Little Frog in High Def

Just saw this in London. It has two extra XLRs for audio I/O.

Why would they put the power on the front? If it is going into a rack, but the power in the back so you don’t have cords draped all over it…

Was wondering if you have had a chance to test the MXO2 for color grading compared to the MXO? Would love to hear your impressions.

You can mount it with the connectors facing the front (weird) or the back (normal). Looks like they just put the mounts toward the front so you could see immediately that it was rack mountable and see all the I/O connections.

I don't understand why you'd prefer to do the computing in your machine, instead of in the outboard unit?

AJA IoHD FireWire-800 Analog/Digital Capture Device with Apple ProRes 422

grep that on B&H & see that the price isn't that far off, and it converts to ProRes 422 *inside itself*, so you can use a notebook to ingest ProRes 422 HQ *realtime*, unlike the Matrox unit…

I'd epoxy the thing into a rack case ( iStarusa.com makes aluminum ones, they're light …
http://istarusa.com/search.aspx?s=aluminum%2brack
bloody idiocy: you have to search, because they don’t let you browse by differentiating factor! ), if that was required, since I’m caring more for capability, than for being a product brochure, but that’s just me.

( and yeah, it’d look dumb, but it’d still rock! :)

Also, by using Firewire, your ExpressCard slot is still free, for an eSATA card, ferinstance, if you like using RAID1s of 2TB drives for hauling tons of footage…

Cheerses,

-me

Me…

IT is all about choice and options. It is good to have lots of options out on the market, and not have your choice limited. Plus competition spurs innovation.

The AJA I/O HD is a great box, and does very well on a tower and MacBook Pro. Built in ProRes encoder is great. But what about people who don’t want PRO RES, but rather would like the option for UNCOMPRESSED on their tower? And want to use the unit for compressed HD formats on the laptop, like DVCPRO HD? And they can’t afford the I/O HD. Then they have the MXO 2 and the MOTU V4HD to look at.

Not everyone needs ProRes on their laptop. But if they do…they have a choice.

Houdini…I haven’t had the chance to put them head to head. That means that I’d have to bring my tower into the house and the Cinema Display and set them up next to my TV, and then get the laptop and MXO 2 in here and wires going to hard drives and wall sockets.

And my wife would be glaring at me.

It looks good. They both look good. I am not set up to do a side by side comparison. Wish I was.

shane: Sounds good. Out of curiousity, what model TV are you using to monitor the MXO2?

Panasonic Professional Plasma. 720p monitor…forget the model. TH9uk or something like that. Good monitor.

Sorry, I obviously was muddy…

According to Matrox, the Matrox unit *cannot* give you HD on a notebook..

*that* is why I was thinking it'd be saner to go with the AJA.

As for uncompressed on the tower, BlackMagic Intensity, though you might need to ingest in MS-Windows to have the cards work with your framerate/format, from what was mentioned on That Post Show…

It was simply that according to Matrox, the Matrox *requires* a tower to give you HD, & *cannot* give you that on a notebook, whereas the AJA isn't so crippled.

( Marines Rule: any investment is an investment in CAPABILITY, not a spending-money.

If it doesn't give you outright capability, there's something rong with the plan.

"Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines", by David H. Freedman, senior Forbes editor.

*Excellent* book to live-by, btw: one of the principles is that whatever you focus-on, you grow.

Someone just got 1 thing right, and 30 things rong, on their expedition?

Focus on what they got right: the rest was simply them pushing themselves outside of their habit/comfort-zone, and learning.

If instead, one concentrates on what was got rong, *that* gets reinforced, and long term they get entrenched in limitation in capability/life.

Brilliant & true: the Aussies beat the English in rugby for a couple of DECADES or so, because of that simple cultural-difference.

Results are good evidence. :)

Cheers,

-me

Matrox said that you cannot get ProRes on a laptop, due to the processor requirements. And you cannot get uncompressed due to the drive requirements (FW800 won’t cut it). But you most certainly can get DVCPRO HD, and that is a very acceptable format…for offline and online purposes.