Hi to all,

I am a sony vegas pro user that looking for a real time software alternative.
Media composer is one of my option but wanted to know what will be the min investment for the hardware, $$ wise.
I saw on line that they sale it with hardware that cost over $4000.00, but I was not sure if this is the only option I have.

Mojo is the cheapest hardware support from Avid.

I don't really know what you mean by a 'real time' alternative though - real time what?

Real time editing and playback of most normal intermediate formats can be done by pretty much any off the shelf computer.

Real time effects are completely dependent on the complexity of the effects.

Real time upressing/down scaling is generally a hardware function.

What exactly do you require that is 'REAL TIME'? Real time everything, including uncompressed or many simultaneous streams (e.g 10+ videos playing at once), in an HD world, means looking at a turn key solution in the Hundreds of Thousands of dollars plus range.

Mojo should be fine for you. You can find an analog mojo on ebay for a couple of hundred dollars. Just make sure it has the I/O you need (the old ones came in Digital only or Analog- component [thru a goofy cable], y/c or composite). I have an analog mojo for one of my Avids and it works fine to get me to component outputs.

You probably don't need the mojo hardware at all unless you have the need of analog inputs. Just go with the Media Composer software.

What is it that you are trying to achieve?

I agree with Vito... many days when editing alone I just use the computer monitor. The mojo adds I/O for decks & monitor, but if Im not feeding tape, I rarely even turn an ntsc monitor on. I do believe that they do help accelerate the rendering thru the GPU, but a dissolve takes less than a second to render, just thru cpu.....