I just got this mixer. My producer owns it but barely uses it, if at all. So he loaned it to me…indefinately. I might buy it. The great thing about this mixer is that it interfaces with FCP directly. Changes I make with the sliders reflect on the FCP timeline. If I raise the audio on tracks 1 & 2, the tracks on the timeline raise as well. You can do this in realtime. When playing back you adjust the levels and it does it on the fly. AND, when you playback the sliders move to reflect the timeline levels. It’s pretty freaky really…those sliders moving as my timeline plays.

OH…and another cool thing. The transport controls. You can play, FF, REW, stop, shuttle and frame advance with the controls on this mixer. AND…you can map the sliders to various controls in Motion for quick manipulation. I love this mixer. And it is darn cheap now too.

It requires a firewire connection and its own firewire bus. This is a bit of a drawback, as I have firewire 800 G-Raids on the FW800 connection, but the G5 is designed that ALL the firewire ports are on the same bus. So for me to use the mixer with my setup and to cut my show, which is stored on G-Raids, I need to add my PCI firewire card. But if I do that, then I lose the HD capabilities of my Decklink HD card…because it needs to be installed onto slot 2 or 3 (slot 1 is the AGP graphics card, and the high speed slot, slot 4, if for the Sonnet 4+4 card) and no other card can be installed in the other slot…or I lose it’s HD capabilities. GAH! So if I want to use the mixer for the offline, I have to have the card installed. When I go to uprez and color correct, I have to take the card out and lose the control interface that I so enjoy. Eh…say la vie.

Now, the “other things.”

My show, that was supposed to be done in late April, is still in post production. Two months have been added as we have major re-structuring to do. And we are in full swing in pre-production for our next show. So my producer, who was tackling the maps for this show using the Curious Map software, has handed that task to me. He brought over his G5 with the x800 graphics card and the Curious software, and I am to learn how to use it. I hear it is darn easy, for it is meant for broadcast news so it is designed to be fast and easy to configure. Heck, if my producer could do it, I can do it. So I have that to tackle. And to learn Shake for green screen work.

AND…I will be doing the color correction. So I will be investing in a Sony PVM-14L5 monitor and HD SDI card for the monitor.

Looks like I am becoming a one stop shop…a one man band that can do everything. Time to incorporate I suppose.