HD For Indies

...so folks have been emailing and asking What To Buy lately. Most are looking to buy a system for a particular project, but I've been starting to think about what I want to buy and use going forward a year or two from now.

I like the idea of BlackMagic's soon-to-be-shipped Multibridge Extreme & Multibridge Studio - they are essentially an SD/HD capture card, HD/SD up/downconverter, HD-SDI-DVI converter all in one rackmount box that connects to your computer by a small, inexpensive PCI Express or PCI-X card that is simply a plug with no brains or guts (or minimal) on the card - all the real smarts live in the rackmount box. This is great for a number of reasons, including:

1.) You can upgrade from PCI-X to PCI Express by merely replacing the little stub card, not an expensive capture card

2.) If you want to be able to hook it up to another machine, you only need a second stub card (or whatever nice name they have for it is), and you can disconnect/reconnect a cable (don't know if it's hot or live swap capable thought) rather than having to open up two computers to deinstall/install cards. One minute changeover instead of 20 minute changeover. Want to be able to use it on any of 1, 2, 5, or 10 machines? Just buy more cheap stubs and keep the computers in cabling reach.

Since they are already promoting it as Mac and PC compatible, I'm pretty certain it should work in Apple's Intel based PowerMacs that will ship in 2007. Long life indeed!

Then I worried (because I do that a lot) that some cards purchased for G5 PowerMacs might not work in Intel based PowerMacs. I don't think there will be a hardware problem there - there are cards that work unmodified in Macs & Windows PCs already today, such as BlackMagic's video capture cards. The bigger challenge is whether the manufacturers will provide MacIntel drivers, and at what cost. This is a big maybe - I've had not one, but TWO multi-hundred dollar SCSI cards get orphaned because someone (Adaptec) didn't want to make drivers for the new version of the operating system.

This happens with products like printers and scanners all the time - new OS comes out, and they don't make a driver for their three year old printer. One would HOPE standards for $500-$2500 cards would be different from $50-$300 office grade computer equipment, but no promises.

Anyway, the point of all this is:

1.) bus agnostic devices (PCI-X or PCI Express) sound like a good idea, and all other things being equal, are probably a better idea than a card that only works on one type of bus.

2.) some cards will work on MacIntels in the future, provided the manufacturers make drivers for'em, so that'll be a good migration path too.

Also, been chatting with some folks about Final Touch HD - it isn't really real time, especially out the HD-SDI port. But when new Macs (G5 or Intel) ship with PCI Express (hopefully within a year), this situation should dramatically improve. Whether that will allow for the holy grail of 1080p24 RGB 4:4:4 footage displaying color corrected in real time out of dual link HD-SDI ports remains to be seen, and probably the developer doesn't even know for sure if that'll be possible (since that'll depend on unannounced PCI Express based HD-SDI cards that I haven't heard even rumors about yet). BUT it is a faster overall solution than Final Cut Pro for high quality color correction.

-mike