It's a lot smaller and easier to deal with than lugging around a full MacPro with an appropriate LCD monitor. Yes, you have to supply power, but dealing with a laptop and this little box is way easier to move around with than a big MacPro with everything else that's needed. (LCD, screen, mouse etc.)

John, I don't think this works with a macbook, you'll need a macbook pro I believe.

But I'll argue with you about it being the same as a macpro. Those things are heavy.

You can drive a firewire buspowered drive from a macbookpro so you've got two outlets to power. Since you're going to need an outlet to power the IO-HD anyway adding a second outlet shouldn't be too bad.

I think as an affordable option for Commercials and Indie movies this is awesome. RNG guys will have to wait a little bit longer. (and then complain about the weight of the on-board device)

Also I think it's not really fair to emply that if you have a macbook pro you don't have a computer (or that the only way to have a computer is to have a macpro) I've edited off a laptop with an external screen, and it hasn't been bad at all.

That being said I still don't think I'll buy one until I have a real rental for it. Or some of the red guys decide they want to go this route.

DOH Barlow beet me buy a minute

Thanks Nick, Thanks Barlow,
good points,

Yeah,
I only have a Macbook Pro as a computer, and didn't mean to imply that it is not a viable option,

This is cetrainly very interesting -
seems like a very good alternative for people depending on your needs & price point.

I'd love to try it and see

For a little more money ($6K + Media Packs), you can have a completely portable, on-board solution with multiple codec offerings in the Colorspace INDI. Completely contained, multiple 2.5" drives for extended recording, on board playback and meta data input via 7" touchscreen.

That looks nice, Drew. What are the codec offerings? A huge advantage of the I/O HD is the integration of the ProRes codec which I took a pretty good look at (NAB) and it indeed looks visually lossless...even after multiple recompressions. All that quality for just over 20 MBs is pretty phenomenal.

Nick, you guys would've probably used an I/O HD on The Signal, were they available, correct?

We have a big feature that we've been struggling to get financed that will use the RED cameras.

However, we're developing an ultra-low budget feature to shoot in the mean time with our XLH1. We will definitely use the IO-HD connected to a MacBook Pro and use the ProRes 422 HQ codec as our workflow.

Very exciting.

Barlow,


My understanding is that the ProRess format is a DCT based 4:2:2 codec running at 140 and 220mbps. That sounds to me like it will be roughly equal in fidelity to the DNxHD 220Mbps, and the MPEG-4 200+ Mbps 4:2:20 DCT based codecs.


All of these codecs are lossy of course.




The INDI will be supporting MPEG4 initially, and more codecs subsequently. Exactly which ones first is not completely clear at this point in time, but customer feedback will play a heavy part in which codecs we support first.

I would like to see CineForm, ProRes or Sheer codec supported.

I currently use the Sheer codec from bitjazz (www.bitjazz.com) to capture XL-H1 raw HD-SDI with a Kona card and Final Cut Pro. It's the best out of all of them, but it has the highest bit rate. (45 MBs) If the recording capacities were large enough, I would prefer to capture with this codec (if it's implementable) as it is truly lossless, and it's multi-platform too.

Dude in a second! I think capturing uncompressed and having an HDV backup is quite possibly the coolest thing ever. You get full everything and just in case a drive crashes or something you've got your complete back up which looks pretty good as well.

There's rumors of another Horror coming to town from some of the guys from the signal, I'm going to try and talk them into using that, but I have a feeling they'll want to go red... Of course, you can use IO-HD for red too so...

Anyhow. Back to the point at hand, I haven't seen the a comparison between HDV and prores, nor have I seen the INDI in person, so I dont' feel comfortable comparing the two, I jsut know that for me, a piece of gear that has many different inputs and costs 1/2 the price is a lot easier to justify right now. I am curious to see prores vs the indi capturing system.

I totally agree. Ideally HDV would make a very useable safety backup, but HD SDI will allow codec choice and get rid of compression concerns.

alright, alright, alright...
4:2:2/ lossless/ tape backup/ sound through the XL-H1's HD-SDI (how does this work again? or does it just work like it should)

Yes, it's great....3500$
I'll bite...

J

It's just a matter of sending an XLR feed to the I/O HD (along with timecode, ideally) and choosing the I/O HD in an easy preset. Video, audio and timecode can be captured via fw800.

ProRess 4:2:2 is not lossless. It is a lossy, DCT based codec.

Well, there's technically "lossy" (ProRes, CineForm, Avid DNX) and truly lossy (HDV, DVCPRO HD). Too bad it's so easy to lump 'em all together with such a vague term. I'll take the former if given a choice.

Everyone's opinion of what an acceptable loss in PSNR is will be different. I would personally not group ProRes/DNxHD with Cineform. As Cineform will have significantly less loss at equal bit rates than ProRes or DNxHD.

I like to leave the vague descriptions at the door, and simply refer to truly lossless formats as such. Some wavelet codecs probably are, "visually lossless", but I don't think I would stick that term onto 7:1/10:1 DCT based ones.