I believe that many fellow FCP editors who are keen about post technology have been hearing a lot about this IOHD by AJA & the ProRES 422 codec, and if you have been keen to buy one unit, I'm sure you'd have tonnes of questions like I did.
To make things worse, if you didn't know about the other competiting product by MOTU, called the V3HD, you probably won't be in a dilemma and would straight away chose IOHD for your applications.
Being a very very new product, no one could tell me about the typical issues or bugs with the unit until my own unit finally came in.
In this brief review, I won't go thru all the details that you can find online and on the other forums, but first of all, as a brief intro, the IOHD is a I/O box like the other series of PCI based I/O products like KONA series or Blackmagic series of capture cards.
It allows input from HDMI, SDI, HDSDI, Component, Composite, & S-video to be captured into your HDD via a single FW800 pipeline with Final Cut Studio 2. (Along the same idea like Avid Mojo but you will not be too restricted to hardware limited resolution.)
- SD Codecs available are the typical AJA ingest capability from 10bit, 8bit, DV25, DV50 & DVCPro. PLUS additional feature of Prores & Prores HQ codecs which amazingly preserves quality at minimal HDD space!
- I've done ingesting tests with my J30 digital beta player via SDI output to capture into 10bit uncompressed and ProResHQ, and other than a bit of loss in color saturation (monitored via FCP's vectorscope), picture integrity remains solid. (In fact, i think the prores processing codec automatically clams in the video input down to broadcast safe levels? Hmm...)
This is a format that I'd definitely use for my mobile editing solution without big scarifice to image quality. In my opinion, the prores HQ codec beats the DVCPro capturing hands-down especially when it comes to having to re-render color corrections where you'll start to introduce picture noise.
- Now for the HD codecs, this is where the IOHD bottlenecks are at, but I'm happy with it because of the nature of my setup for mobility requirements. For all the supported HD formats from 720p to 1080i, the IOHD is limited to capturing via it's Prores or ProResHD codecs.
With test footage from HDV & other test footage from the RED camera, the Prores codec gives a very decent quality output considering the file size savings.
Good enough for HDCAM playouts for TV applications because final HDTV broadcast streams are MPEG4 based anyways! And for now, probably 70% of the local HD channel you are watching are upconverted from SD anyway...duh...
- Talking about upconverting functions. IOHD performs up & down conversions very decently. It also does pulldowns as well, but I have no footage to test it with.
- The IOHD's biggest benefit for me with my mobile editing setup is for HDV post. I can now move away from pain of editing natively in mpeg2, long-gop HDV format which will be f^%^%ing painful for playing out with accurate monitoring. No more long waits for 'CONFORMING' timelines too.
For any doubts on system requirements, I run my FCS2 mobile edit suite with the IOHD on a Core2duo 2.33ghz Macbook Pro smoothly without a single hitch, capturing up to Uncompressed SD 10bit on raided FW800 drives. Looking forward to have opportunity to playout HDV or Prores HD materials to HDCAM for a short film soon.
Other than my post production services, I can be hired for post production system setup consultation, installation, training and troubleshooting.
Regards,
Dixon Liw
Broadcast Editor/Consultant
BA. (Hon) Recording Arts (UK)
Dip. Film, Sound & Video (SG)
Mobile: +65 96350447
To make things worse, if you didn't know about the other competiting product by MOTU, called the V3HD, you probably won't be in a dilemma and would straight away chose IOHD for your applications.
Being a very very new product, no one could tell me about the typical issues or bugs with the unit until my own unit finally came in.
In this brief review, I won't go thru all the details that you can find online and on the other forums, but first of all, as a brief intro, the IOHD is a I/O box like the other series of PCI based I/O products like KONA series or Blackmagic series of capture cards.
It allows input from HDMI, SDI, HDSDI, Component, Composite, & S-video to be captured into your HDD via a single FW800 pipeline with Final Cut Studio 2. (Along the same idea like Avid Mojo but you will not be too restricted to hardware limited resolution.)
- SD Codecs available are the typical AJA ingest capability from 10bit, 8bit, DV25, DV50 & DVCPro. PLUS additional feature of Prores & Prores HQ codecs which amazingly preserves quality at minimal HDD space!
- I've done ingesting tests with my J30 digital beta player via SDI output to capture into 10bit uncompressed and ProResHQ, and other than a bit of loss in color saturation (monitored via FCP's vectorscope), picture integrity remains solid. (In fact, i think the prores processing codec automatically clams in the video input down to broadcast safe levels? Hmm...)
This is a format that I'd definitely use for my mobile editing solution without big scarifice to image quality. In my opinion, the prores HQ codec beats the DVCPro capturing hands-down especially when it comes to having to re-render color corrections where you'll start to introduce picture noise.
- Now for the HD codecs, this is where the IOHD bottlenecks are at, but I'm happy with it because of the nature of my setup for mobility requirements. For all the supported HD formats from 720p to 1080i, the IOHD is limited to capturing via it's Prores or ProResHD codecs.
With test footage from HDV & other test footage from the RED camera, the Prores codec gives a very decent quality output considering the file size savings.
Good enough for HDCAM playouts for TV applications because final HDTV broadcast streams are MPEG4 based anyways! And for now, probably 70% of the local HD channel you are watching are upconverted from SD anyway...duh...
- Talking about upconverting functions. IOHD performs up & down conversions very decently. It also does pulldowns as well, but I have no footage to test it with.
- The IOHD's biggest benefit for me with my mobile editing setup is for HDV post. I can now move away from pain of editing natively in mpeg2, long-gop HDV format which will be f^%^%ing painful for playing out with accurate monitoring. No more long waits for 'CONFORMING' timelines too.
For any doubts on system requirements, I run my FCS2 mobile edit suite with the IOHD on a Core2duo 2.33ghz Macbook Pro smoothly without a single hitch, capturing up to Uncompressed SD 10bit on raided FW800 drives. Looking forward to have opportunity to playout HDV or Prores HD materials to HDCAM for a short film soon.
Other than my post production services, I can be hired for post production system setup consultation, installation, training and troubleshooting.
Regards,
Dixon Liw
Broadcast Editor/Consultant
BA. (Hon) Recording Arts (UK)
Dip. Film, Sound & Video (SG)
Mobile: +65 96350447
