HD For Indies

Reader Robert Ashe sent this in:



- The AJA IO HD is NOT an accelerator of any kind nor will they ever claim to be (cough cough Avid)
- Can be used as a converter as long as it is hooked up to a computer (a future version will allow it to be flashed into a setting, and then disconnected, keeping the setting intact)
- You cannot (as it stands now) have both a AJA IO HD and a kona card running simultaneously on the same system. They suggest doing a dual boot partition (Leopard may change this)
- If you add Virtual VTR to the mix you "probably" could use your system as a slave (they haven't tested it)
- It is designed for pro res PERIOD.
- If your machine is fast enough however it will support play out of anything from dvcpro hd to uncompressed
- There is a solid one frame video delay for digitizing (not surprising)
- Just like the adrenaline the IO HD dominates the firewire box, you MUST install a pci-e or pci-x firewire card for other devices.
- AC Power supply (this is nice, in case you lose the supply)
- Supports video output in the usual applications, however in color, it CURRENTLY only supports SD...for now.
- No Look up table support. Kona 3 will remain the "film" card
- Purely designed for broadcast television
- Has same chip set for the FS-1 as far as up-conversions and cross conversions which look really great.
- Does NOT convert frame rates, it works in hertz so that will be very tricky for 720p 60 (wasn't clear about this part) Seems like it may have the same problems with 59.94 and 60p shows that the adrenaline has
- Will not overheat, they've done all the testing, the thing is gold
- Does have LTC input but some changes will have to be made in quicktime to accommodate
- Ready to ship, just waiting for green light from apple
- 1/2 Rack size, same size as HVR-1500. They WILL sell a rack for it later, other wise the sony rack for half rack decks "should" work
- Any speculation with redcode compatibility is currently only speculation

So I pretty much think that this one is almost completely on par with the adrenaline (only missing a 35mbit pro res) and it's about 1/6.5 the price. Pretty much a no brainer for any small shop or film.



Thanks Robert!

Mike's Comments: For field usage and broadcast work, this is a very useful and capable box, FOR CERTAIN APPLICATIONS. For those looking to have a portable converter, a field capture device, a field ingest device to work with a laptop, etc, this thing is GOLDEN.

For those looking to work with Color as well as possible, or get maximum performance, or do LUTs, or 4:4:4 work, or uncompressed HD, this is not the ideal tool.

But it is a GREAT tool to have in the arsenal from what I've heard so far.

As Robert alluded, Apple (with the ProRes codec) and AJA (with the IO HD) have taken solid aim at Avid's DNxHD codec and Adrenaline hardware - and come up with a winner in terms of bang for the buck.

Avid still has some well liked options in terms of software features, but in terms of high quality ingest and export and realtime mixing of formats and codecs, the price performance winner is looking strongly like Apple on this one.

Further emails - Rob suggested that Apple needs an equivalent to DNxHD 36 - a low bandwidth, full raster codec for offline HD editing. I agree! But that's a relatively easy addition that can be done at pretty much anytime they want. They COULD include it in a .0x update, or wait for marketing reasons to roll it into next NAB's version, whatever that may be.

On my wishlist: GPU acceleration for format mixing, better frame rate conversion done in GPU (3:2 pulldown not repeating 4th frame please!), cleaner Compressor functionality, bug fixes, better EDL/XML interaction & integration with Color, DVD SP Blu-ray support (and the drives to go with it!), etc. Personally, I don't care as much whether they support HD DVD or Blu-ray or both, as long as it is soon. Well yeah, I do care - Blu-ray seems to be taking the lead, although slowed by the recent Paramount buy-out/buy-off. Hate to see Apple back the wrong horse exclusively. Although they seem well set to handle both. The hat trick would be to offer a combo burner - burns CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray. Pricey, but would RAWK.

-mike

Labels: AJA, FCP, Final Cut, hardware, Mac, NLE, software