn’t work with the newest MBPs since July, they bought a MBP on August 2nd to figure out why it doesn’t work. It’s now 3 1/2 months since they’ve known it doesn’t work, and yet they’ve continued to market it as a MBP solution. They don’t show a MacPro in their ads, they show a MBP. I’d call that a pretty big issue. And I’m guessing that for the majority of FCP users, Color, which is included in FCS, is the CC of choice, so that’s a big issue too.
Ed[Christopher Wright] “……..The new MBP Nvidia driver is an issue, but I’m sure they are working on that as we speak. I was just ecstatic that they already have the Leopard drivers working on both my Leopard machines already! I will be screening a HD feature with it in less than two weeks! “
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