[Jesus Ali]

[Walter Biscardi, Jr.] We only use the breakout box on all our Konas as it’s just a lot easier and more robust than a snake of cables.

I was looking at the photos of your edit bays on your website. When you use Anthro furniture have you used their 1, 3, or 9 U rack mounts?

Thanks. Jesus.

[Jesus Ali]

Oh, Gary, the “connections” I was referring to in my original post were the component sides of the BNC Tether. I wasn’t plugging in the Tether (DVI-type) Connector or the mini BNC’s with the computer powered up. I’m not that reckless!

I was connecting the SDI In 1 to a camera and the Component BNCs to a studio monitor. That’s when I felt the tingling, as I was sorting out the BNC’s from the XLR connectors.

And that was my question about the IoHD. And subsequently, the KONA 3 breakout box.

Can those BNC connections be changed while the unit is powered up?

Thanks for music store rack mount tip. I will take a local look.

Thanks. Jesus.

[Jesus Ali]

If any of you KONA card owners have a moment, could you tell me if you are or are using the breakout box?

Any arguments pro or con would be appreciated. I’ll have to sell the school funders on the additional purchase.

Could people also recommend a nice, small, “mini rack” to put the breakout box into? Right now we don’t have a professional edit station desktop with rack mounting holes. Is anyone using something to hold the breakout box on a desktop or on top of the Mac Pro?

Any thoughts and tips would be welcomed.

Thank you. Jesus.

[Jesus Ali]

Yes Gary, I know my behavior was sketchy… 🙁

But just to be clear, if I was using the KONA 3 breakout box should I STILL power down the computer completely before changing any connections? Is that the recommended “best practice” even with the box?

Would you recommend the same caution with an IoHD box? Shutdown everything before changing any connections?

I suppose it won’t be such an issue once the edit stations are setup, I’m experimenting with different configurations now though, so I’ve been swapping things out a lot.

But if I should tell students to shutdown completely before switching anything I will.

Thanks. Jesus.

[Jesus Ali]

Hey Matt,

I don’t know this for certain, but I do know that Apple’s ProRes 422 codec requires Final Cut 6, (Studio 2.0).

Since the IoHD is SO tied to Apple ProRes 422, you would be losing the majority of its intended utility to use it when you couldn’t use ProRes 422 (FCP 5.0, Studio 1).

Also, I saw a note in the IoHD User Manual that at one point even recommended placing DVC HD PRO video into a ProRes 422 Sequence in FCP so that FCP could utilize the acceleration to live Preview your Timeline.

You may be able to use the IoHD to capture other formats into FCP, but it would offer no acceleration, so it wouldn’t serve much point, other than providing a BCN connector for SDI or HD-SDI. If that’s the case, you may as well go with the KONA which offers DVC HD PRO hardware acceleration.

Good luck. I’m sure other with more experience can endorse or correct this post more reliably. 😉

[Jesus Ali]

Somebody? Anybody? 😉

Is anybody using an additional Firewire PCI card to provide a 2nd FW bus while the IoHD uses the other?

Can anyone recommend specific brands / models that work exceptionally well / bad?

Thanks. Jesus

@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Jesus Ali

[Jesus Ali]

Thanks for all the info Jeremy. Here are some follow questions I have:

[Jesus Ali] But I have recently heard that the SD down convert is not color correcting accurate. Do others agree with this?

[Jeremy] No. I don’t agree. What exactly did you hear?

[New from Jesus Ali] Here on CreativeCow, I had just read Shane Ross’ “Ultimate Real World FCP FAQ’s -Part 2“, in specific: “Number 25: HDV External Monitor Viewing” wherein he states:

To view HDV on an external monitor you are going to need to purchase a capture card, like the ones Blackmagic or AJA offer. They will both play out HDV in real time. The catch is that you cannot view this on a regular TV or NTSC monitor. Since this is HD, an HD monitor will be needed.

HOWEVER, both cards are capable of down converting the signal so that it can be displayed on an SD monitor. This won’t be color accurate however.

[New from Jesus Ali] Did I misunderstand and perhaps the color incorrectness stems from HDV’s 4:2:0 color space and that’s why the down convert won’t be calibrated? Or do you think he’s saying that hardware down convert simply isn’t reliable for color correcting?

[Jesus Ali] “But I suppose the Kona could do the same; HD monitoring over Component, and SD over SD-SDI. What are your thoughts? “

[Jeremy] If you need analog input at all, the ioHD is for you (as long as you don’t need uncompressed). If you need to go uncompressed, then a Kona3 and a a/d converter is for you.

[New from Jesus Ali] What would the best workflow be for the Sony HC1 cameras? They shoot HDV to tape. The cameras themselves offer Component Out, but I don’t know how to transfer Timecode. We could put the HDV tapes in a HVR-M25U HDV deck, it has Component and HDMI Out, but I’m still not sure about Timecode. I know there is Convergent Design’s HD Connect boxes, but isn’t there a cheaper way to get Timecode out with the footage? The deck also has “Control S” and LANC connections.

[Jesus Ali] “Can anyone explain exactly what that means? I know that “supports” isn’t the same as “hardware accelerates!” But could IoHD users please testify to how helpful the hardware acceleration is?”

[Jeremy] With the ioHD the ProRes encoding gets done in the box itself then sent to the computer via fw800. With a Kona3, ProRes is encoded in software. No difference in quality, just in computer resources.

[New from Jesus Ali] I was understanding “hardware acceleration” as meaning that you need to render the FCP timeline less or not at all. Is that correct?

On a 10 minute FCP project with 3 layers of ProRes video, how much of a benefit is the hardware acceleration of having the IoHD connected to the computer?

If you had the same project (working in ProRes, not DVCPro HD) with a KONA 3 connected instead of the IoHD, would you be rendering and waiting dramatically longer?

This is probably a dumb question, but just to be absolutely certain, while the KONA 3 “supports” ProRes, but doesn’t accelerate it, can the KONA 3 convert the HD-SDI stream from the Canon XL H1 into ProRes 422 HQ instantaneously on the fly in realtime? or do I need the IoHD for that functionality?

I thank everyone for their expertise and continued patience.

[Jesus Ali]

The Sony HDR-HC# family of HDV cameras can kick out SD from an HDV recorded tape.

You can pull a “casual offline” edit by ingesting the SD footage and when finished editing, automatically recapture just the HDV footage you actually ended up using. That is, if your tapes have solid timecode.

This way the majority of the time your laptop is only dealing with SD footage.

Aside from that you can even go the official “OfflineRT” mode built into FCP, which makes your HDV footage 30% quality PhotoJPEG for super quick editing.

But if you get the latest Mac Pro you probably won’t even need to worry about this. You can even get around most of the slowness of editing long-gop HDV by converting to the Apple Intermediate Codec on ingest.

Word. Jesus. (I hope you are still wondering about this…)

[Jesus Ali]