Avid native R3D support...

[Peter Moretti]

Lucas, very nice analysis. I don't disagree one iota.

P.S. I just want to add that Avid has done a lot of cost cutting measures (some of which sounds pretty shortsighted, e.g. cutting back on hardware development, and obviously is very difficult for the people let go). It has also had a lot of charges related to integrating Digidesign, Pinnacle and some other business units under one Avid banner. So they *should* burn through cash less quickly than they have been. That's the plan. We'll see.

 

[Jay Gannon]

I would be confident in Avid's financial situation, I am assuming from its recent revamp in attitude that those figures are including a truckload of R&D as evidenced by MC 5.0, which I would say will be followed by a lot of new things over the next 12 months to bring real interest back into the company.
So if they can be that liquid while doing heavy R&D that would bode well for their financial state in my mind.

 

[Todd M.]

Todd are you sure you even needed a Nitris DX box to edit a few indies? Would a Mojo DX have been enough? And now you can use a Matrox mini for HD monitoring. Also, Full Screen Playback, which is free, does a decent job if you have good LCD monitor and can calibrate it. You can even set FSP to truncate the luminance to simulate broadcast studio swing levels.

I realize the Matrox compatibility wasn't available when you were specing out a system, but with it and AMA perhaps Avid has a reasonably priced system that would fit the bill.

As for the is it seven times better or three times better ?, that's kind of not fair. It's a law of diminishing returns when you move to higher end equipment. It's like the difference between consumer and enterprise harddrives, or Speedgrade versus BaseLight. The price doesn't seem justified, unless failure or less than blazing performance is just not a option. For some people a Nitris DX box is justified and it will pay for itself, for others it's way over priced. (I personally think Avid should open up their hardware so it can work with other NLE's and sell it cheaper. I think people would pay some kind of a premium for Avid over BlackMagic, Matrox, etc. but Avid seems to not want to go in that direction.)

But I'm sure the evaluation you used for Avid in the past will hold true starting June 5th when MC5 is released.

If I were only monitoring sure, but I also wanted to ingest from and master to SR.

Kona 3 is rock-solid, hardware accelerated (the real downfall to the MultiBridge I used, IMO), does dual HD-SDI at 4:4:4 and is 1/3 the cost of Nitris. And I certainly wouldn't classify it as "consumer" or even prosumer as your analogy suggests. What we are talking about is a box that accepts video signals: it either does the job or it doesn't. Do you buy Monster HDMI cables for their "gold" plated connectors also? Probably not, because ultimately it's just a digital signal... it either gets there or it doesn't, that gold doesn't make a bit of difference.

 

[Kris Anderson]

HI Todd,

I have 4 Mojo DX suites here and in about 5 minutes will be mastering from a DX Mojo to SR.

To/From SR is not a problem (4:2:2) with the Mojo DX. Not here anyway.