[Tim Phillips]

Thanks for the responses fellas. Please allow me to add a wrinkle.

Shane, I was intrigued with your idea of having an SD setup and an HD setup, then I quickly remembered that my reason for upgrading to a new system was the suddenly quick march to death of my G5. I don\’t think I can trust it anymore, which is why I\’m upgrading to a new system when it\’s not a great idea financially.

Anyways… I posted this question over the weekend and Matrox support returned a voicemail this morning that I\’d left on Friday asking the same question. Matrox tech support said I\’d be just fine using the MXO2 mini and the AJA io on the same system. They say they have systems like that in their support area (to keep up with the competition) and they play together just fine. I just have to power off the machine I\’m not currently using.

Oh the humanity. I\’d love to save $500 but I don\’t want to hose myself.

[Tim Phillips]

Hi

I have an Avid Xpress Elite that I upgraded to OSX about two years ago. I’m currently running version 5.8 on a 933 G4. I have a Meridian 2 card so that was the fastest machine I could use when I left my 533 G4.

I also wanted to switch to OSX in a bad way. The color correction in 5.8 is very nice and to be able to use the nice X features like idvd using only Quicktime reference movies was even nicer.

But alas, it hasn’t been all great. 5.8 and my Medea drives never got along at all. For the past two years I’ve had major kernal panic crashes every 4 or 5 times I’d try and digitize. Avid tech support and Medea both blamed each other. I finally gave up after 6 months or so and now I just adjust my work flow to minimize any damage that the crashes might do. I’m stuck on OS 10.2.6 while the rest of the Apple world is on 10.4 because Avid and Apple can’t get along. And because I refuse to pay $2,000 a year for 10 phone calls I don’t get the software upgrades that come along with tech support. I’ve had version 6 of the Xpress software sitting on my desktop for the past year, ready to be upgraded, but not daring to because I don’t know what further damage it might do to my system. I read that it was very buggy and caused bins to dissapear randomly.

So there ya go. If the situation is right for you, I’d upgrade, as long as you have Avid drives. Just beware that you’re only slightly prolonging the death or your system. I myself am one big client check away, which should be here in the next month, from switching to Final Cut Pro. I always said that I’d give up my Avid before I’d give up my Mac, and after 10 years on various Avids, that’s what I’m doing.

Tim

[Tim Phillips]

Will the Firmtek SATA card and enclosure allow for 10bit uncompressed using an AJA I/O box? Especially when using two exclosures striped together?

Tim