Straight from Cutter's Mouth

August 4, 2008
I/O: the Good, the Bad, and the Uncompressed
by Cutter Stevens
DV411's Resident Geek and Technical Director

Those of you who know me also know that I have never advocated that a laptop be your sole editing platform. I could literally have a tag line on my shirt, "Yeah you can use your laptop for simple field editing, but you still need your workstation at the studio for the real stuff!". I still believe this..sorry nothing's changed, however things are getting much closer. Soon enough workstations will probably go the way of the land line.

The new generation of laptops on both platforms are getting ridiculously fast: PCIe gives us really good portable storage speeds, and now we have some amazing I/O options far beyond firewire. Things are indeed getting interesting in the world of mobile editing. We now have three really cool and very different options with the AJA IOHD, Matrox MXO2 and the dual platform MOTU V3HD (the V4 will be available soon, and they are promising to upgrade anyone's box who buys today).

The IOHD is one hell of a box. What makes it stand out the most is the ProRes hardware chip. It is the ONLY one that supports ProRes video in hardware, granted laptops are getting fast enough to do the sample in software, but you can't beat the quality of doing it through the chip, you just can't. So if you are on set using HDSDI cameras and looking for the truest representation of the footage for onset dailies, I'm more than likely to build your system around this box. Beyond this, it has a giant list of professional features you can check out at here and view DV411's portable system with the AJA IOHD here.

The Matrox MXO2 (scheduled to ship any day now!) has many of the same features of the IOHD as far as capabilities, but lacks the ProRes hardware chip. This little guy is exciting specifically because it is truly portable; you can have the laptop, storage, monitor and I/O all completely on battery power. Add to that its very reasonable price of around $1600, and this makes the perfect choice for our documentary and on-the-move clients. Check out our under $10K mobile bundle here.

Last but certainly not least we have the MOTU V3HD. This box is special for a few reasons, firstly because it works on both PC and Mac systems and has drivers for Final cut and Premier Pro (After effects hopefully will follow soon). Secondly, it can function as a stand alone analog/digital, down/up/cross converter. No matter what camera you have, you can get it onto a field monitor, and not just one! Hell, feed signal to anybody or anything all simultaneously and synced. This is very fast becoming my favorite all around complete portable I/O, mostly because it gives us the flexibility to tailor design workflows very specific to the client from ingest to author to upload.
For you curious types, view the portable system here and V3HD specs here (V4HD coming soon).

As you can see editing on the move is now a reality! Soon enough with 64 bit apps (God, I hope soon) our space and power hungry workstation will be a thing of the past. That or we'll find ways to hog the bandwidth in order to keep them around.