Little Frog in High Def

Frankly after my recent experience of dealing with the MXO2, I’d have a hard time recommending it. We found a repeatable bug where we got audio drop-outs through the SDI output, and after fighting to get a replacement unit in under deadline (which was difficult since they’re canada based) we found the same bug again, across multiple units, which made this set of layoffs nearly impossible.

After an incredibly difficult few days, we decided that it was easier to install the Kona 3 that was previously used by the house and figure out how to export Closed Captioning data with that. It’s not as intuitive and keeps you from being able to insert edit, but we got there.

After we were done with this issue the tech guys at Matrox got back to us and found that they repeated the bug themselves on their own hardware, so it was across all units, but somehow no one found it before.

We went with the MXO2 for the really neat way they handle Closed Captioning (and allow you to cross convert & do captions at the same time), and the laptop compatibility, but the problems we encountered made me very wary of matrox products if such a huge bug could have gone through and been unnoticed. I’ll stick to the Blackmagic & AJA video in the future.

I hope that their QA department gets better, because I like the idea of their products, but I do not have time to be their bug catcher. Even if I just got unlucky and this bug only appeared in that specific firmware/software, I find it hard to step away from products where I’ve never encountered such serious issues.

No I’m in the US (NYC), and I’ve gotten great support from AJA & BMD in the past, but with Matrox, it took the producer while on the phone trying to get things resolved to even attempt to make deadline. A major constraint was apparently the delay to get something through customs (they’re in canada).

To be fair, the tech support at Matrox very responsive, they were obviously working hard on the issue and tried their best to resolve it, but at the end of the day it was a problem that was in the software or the firmware, and the tech support guys couldn’t immediately fix this problem.

The issue we had wasn’t related to CC. It was with software version 2.7 or 2.8 I think? And it was dropping just a frame of audio every 3-15 minutes causing an audio pop with just SDI embedded audio output (other audio outputs were aparently ok). The insane part was getting to the part where we discovered that it was a bug in with the Matrox MXO2 in general, not just our unit, and that it was doing this on all layoffs, with intermittent frequency which made incredibly hard to troubleshoot.

That’s not a problem you usually associate with a software bug, we weren’t even sure that we just hadn’t got 2 bad units in a row until the Matrox’s tech support confirmed it was happening on his end with his unit. Which means that any tape layed off with that software that used SDI audio potentially had audio dropouts. How that didn’t get tested or checked was the biggest gripe I had, because it’s something that isn’t that esoteric.

I was on color back when it was Final Touch, so I’m well versed in being the bug catcher, and finding work around and solutions. And if my clients can afford it, I always lean towards AJA video, but some of those BMD cards are so cheap, and work really well.