Matrox’s MXO2 MAXed out, with a little MXO in the mix

Creative Cow by Jerry Hofmann

ACT ONE: THE RUSH JOB

An old and favored client called me on a Wednesday afternoon asking for a production of a short instructional video, and a 30-second spot. The scary thing was that I had to deliver a broadcast spot, a broadcast 6 minute instructional insert program, and in the end, a couple of web streams all by the following Monday morning. Yikes! It wasn't even written yet. Double yikes!

ACT TWO, THE SHOOT, Matrox MXO2 SAVES MONEY on set

Enter the Matrox MXO2, 17" MacBook Pro and CalDigit VR for the shoot. By the end of shoot, I was online and logged in FCP 7. We could check playback, audio levels and everything I intended to edit with. The wonderful DP I hired, Tom Miller of Big Pictures, had an HD video monitor with built in scopes and I could view externally with it during the shoot playing back files from the laptop. A thing of beauty.

I saved at least $400 and 2 hours in postproduction on the first day of use. I don't have a DVCPROHD deck and the DP I hired owns an HDX-900. Normally I would have needed to rent a deck, or go to someone else's editing system to use theirs. Capturing through the MXO2 with my laptop as we shot saved me that expenditure.

The time in a bay to capture from tape is real time. That means if you had to capture 3 hours of tape, it really takes well over 3 and approaching 4 hours to just capture the tape (plus travel time if you can't do it in your bay).

Many editors want to log things first (I really like short media files myself), so they spend even more time shuttling tape to log, and then capture the smaller files. Capturing a whole tape without logging individual shots takes about an extra 10-15 minutes per tape change to account for swapping the tapes, rewinding, and logging. read more...