mojo/nitris dx

[Michael Hancock]

I haven’t seen Bob’s post, but he was slightly mistaken (never thought I’d get to write that!).

The NitrisDX box has hardware that captures your HD material into the DNxHD codec so you don’t have to transcode thin raster HD after you capture. This helps realtime playback, converts thin raster to full raster, and cuts down on the amount of time you spend converting your footage to a simliar codec. It also upscales your thin raster to full raster on playback, I believe.

NitrisDX does have more I/O than MojoDX–it’s all digital SD and HD, as well as analogue. MojoDX is HD and SD digital only. In addition, NitrisDX can has an input for HD and SD over SDI both, whereas MojoDX is HD or SD over the same SDI port (if I remember right). If you’re feeding both, you’ll want a patch bay, but I could be mistaken here.

From what I understand, and what I’ve seen in a demo, NitrisDX doesn’t have effect acceleration. Perhaps it will handle the thin to full raster conversions so it takes that load off the CPU, which lets the CPU and GPU process effects faster, but there is no integrated hardware to playback effects in realtime (unlike the old Symphony Meridien systems that had the Ultimatte hardware chip to play back keys realtime).

Otherwise, it’s an I/O with hardware based transcoding power. If you’re working all file based and don’t capture your material, though, you won’t see much benefit from it. Capture your HD material over SDI and you will.

Michael.

[Rob Alexander]

Thanks Michael,

so Nitris DX is essentially doing the same thing as Io HD for FCP except it connects vie PCIe. They’re still charging an awful lot then aren’t they!

Could you explain the difference between thin raster and full raster? Presumably without the hardware processing it’s the CPU which does this?

Thanks,

Rob