I think people have said this in various threads in various areas, but let me ask this.

How many of us would not even have to think about buying the following, we would just buy it:

an external box that hooked up via firewire that simply took the DNXHD OR dvcproHD signal from Avid and converted it to HD analog... for a moderate price (I'm thinking $500 US)

I'm not even talking about input... im talking about a box that can ONLY OUTPUT for monitoring purposes.

Most of my work comes to me digitally, I don't even need analog inputs.  If this device existed, I would buy it in a second... even if it only used ONE of those HD formats.

Anyone?

Yes there is a need for Avid to address this although $500 seems too low but $1000-$1500 should do it.

Another product would be a Nitris box for the new world of tapeless production ie that box with no analogue or SDI just HDMI out, but with the acceleration of the Nitris. Cost for that maybe around $5000

To be fair the new Nitris box is at a fair Avid premium price for a post facility but the Mojo DX is too expensive to address Avids problem with Final Cut Pro and smaller production companies or owner operators.

I couldn't agree more with both of you.  For my situation our HD work is coming in digitally (so is 99% of our SD work as well).  We have an Adrenaline (working fine) and a Meridian still sitting in my suite right next to my xw8400 MCS.  In the last two years I've used the Meridian twice for some uncompressed SD capturing while editing on the other machine.  Anyway, I would love an Avid or third-party supported device for monitoring. 

it would be great if they would continue to sell the adrenaline box

but at a better price.

Mike

Or drop the price of the HD card for existing Adrenalines . .

lmerino:

an external box that hooked up via firewire that simply took the DNXHD OR dvcproHD signal from Avid and converted it to HD analog..

http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo/

I saw a post about some type of Avid showing at the Matrox NAB booth.  Is there any truth to this?

As it stands right now, MXO is NOT the solution that I would be looking for.  This is the latest of many responses from Matrox support that I could find from the MXO forum (10/22/07).

The MXO will work in Mastering mode with any application that supports the Video - Out component of the QuickTime engine. If the application does not have support for this (as the Avid software), then the MXO can run in Presentation mode. Presentation mode will provide the ability to output what is being displayed on your desktop out to the video outputs of the MXO. Thus you would have the ability to at least get a preview of what your video would look like on output. Note that this will, in no way provide any benefit to the video as opposed to what is provided in Mastering mode (Such as: color calibration and Interlacing artifact elimination). 

Could we have an official answer as to whether the situation is changing with MC 3.0?   A "no" would certainly be discouraging, but at least the small shops / users amongst us could spend our time figuring out how to finance a DX box or learning FCP instead of on threads like this.

Blitzer, your post pretty much clears the confusion there's been around the MXO in these forums for several months.

I own an MXO and Xpresspro (soon to be MC), latest version running on a fast mac system with two 256 mb graphic card. So the fullscreen playback in Xpress runs here "as smooth as it can be", in fact a lot better than in other systems I saw (especially when one of my graphic cards is dedicated to FSP only so the 256mb of vram are not splitted).

Anyone not an editor would say it "looks good and plays smooth", more than enought for some basic corporate work or dad's home movies but certainly not what could be called a real monitoring solution. In this post I and others explained our "feeling" towards FSP monitoring, simply useless for real world editing purposes. 

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/56197/322475.aspx#322475

Now what does the MXO bring you:

Instead of connecting your LCD directly to your graphic card you can run FSP trough the MXO, and have the LCD connected to it. Since the MXO does'nt work in "mastering mode" with avid (presentation mode only), it's just pass trought, so you'll get the exact same FSP quality, with a nice little box with blue light on your desk...

Now what happens when you connect a good CRT to the analog or sdi connectors of the MXO and enable the "two fields" option in FSP settings. Well you get to see what a video signal created from an RGB overlay looks like... and believe me, it's not something you can work with! In fact it's actually even worse then just FSP to LCD. Interlace artefacts are still there and motion gets a lot worse.

As of today the MXO is just useless with avid, so no one should buy it unless working in AE, FCS, or PREMIERE. In those apps, the MXO runs in "mastering mode", working pretty much like an AJA or Decklink card, grabing the signal inside the app and providing a real video output in component, sdi and even DVI, that's the beauty of this device, I don't know how but it is really able to send an interlace signal to the LCD with it looking perfect, two fields, great motion and real color space.

What's really confusing now are the posts referring to an AVID/MATROX presentation at nab 2008 where MC 3 was shown working with MXO. If the MXO is now able to work in "mastering mode" with avid then it's just great news, and affordable (1k) HD/SD monitoring only solution for avid would be consistent with the "new thinking" and MC price drop. If not, then I can't understand why MC 3 was shown running with an MXO attached, it just makes no sense.

The avid reseller "videoguys" seems to think  MC3 is going to be compatible with MXO, here's a link to their matrox nab2008 report.

http://groups.google.com/group/DV-L/browse_thread/thread/e62a60e4dc0ffaca

If "new thinking" really means better communication with the customer someone at Avid might want to clear our doubts before the MC 3 release.

Thanks for that link, nicov.  It seems that any additional MC / MXO compatibility at this point is purely conjecture.  Still, there have been enough threads about this that maybe Marianna or a moderator could simply confirm that the situation is unchanged for MC3.

Well, if someone could figure out a way to replace Avids routing of media through DIO to QuickTime or DirectShow standard processing, you could use any number of devices from BlackMagic, Matrox, AJA, BlueFish444, MOTU....

But that won't happen because Avid can't shake its desire to be just a hardware vendor and full-system solution provider.  They have repeatedly shown no understanding of/ or interest in continuing as an application provider.  Historically, every application they have ever developed that worked as software only or software with platform standard, 3rd party hardware support, was EOL'd after 36 - 48 months and luring as many of the "low enders" as possible into the "Media Composer Family".

Now that Media Composer is at the low end, I would expect it will be EOL'd in another 24 - 36 months so that Avid can focus on Unity, NitrisDX, and integrated newsroom installations, and finally make it back to the $20,000 and up individual component sales like in the glory days before FCP, thus leaving the Pinnacle division to handle the off-the-shelf srhink-wrap application business.

lmerino:

I think people have said this in various threads in various areas, but let me ask this.

How many of us would not even have to think about buying the following, we would just buy it:

an external box that hooked up via firewire that simply took the DNXHD OR dvcproHD signal from Avid and converted it to HD analog... for a moderate price (I'm thinking $500 US)

I'm not even talking about input... im talking about a box that can ONLY OUTPUT for monitoring purposes.

Most of my work comes to me digitally, I don't even need analog inputs.  If this device existed, I would buy it in a second... even if it only used ONE of those HD formats.

Anyone?