Just curious if anybody has tried this...  Our company will be making the jump to P2 and HD shortly.  Has anyone tried using the new MOTU V3HD box as a transcoder for capture & digital cut in Avid Xpress Pro HD?  Why wouldn't the V3HD work like any old transcoder, then use RS422 for deck control through the serial port for Beta SP?

I know V3HD would not be an "accellerator" like Mojo or Adrenaline, but since we're happy with software-only performance it be a lot more flexible for dubbing/transcoding at a MUCH lower price point than Adrenaline.  This way we could do Beta SP captures or uprez SD to DVCPro HD and edit everything using native DVCPro HD.  And it would give us the ability to transcode DV100 firewire output to an SD or HD production monitor for color correction.  Then once the initial cut's done, we would have the added features to use with Adobe After Effects CS3 & Encore too.  Heck, we could even do audio mixing in Adobe Audition if we wanted to.

Anybody know if this is doable?  Or am I floating around in magic fairy tale land?

I haven't tried or heard anything about using the V3HD as so.

I myself was wondering how the V3HD presented itself to the computer. I was hoping it would present itself as a DVCPro HD deck.

Please do lets us know if this works out.

Anybody done this yet?  I don't have a V3HD on hand to try it out, so I'm hoping somebody else out there has explored the option.

Thanks,

Looking at it, it seems like it operates as a video adaptor - like the AJA IoHD, BlackMagic MultiBridge or Avid Adrenaline -- so they rely on custom drivers and application support - in short, nope, I doubt it'll work with Avid.

Over Firewire the only signals Avid will accept are DV (25/50/100) and HDV. So unless it's converting to and from one of those (which it doesn't seem to be, and which wouldn't yield fantastic results generally) then it's not going to work.

Obviously for P2 this is unnecessary, as you can do file-based workflow, but for other things you're going to need native support. For DVCProHD the AJ-HD1400 is the best option, but it's fair from foolproof. I don't know if it does E-to-E upconversion, but you can certainly upconvert with it onto tape.

I don't know of any converters that have a DV100 interface.

Hi,
we are also looking for a way to find an HD workflow without having to buy an adrenaline.
We currently have a Xpress HD lastest version and shooting with Panasonic on P2 cards.
After have tranfered the mxf files from the P2 card, we are looking for a cheap way to have a full screen full frame output of the edited sequences on a monitor and on a recorder.
So we would like to use the V3HD mainly for AVID output.

Do you think using the V3HD firewire input and either HDMI or SD output pluged to our monitor this could be ok (AVID firewire -> V3HD firewire input-> VH3D HDMI ou SD output -> monitor) ?

Futher more I assume the signal from the firewire in HDV (4:2:0), instead of DVPro HD, so the best resolution we could record on a recorder would be HDV right ?
Could Sycophant explain futher : "which  wouldn't yield fantastic results generally", Why is that ?

Has anyone done it and what is the best and cheapest solution ?
Thanks for time and feedback.

My understanding is that the V3HD can be used as a standalone transcoder, converting SD connections and HD-SDI to standard DVCPro HD on firewire.  That's why I'm curious as to whether or not it could be used with Avid software the same way DV transcoders can be used via firewire for capture and playback. 

Anyone know about this MOTU option considering the new Avid hardware has come out and its incredibly over-priced?

THanks

Sycophant:

Over Firewire the only signals Avid will accept are DV (25/50/100) and HDV.

Avid can work with a native DVCProHD signal over firewire too. So this box might work just fine. (It says in the specs that it outputs a native DVCProHD signal.)