A number of Liquid users are considering making the change over to MC Soft, and the questions of hardware I/O came up. For users of the Liquid Pro BOB (analog SD only) the most comparable Avid  I/O hardware is the basic MOJO. So does the basic MOJO work with the current version, and does anyone know if it will work with MC 3 and Vista? We know that MOJO has been superseded with the Mojo DX and other boxes, but they're still available if anyone looks for one.

The Liquid Pro BOB offers no acceleration features at all, so do 3rd party analog to firewire converters (e.g. the Canopus boxes) work with MC (and that includes real-time previews while scrubbing a timeline, and previewing changes in the color corrector, etc.)?

These types of questions are going to show up over on the Liquid forums before they show up here, so I'd like to get a jump on what to tell the users.

Thanks.

DStone:

does the basic MOJO work with the current version, and does anyone know if it will work with MC 3 and Vista?

See http://community.avid.com/forums/t/57522.aspx:
Q. What is happening with Mojo?
A. We are continuing to ship Mojo SDI which is an excellent solution for standard definition workflows with both analog and SD-SDI input and output connectivity. We will stop production of Mojo analog in June 2008. Mojo analog will continue to be supported in the new version of the editors.[

Please make your users aware that the Mojo has rather exacting hardware requirements.  It requires a TI firewire chipset, and also requires it's own dedicated PCI bus to work consistantly and effectively.  Most P4 machines do not have motherboards with the separate PCI busses required to run Mojo - the Xeon machines have the motherboards with segmented busses.  

OK, I'll do that.

What about using a non-accelerated solution, e.g. the Canopus ADVC 300 for SD analog I/O and previews?

I'm not sure those will work. The Mojo - although sometimes presented as such - is not really an accelerator, but a proprietary I/O device that enables the capture of high res video over an FW cable into an Avid. So the Mojo is sort of an expensive ADVC300.

Which still leads to the question, does a 3rd party solution work. For example, if you plug a camera directly into a firewire port on the system, one presumes you can capture from it and play back to it. Can you also preview scrubbing the timeline on it, etc.? If it does, then the Canopus type box will be suitable for many of the users. And the ones for whom it won't are already looking at the Mojo DX et. al.

I'm not sure how much an issue the segmented PCI bus is going to be. Most of the users looking to do this are running dual-core and quad-core systems with PCI-E and PCI busses, so as long as there's nothing else on the PCI bus it's effectively dedicated. At least, one would hope current MOBO design tends to that direction.

To answer my own question, a wider search on the forums indicates that the Canopus converter boxes will work. They're just limited to DV at 25Mbs (no surprise there). Which, for a lot of the Liquid users moving up, will be fine (at least to start).

I'm not sure those will work. The Mojo - although sometimes presented as such - is not really an accelerator, but a proprietary I/O device that enables the capture of high res video over an FW cable into an Avid. So the Mojo is sort of an expensive ADVC300.

.- Nope.

The Mojo does accelerate and is not the same as a Canopus.

The Canopus is just a DV transcoder, so everything it captures is converted to DV25.

The Mojo captures true uncompressed 4:2:2 component.

And yes, the Mojo can give full resolution component monitoring with some effects in realtime.

Raspago is right, and I stand corrected.

raspago:

And yes, the Mojo can give full resolution component monitoring with some effects in realtime.

Just be aware that most analogue mojos exhibit a green tint on their component output. Mojo sdi does not. 

OK, thanks for the info. I've passed it on.

The next question (and this probably should be a new thread), for MC Soft is the NVidia Quadro card really required? For example, I've a system here that's a dual Xeon 2.2 with 2Gb, but it's AGP and running an ATI 9600Pro (don't laugh, it's what I use for general purpose). I'm going to be using it for working out how to help the Liquid to MC upgraders. Most of the Liquid users are currently running ATI cards as this is what works best with Liquid.

If need be I can find an AGP Quadro 1100, but the question is should I really bother, and should the other Liquid users bother (note that most of them have PCI-E, so they're in better shape than I).