ProRes 422 HD?

[Mick Wilcomes]

Hey All,
I am looking at the Matrox MXO2 For HD primarily monitoring EX1 footage from my MACBOOKPRO.
on the MATROX website it clarifies that to obtain Prores422 HD you need a larger system than the MACBOOKPRO, Does this mean i am missing out on full quality from the EX1 by not having the bigger system?
Confused.

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Mick Wilcomes

Hey All,
I am looking at the Matrox MXO2 For HD primarily monitoring EX1 footage from my MACBOOKPRO.
on the MATROX website it clarifies that to obtain Prores422 HD you need a larger system than the MACBOOKPRO, Does this mean i am missing out on full quality from the EX1 by not having the bigger system?
Confused.

Mick it simply means that Matrox does not recommend MacBookPro because it does not have enough CPU horsepower and system bandwidth to re-render the EX-XDCAM MPEG2 signal to the ProRes format "as you import in realtime."

[Craig Seeman]

One difference between the AJA IO and MXO2 is the AJA box does it's own ProRes Encode (not relaying on the CPU). The MacBookPro can convert to ProRes but not in real time. The question is do you have a reason to have ProRes source rather than EX codec from SxS or 10 bit 422 from HD-SDI. MXO2 should be fine for monitoring and fine for inputing from whatever the camera spits out. I don't own the MXO2 but did see a demo of it recently and had a good took with folks from Matrox at a trade show.

(edit added)
I should also mention that there's the MXO which is just for monitoring (no inputs) for about 1/3 less than the MXO2.

[Peter Kraft]

Originally Posted by Mick Wilcomes

Hey All,
I am looking at the Matrox MXO2 For HD primarily monitoring EX1 footage from my MACBOOKPRO.
on the MATROX website it clarifies that to obtain Prores422 HD you need a larger system than the MACBOOKPRO, Does this mean i am missing out on full quality from the EX1 by not having the bigger system?
Confused.

Mick, it#s no wonder you are confused...
Let me ask you two questions first:
- Which MBP do you own (plz state proc and frequency + amount of RAM + type of video card and amount of video RAM, type of hard drive (internal/external), kind of firewire port (400/800), speed of HD (4200/5400/7200?), QT and FCP version, using only internal LCD and/or external LCD (like Cinema Display? Size??).
- Why Prores422 HQ? Will you do green screen or heavy colour grading?


Two points for your peace of mind: Your MBP is by far powerful enough to trancode your raw material to Prores 422 (HQ). It takes a few seconds more then on a Mac Pro multi core, sure, but it works fluently. The power of your MBP determines, so to say, how many parallel video streams you can put into your time line before rendering is required prior to smooth running video on the screen. It also depends on the number and power-requirements of the effects chosen. But we'll go through that later, after I have your answers.

[Ned Soltz]

I have been using MXO2 since beta versions (I have one of the first units produced) and can tell you that you cannot encode ProRes or ProRes HQ in a real time capture. ProRes real time encoding requires a quad-core chip.

Now, there is no problem with editing ProRes on a MBPro or even taking the time to transcode and render. But you cannot capture in real time.

[Peter Kraft]

Originally Posted by Ned Soltz

...But you cannot capture in real time.

Mick you are on the safe side of the street. See the Matrox website
for mxo and mxo2 - you will find the product pictured there with
a Macbook Pro and with a text that relates several time to the
benefit of using mxo(2) and MBP together.

[Mick Wilcomes]

Hi All and thank you for the help,
after reading all your advice and input it does'nt make a lot of sense to be spending this amount of money at present (AJA IoHD), seeing as though my priority is to firstly just to be able view my footage as close as native as possible and besides buying a broadcast HD monitor (dream about it) It looks as though the MXO might be enough....for now, thanks again for your help again, Mick

[Michael Maier]

Originally Posted by Ned Soltz

I have been using MXO2 since beta versions (I have one of the first units produced) and can tell you that you cannot encode ProRes or ProRes HQ in a real time capture. ProRes real time encoding requires a quad-core chip.

Now, there is no problem with editing ProRes on a MBPro or even taking the time to transcode and render. But you cannot capture in real time.

I'm thinking you would use the MXO2 to encode ProRes from the 10-bit 4:2:2 SDI out?
If so, why would you bother with ProRes and just not capture it all uncompressed? Unless recording a whole show, for green screen work storage shouldn't be a problem. Or do people use the MXO2 to encoded realtime to ProRes from the firewire out? Although that doesn't make any sense over the SDI.

[Ned Soltz]

MXO2 does not have firewire in and besides FW only streams SQ.

The only reasons to use the MXO2 for acquiring from EX is to stream uncompressed 4:2:2 live out of HD-SDI or to do a real time downconvert in the camera. The reason that one would use ProRes is for the very reason that Apple created ProRes-- to obtain a 10-bit compressed signal of comparable quality to 10-bit uncompressed but without the file sizes and storage requirements of uncompressed.

[Michael Maier]

I see that but as I said, at least in my opinion, unless you are filming a whole show, using ProRes over uncompressed seems like an unneeded compromise. If you are just using ProRes for a 5 minutes green screen shot I would do it uncompressed instead. ProRes is only really lossless in name only.

[Peter Kraft]

Originally Posted by Michael Maier

ProRes is only really lossless in name only.

Michael, where did you get that from? Look one post above yours:

Originally Posted by Ned Soltz

The reason that one would use ProRes is for the very reason that Apple created ProRes-- to obtain a 10-bit compressed signal of comparable quality to 10-bit uncompressed but without the file sizes and storage requirements of uncompressed.

You see? And have a look into the Prores White Paper @
http://images.apple.com/finalcutstud..._ProRes_WP.pdf

[Brian Luce]

If you're not doing green screen where the extra color is useful, is there an advantage to going 4.2.2 Pro Res via the camera's hdmi over using the native 35mb/sec mpeg 2 stream? Any perceptible improvement in image quality?

[Lonnie Bell]

Michael,
the difference in your workflow (uncompressed vs prores) statement is you will still need a raid to capture uncompressed (even for 5 minutes) - where with prores you can use your standard harddrive setup in your Macpro.

[Leonard Levy]

Mick,
Are you sure you want MXO2 rather than the original MXO just to monitor from a Macbook Pro?
It will tie up your express card slot so you cannot use faster SATA drives and it does not have a DVI out to run many standard monitors.

MXO is generally more limited, but for monitoring, it will come out from your MacBookpro's DVI port and split that up so you still have DVI and also SD and HD monitoring.

[Mitchell Lewis]

I didn't like the configuration of the inputs/outputs on the MX02. Why didn't they put them ALL on the back? With the inputs on the front and out outputs on the back, you'll end up with a mess of cables.....at least with our current editing system (Beta SP, DV, DVD, VHS, Mixing Board.....that's a lot of in's and out's)

It's a great value though. We went with the AJA Io HD. But I think the MX02 is like $1000 less? We paid $2750 for our AJA Io HD.