[Mel Matsuoka]

I had a Lacie 160GB d2 drive fail on me less than 8 weeks after I purchased it. It failed (Diskwarrior and TTP 4 couldnt even save it) about 1 day before I was about to complete a major motion graphics job for Interscope Records that was already behind schedule. My fault, of course for not paranoically backing up all of my files after every day’s worth of work, but still, a disk failure after only 8 weeks of use is unacceptable.

The funny thing is, my experience is not an isolated case in my town. My colleague also had his d2 120GB fail for no apparant reason in the middle of a project. Also, the company whom I currently work for also has experienced highly unreliable perfomance from its d2 drives.

My guess is that the flakiness of Lacie drives (at least the lower cost d2 drives) has to do a lot with the fact that they use cheapie Maxtor drives, which are very notorious for being among the crappiest on the market. From what I understand, the newer Lacies are much more reliable because they use higher-end Maxtors.

But I’ve been bitten too many times by the Lacie bug to have any confidence about buying another drive from them in the future. It’s really too bad, since I love the tank-like construction of the d2 cases.

Aloha,
mel

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Tony!] “Hmm, I don’t understand your post. Why would compare the AJA Io to the BlackMagic cards if latency was an important issue to you? The Io has more latency because it uses Firewire (which has some advantages over PCI). For myself and many others pro editors the latency has been a non issue, but I understand why it could bother others. Its my opinion you should have compared the BlackMagic cards to the Kona 2 and/or Kona LS cards from AJA. Don’t get me wrong, BM has some very interesting and competitive offerings, I’m just saying, don’t slam the Io for something AJA can’t control and at the same time condemn all AJA’s products by not even mentioning them.

The Kona LS or Kona 2 with the K-Box option would have been a great choice for you based on what I know. I like that with the Kona/K-Box setup you don’t have the messy cable bundle. Additionally, Kona cards have excellent compatibility with the Io if you already have one. BlackMagic has also recently introduced some very nice breakout box like options of their own, but compare the price of those to the $299 K-Box and you’ll see that the Kona cards are very competitive with good features and quality.

AJA has also already released the updates for FCP 5/Tiger for the Kona cards. This was made possible by their very close working relationship with Apple. In fact the Kona 2 cards were the only cards used by Apple in their NAB booth and for their presentations on stage. Anyway, I’m not saying you made a bad choice with the Decklink cards because I know they have some nice capabilities and features, but I am saying that the Io the Kona cards are a very good pieces of equipment used in pro environments all over the world. For example, the Io’s and/or the Kona cards have been used heavily in an amazing number of high profile events with great success including the Superbowl, the Datona 500, the World Series and many Sundance films. Fox Sports can use just about whatever equipment they want for their high profile sporting events. They picked the AJA kona cards, Io’s and other AJA devices for a reason. I’m guessing Apple picked them for a similar reason as well.

Even with your BlackMagic choice, I hope you keep AJA in mind for your future purchases. They have some great products and are worth your consideration”

Don’t get me wrong. I love the IO and think it is absolutely wonderful for getting multi-format signals in and out of the G5. And AJA’s customer support has been among the best we have ever experienced in all our years of being in this business. I don’t need to be evangelized as to the excellence of AJA’s products and reach within the industry.

However, do not make the assumption that we just got instantly wooed by all the shiny objects (and lovely card-swiper girl) at the Blackmagic booth. We spent many HOURS going back and forth between both the AJA booth (including the smaller booth upstairs) and the BM booth. I’m certain that by the end of the show, the people at BOTH booths hated us because we had so many questions to ask. We tried to find a solution to our needs within the AJA booth. After talking to both salespeople *as well* as software/hardware engineers for both the Kona and IO product, the obvious conclusion was that the solution was not to be found in the AJA booth.

Yes, we took a very serious look at the Kona boards (in fact, I have been championing for our company trying them out, ever since we got the IO box), but our problem is that we are outfitting a new facility that has a machine room feeding THREE seperate edit suites, all of which require identical I/O routing and in-suite SDI/analog monitoring setups. Dropping a Kona board in each of the workatation probably *would* work (from a technical standpoint), but it’s WAY overkill and way too expensive for the simple problem we are trying to solve. For the cost of buying 3 IO boxes, 3 Kona boards, building an analog/SDI router and Firewire repeater system (it’s about a 50-60 foot run between each edit suite and the machine room), we could get a Blackmagic Workgroup Videohub, Multibridge and 3 Decklink Pro cards, plus have several thousand dollars left over in change.

We were just about to (painfully) plunk down $7,000 for a PESA Osselot router at the show (thinking that we were going to somehow stick with our AJA IO setup at the new facility) but the next day, our extensive demo’ing of the BM stuff just ended up sweeping all the AJA and PESA stuff off the table.

I’m not “slamming” IO or AJA. Where you got that idea escapes me. I’m just an unbiased reporter of truth, and honestly, what I saw at the BM booth totally impressed me. I cant say the same for AJA’s booth (although I really wish I could, since I’m a big fan of the company). The modularity and integration of thier product line is incredibly well thought out, and as such, they happened to have EXACTLY what we were looking for for our setup. Routing and switching SDI to the rooms (rather than long firewire runs) makes a lot of sense.

The funny thing is, the latency issue with the IO box never really bothered me 🙂 But since I mainly do motion graphics and online/finishing work, I never felt the need for the level of precision that my offline editor (who is considered the best editor in my town, so every director and agency in town uses him) demands. In fact, I recall Walter Murch (in the awesome book, “Behind the Seen”) mentioning in his notes that he also found the latency issue *very* disconcerting while editing Cold Mountain, so it’s a very real problem among discriminating editors.

[Mel Matsuoka]

While the “reduced latency” from 7 frames to 5 frames is a welcome fix, it’s unfortunately too little, too late for us 🙁

My company was on a major mission at NAB2005 to find a solution which would allow us to have low-cost uncompressed, multiformat I/O *AND* have low-latency monitoring to both SDI and analog A/V devices (for editing). After spending many hours at both the AJA and Blackmagic booths, we decided that the best, cheapest solution is to install a Blackmagic Decklink Pro PCI card, and use it’s outputs during the editing process, and ONLY use the IO for capturing and layback to tape.

Even a 5 frame delay is completely unacceptable when you are editing with a client or director, and the overwhelming consensus among nearly every vendor I’ve talked to about this issue is that it is impossible to remove this latency, so long as the interface between computer and output device is via a Firewire connection. The delay is inherent to the protocol.

We demo’ed the Decklink Pro card at the Blackmagic booth, and was absolutely flabbergasted to see that it is indeed possible to have your FCP canvas/viewer and the SDI/Analog video monitor to be in near-perfect sync. And it will play back most all of the codecs supprted by the AJA IO box.

I’m sold.