Which control surface? Mackie control universal or Tascam FW 1082

[Shane Ross]

What mixer will you be using?

I have the Tascam FW 1082 and love it. Any adjustments I make with it are reflected on the timeline. Plus it has shuttle, jog, playback control of the timeline. AND…you can map Motion behaviours to all of the knobs and sliders.

Drawbacks…needs it’s own Firewire bus. So if you have firewire drives, you will need a PCI firewire card for additional FW buses. Another issue…the additional firewire card will disable the HD capabilities of your HD capture card…iffin you have one.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Bryan Keith]

Right now I have a Decklink HD pro card. So you are saying the additional firewire card would disable HD capability? Why would that be? I also have a Mackie 1202 vlz analog mixer for monitoring. I know that I would need to keep that if I used the MCU. Would the Tascam completely eliminate my need for the mixer?

Is there any latency with the Tascam?

[Shane Ross]

Latency with the Tascam? No.

I have the Decklink HD card and it doesn’t work with a Firewire card in the computer. But, let me explain a bit further. I have a Sonnet 4+4 SATA Card in Slot 4…the top. And the Decklink in Slot 3. If I put a firewire card…ANY card really into slot 2 is slows down the bus and I can’t do HD. This is known and talked about in the Decklink forum…look my post up and see what they said.

If I put the Decklink in the Top #4 slot, and the Sonnet card in slot 3 with the Firewire card, my SATA RAID performance takes a hit. I can’t have that. So…when I offline edit and don’t need the HD capabilities…I have the firewire card in. When it is time to online, I take it out. Pain in the patoot, but what I have to do.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Bryan Keith]

Thanks for that info. The firewire issue seems a problem I might not want to worry about. I guess I’m leaning more towards the Mackie. Besides the fact that I’ll need to keep my analog mixer, is there any other drawbacks to having the Mackie control universal?

[Jean-philippe Mariani]

Should you precise that this only applies to PCI-X machines, and not PCIe G5, like the Quad G5 which is not affected with mixing all kinds of PCIe cards, if they do respect the bandwidth required (1x to 4x for most of them).

[Chris Poisson]

Brian,

I have the same mixer you have, and I’m using the Bheringer CS with it, which is USB. Plus it’s way cheaper than the other two and works great with FCP and Soundtrack Pro. FWIW.

[Chrisbook]

There is a downside to the Behringer. Any time there is a track in the timeline without any audio the corresponding motorized slider will slam down to the bottom of it’s track. The result is that the sliders are constantly banging when you are trying to concentrate. I have heard that the Mackie does not do this.

[Martin Baker]

The Mackie is the same – follows exactly what’s happening on the Audio Mixer window. I guess the Behringer faders are probably noisier than the Mackie ones though.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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[John Steventon]

I’ve got the MCU – and it’s a nice mixer to use – when FCP decides it wants to use it. I’m still on 5.02 so many FCP has improve in recent releases, but I find sometimes that FCP doesn’t want to control or be controlled by the faders (it’s more likely that it doesn’t want to be controlled – I’ll move the faders, but they’ll fight against me and not update the keyframe information.)

As long as you’re only worried about levels, then it’s ok to use. Unless I’m missing something, all the button controls on the right hand side are redundant in FCP apart from the jog control (which works nice, but I wish the scrub part would work on it).

Compared to needing to use the audio mixer window, or using the pen tool with keyframes, the MCU is a great way of leveliing audio (when it wants to) but if you full control over the audio, you need to work in conjunction the mouse – and click some menus in FCP.

Hope this helped.

John

John
Success is merely a failiure to imagine more…

G5 2.7Ghz, 4.5Gb ram, Blackmagic Decklink/multibridge, 5.6Tb Infortrend storage, FCP Studio 5.02, Makie MCU control, Yahama 5.1 surround, JVC DTV multi-format monitor, 2x23inch Apple monitors – and a partirdge on a pear tree.