[Heath Firestone]

I don’t know if this is related, but I had one replication house tell me that a disk I burned with Encore failed their test because it was set up for multiple sessions and wasn’t finalized. Of course this is not true, as it wouldn’t play back in set top players if it wasn’t finalized, but to avoid that problem with them in the future, instead, I always export to a folder. Then with Nero, or Toast, I create a Video DVD, and select the contents of the folders Encore created into their respective locations using Nero or Toast. Here at least I can make sure it is set as single session and finalized, and I don’t get complaints from this particular replicator. I have not had any issues like this with other replicators, though.

There are some people who believe you should never actually do the burn for a disk that is going to replication, within the DVD authoring application, and that you should always export to a folder and burn with an actual burning program. I don’t know if I agree with this, but I thought I’d mention how to do this at least.

[Heath Firestone]

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