[Ed Dooley]

Bob,
Just because you don’t like FW for ingest doesn’t make it non-professional. I was referring to HDV FW ingest (so the ingest part is taken care of) and using the MXO for all the things I listed (that’s what it was designed for). And lots of professionals use it (the moderator of the FCP-L list that you just joined, Frank Capria, for one, Shane Ross, one of the moderators of the FCP forum here on the COW, is another of the many pros that use it).
I’m not advocating one over the other (I’m about to buy, and I can’t decide yet myself) just mentioning *all* the options rather than saying “you need to buy the IO HD”. As for the other AJA and Blackmagic products, I did mention the companies had alternatives. I’m not 100% sure of this, but the “magic” of the MXO is that it does blue-only for monitor calibration. I don’t think the others you mentioned do (I hope I’m wrong on that because I would really like this feature). Sure you can work around it, or sure you can use a CRT or expensive pro-series LCD with it, but if you’re using a Dell (as you suggested) I’d sure like something with blue-only for that calibration because the Dell doesn’t come with it by itself.
The irony here for me is that, technically, you could call the IO HD a FW ingest device (but I’m sure you wouldn’t agree because you hate those!). 🙂
Ed

[Bob Zelin] “Hi Ed –
you write –
the Matrox MXO has been getting a lot of press for HDV FW ingest projects

REPLY – I am not sure what you were refering to, but the Matrox MXO is an output device for a MAC with a DVI port. I do not encourange anyone to capture via firewire, even when using HDV, as there are countless better alternatives – and the I/O HD is just one of them, as well as other products from AJA and Blackmagic. If he does not have the money for the I/O HD, he can get an AJA Kona LHe, which will also give him a Y Pb Pr HD output to hookup to any inexpensive HD montitor including the DELL that I mentioned, instead of spending $1000 just for a Matrox output device. When you write –
“it calibrates your good quality LCD monitor for use as an HD video monitor ” – this is not magic, and the exact same results can be obtained from any AJA or Blackmagic product. All in all the AJA I/O HD, AJA Kona LHe or Blackmagic product is a MUCH BETTER INVESTMENT. Stop this nonsense with HDV firewire capture – this man is a professional, and needs to use his tools in a professional manner.

Bob Zelin

FROM THE MATROX WEB SITE –

Matrox MXO is a versatile, all-in-one monitoring, output, and scan conversion device for the Mac that you?ll use in many different ways. Because it?s small and portable, it makes your laptop a mobile editor. And because it?s hot swappable, you can easily move it to any workstation in your facility.

Matrox MXO is ideal for:

? Inexpensive HD monitoring
? Frame-accurate, broadcast-quality HD/SD output
? Genlockable HD/SD scan conversion for flicker-free
video output of your computer desktop”

[Ed Dooley]

Just a wild guess here, Bob, but I don’t think the “3 x 250GB 7200” RPM HDDs he mentioned are all some raided boot drive. Two of them probably *are* for media storage. 🙂

As for “needing” the IO HD, Leon, it seems like a useful tool (check out Tim Wilson’s compilation of posts from many forums about it- do a search of articles, or it’s mentioned today or yesterday in the FCP forum), but there are a few options for FCP and HDV (AJA has more, Blackmagic has some). Although I’ve been reading about recent driver issues with it, the Matrox MXO has been getting a lot of press for HDV FW ingest projects. It connects by FW so it can be used on different machines (like the IO HD), it calibrates your good quality LCD monitor for use as an HD video monitor (the IO HD allows you to monitor too, but I don’t know if has, or will have calibration tools), and has output features (you’ll have to compare with the IO HD to see if it has enough for you- the IO HD definitely wins for output options, but you may not need them all).
Ed

[Bob Zelin] “You need the AJA IO HD”
“You need storage – I have no idea of what resolution you want to use, but you certainly can’t use the internal hard drive of your computer.”

[Ed Dooley]

Just thought I’d roll credits on this one:

A jujuelliot Production

Executive Produder- JeremyG
Producer- Shane Ross
Director- Rafalaos
Best Boy- Mortimer Heathcliff
Gaffer- Lightning Ad (seemed so obvious)
Co-Executive Producer- David Roth Weiss
Curmudgeon- Ed Dooley
Grip- Thax

No FCP users were harmed during this production.

[Ed Dooley]

Ah, now who’s assuming too much? For more than half the world it should read,
“Where some guy who may or may not have been named Jesus, may or may not have been crucified” 🙂
BTW, David, you beat me to the punch, the guy (who should really be on the calf, based on all his posts I’ve read, should be polite enough to either *not* say “emergency, emergency!!!”, or respond in a timely manner, at least with a thank-you, to all the people who tried to help him with his “emergency”.
Ed

[mortimer heathcliff] “yes, i do understand. ying-yang, karma, the golden rule…

and by the way, it’s “cavalry”…”Calvary”* is where Jesus was crucified

: )”

[Ed Dooley]

My insight is to do a search. Just yesterday there was a long thread about whether to use ProRes422 or native HDV for editing. There’s even a couple of links to very useful information, including Tim Wilson’s compilation of the collective COW wisdom.
ProRes 422 or HDV For Editing is the title of the thread I think (it was just yesterday)
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Barefeats did a test recently:
https://www.barefeats.com/rosa05.html

Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Here’s an article by Tim Wilson of the Cow, putting together a lot of opinions about this workflow. The collected wisdom of the Cow is capture, and edit in HDV, and render out to ProRes (unless you’re doing a lot of Color, then the story changes). You don’t metion if you have a capture card, but if you don’t you can’t capture to ProRes. You *can* capture to HDV, then change to a ProRes timeline. But read the article, it endorses the “capture and edit in HDV” school.
Ed

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=35&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/wilson_tim/ProRes02/index.html

Here’s another thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/944791?

[Ed Dooley]

The advice I’ve read, here and elsewhere, from people I respect is, if you’re capturing
HDV material, edit in HDV, lay-off to ProRes 422.
Do a search here and the AJA IO forumand you’ll find plenty of discussion.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

I just heard Beta, Gary, not Digi-Beta, and if it’s Beta-SP then I beg to differ. 10bit doesn’t gain you *any* quality over 8bit with Beta-SP.
Now, if you’re talking about adding graphics, etc. over Beta in a timeline (which we weren’t) you get better quality in the end with the graphics, but not in the Beta itself.
Ed

“[Ed Dooley] “So the very best quality you can get is UC 8Bit from Beta (DVCPro50 is a good 2nd choice).”

[gary adcock]
the best you can get is 10bit uncompressed from Dbeta or any other tape based format”

[Ed Dooley]

My point is, that although it would be great if you could digitize to DVCProHD, you said yourself you couldn’t find anyone that had a system with that codec to digitize it for you. So the very best quality you can get is UC 8Bit from Beta (DVCPro50 is a good 2nd choice). Once you capture it you can convert it to many codecs. UC is the best you can get. And if I remember correctly, this is the FCP forum, which implies that you’re using FCP (meaning Mac, not PC). It’s a logical assumption to think you’re on a Mac if you’re using this forum.
Good luck,
Ed