ProRes acquisition?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Jerry Hofmann] ”
I don’t understand the elation… if you buy the magama and then buy a Kona 3, wouldn’t it be more expensive than an Io HD in the first place? Course, if you already own a Kona 3, I can see where it might be cheaper, but it would also involve tearing apart your system to work with it…. 3 days down with the ‘home’ system would cost more than an Io HD… So even that scenario doesn’t really make sense.”

I have to agree here. The $769 you pay for the Magma box would be in addition to the cost of a Kona card whereas you pay once for an external box that does it all. You still would not be able to capture uncompressed HD to a laptop so I’m not sure what you’re gaining. And I could never encourage someone to keep pulling a PCIe card out of a machine for field use and then putting it back in to their desktop. You’re just asking for trouble and at some point the card will fail. They’re not “portable” in the sense of moving from machine to machine all the time.

If this will be permanently portable setup, then the Io HD makes more sense than a Magma. Just my 2 cents.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

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

[Jerry Hofmann]

I”m not sure you’ll ever see one… Pro Res is an editing only format for now anyway, and if Apple doesn’t sell the technology to a camera manufacturer it’s never going to happen. Hey, shoot whatever you want and buy an Io HD… That’s the solution that makes the most sense to me for now… hey, not everyone would be shooiting Pro Res even if it became an aquisition format. The Io HD would allow you to capture from any source except dual link 4:4:4 to the new codec. From what I saw at NAB, Pro Res is going to be the preferred workflow by 99% of the work out there. SD or HD. Saves so much money on drive space/speed that it doesn’t make sense to use uncompressed video at all for almost every project out there.

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

[Ben Holmes]

Both vaild points. We have a number of systems, a couple of which will mostly remain at base for backup/support purposes. The idea of getting more use out of the Kona LH’s in them for SD use appeals to me – maybe using my laptop as a capture station.

Not really a serious consideration at the moment, as we have just built a $1 million truck with two Octo-core Macs in – so that’s mostly what we go on the road with….

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd

EVS & FCP specialists for live broadcast.

OB Server 1 HD – Mobile FCP editing done right.

[Sean Oneil]

[Jerry Hofmann] “I don’t understand the elation… if you buy the magama and then buy a Kona 3, wouldn’t it be more expensive than an Io HD in the first place? Course, if you already own a Kona 3, I can see where it might be cheaper, but it would also involve tearing apart your system to work with it…. 3 days down with the ‘home’ system would cost more than an Io HD… So even that scenario doesn’t really make sense.

I’d rather go with the Io and forget tearing apart a system, and thus keeping it from working while you shoot etc… Let alone the possibility of frying a card moving it back and forth. Not only that, the io HD will releave the CPU from doing the compression to Pro Res… I’m not sure that a laptop can manage the compression on the fly by itself… at NAB we were told that it would only work with intel macs, and Apple hasn’t posted any minimum spec on capturing to pro res… it’s nowhere to be seen on the specs page of Studio 2… I think we’ll have to stay tuned for that one.”

Well I agree, I certainly wouldn’t recommend pulling a card in and out constantly. That’s an enormous waste of time.

But I totally disagree with your economics. First of all, a Kona 3 is complete overkill. You don’t need it’s advanced features or it’s extra connectors if all you’re doing with it is capturing. You can get a Kona LHE or Decklink HD between $1000-$1500.

So this would cost $1800-$2300. The IO HD costs $3500.

I’m not trying to tell people not to get an IO. I know you guys have relations with AJA. But this is an alternative way capture ProRes on a laptop and there is no reason why it wouldn’t work just as well. The fact that it’s lighter and less expensive might be important to some people.

Sean

[Walter Biscardi]

[Sean ONeil] “But I totally disagree with your economics. First of all, a Kona 3 is complete overkill. You don’t need it’s advanced features or it’s extra connectors if all you’re doing with it is capturing. You can get a Kona LHE or Decklink HD between $1000-$1500.”

In day to day capturing I upconvert and cross-convert all the time. The Kona 3 does this in real-time so for our Post Production workflow, it’s not overkill by any means. In fact, if you’re in a true HD Post environment, all the extra features of the Kona 3 or Io HD are a must.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

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

[Sean Oneil]

[walter biscardi] “In day to day capturing I upconvert and cross-convert all the time. The Kona 3 does this in real-time so for our Post Production workflow, it’s not overkill by any means. In fact, if you’re in a true HD Post environment, all the extra features of the Kona 3 or Io HD are a must.”

I’m just talking about being in the field. To anyone who doesn’t do conversions in the field, it is overkill. To those who do, then perhaps the IO is the best choice.

[Jerry Hofmann]

Well, it costs no more than a Kona 3 and kbox… plus it doesn’t take up a slot, And it lifts the heavy lifting of the compression and decompression from your CPU, because the pro res codec is on board the io (only box or card in the world right now that does this)… It remains to be seen I think where the cutoff for capturing to a Mac with just a capture card will fall… it may not work on single G5’s for example… we don’t know yet… So it would require an Io to capture to pro res if your computer ends up not being fast enough to do the compression during capture.

You very well might get more realtime streams of video with it because using the Io HD, You’d not be using your CPU for the decompression for monitoring externally with Pro Res…

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

[Steve Braker]

Those are great points, Jerry.

Allow me to demonstrate my ignorance:

If playback decompression is happening on the outboard Io, what happens to all that RT playback processing? Doesn’t it all get decompressed in the Mac, tweaked and mushed together, then recompressed to go out to the Io, then decompressed again for the display?

Or do we think FCP knows how to do all this natively in ProRes?

I admit I have no idea how this all works with e.g. an all-DV system.