Opinions sought about adding to my edit suite

[Damian Heffernan]

Hi,
I've been reading posts for hours about various bits and pieces for the edit suite, mainly focusing on the output devices like the Matrox MXO2 mini.

Given the strength of our dollar against the US dollar at the moment I thought the time was ripe to buy some bits. But I would love some advice from the community here about what best to spend the bucks on.

I currently shoot mainly XDCAM EX with an EX1 but have lots of older stuff shot in HDV on mini DV and sometimes people provide me footage, sometimes Mini DV, sometimes older.

I have a Final Cut Pro suite setup consisting of a Mac Book Pro, couple of big monitors (one HDMI), and a few My Book Studio hard drives and a Sharespace NAS (raided) for capture and archiving, as well as bluray burner. I find this all works well but I'm feeling the lack of a dedicated TV to monitor the "real" signal on. Hence I've been looking at the MXO2 mini to use to output the HDMI signal to a TV. My footage comes in on the SxS cards and firewire and so the ingest isn't an issue but the Matrox will give me some other capture channels if I need to bring in any HDV or older footage via component or the like.

Given I've a budget of maybe $500 for the box (matrox is about $450) and maybe $300-400 for something else what can you guys recommend? Is the output the best use of the cash?

Thanks

[Steve Oakley]

the MXO2 mini it a great box, but you might consider getting one with the MAX h264 RT encoder. especially for a laptop which is limited in raw processing power for stuff like encoding.