Is FCP X ready for broadcast?

After a year of updates, is Apple’s best-selling non-linear editor, Final Cut Pro X, finally ready for primetime? 
The following was written for the August issue of the broadcast industry magazine: TVB Europe - available free online or downloadable to iPad via Newstand.

When Apple introduced Final Cut Pro X last year, it wasn’t so much an update to FCP 7 as a completely new non-linear video editing program. It was a radical re-think of how we do editing, but because it was essentially a version 1.0 release, it became more talked about for what it didn’t do than its new features.

Amongst broadcast editors, especially, the initial reaction was one of dismay. Many aspects of the traditional broadcast workflow weren’t supported. Indeed, so great was the backlash that Apple soon put the discontinued FCP 7 and the Final Cut Studio package back on its shelves, so that facilities and production companies that relied on the earlier version didn’t need to upgrade to X if they wanted to add further edit seats.

Matrox MC-100 SDI-HDMI converter

The new Matrox MC-100 is a dual SDI-to-HDMI mini converter that supports a wide range of display resolutions through 3G, Dual Link-, HD-, and SD-SDI, and lets users monitor, distribute, switch, multiplex, and converge video signals.

It costs £349 ($495, €399) and can be used as an HD-SDI switcher, a distribution amplifier, a multiplexer, and a 3D processing unit.

“Now, rather than purchasing different devices to perform different tasks, broadcast engineers and A/V professionals have a single, affordable, easy-to-use device that meets their diverse needs when it comes to managing SDI signals within their environments — for monitoring, distributing, switching, multiplexing, and converging 3D," said Charles Amyot, product manager at Matrox Video Products Group.

Features include: two SDI inputs and two SDI outputs; HDMI output for monitoring; on-screen display controlled by hardware buttons for straightforward configuration on HDMI and/or SDI monitors; multiformat SDI signal distribution; SDI signal amplification — 300m in SD, 100m in HD, 70m in 3G; glitch-free switching between two HD-SDI feeds; loss-of-signal switching in case of invalid or lost input signal; multiplexing of two HD-SDI video signals into a single 3G-SDI feed; 16 channels of embedded audio on SDI; and eight channels of embedded audio on HDMI, selectable between the first and second set of four pairs.

For stereoscopic 3D use, it also has: real-time 3D processing including horizontal image translation and vertical offset adjustments; anaglyph, difference and 50/50 3D analysis modes; comprehensive 3D output format support (side-by-side, over/under and frame packing via HDMI 1.4a); and a video time-base corrector and frame synchronizer for 3D workflows.

By David Fox

New Matrox Mojito MAX I/O card

The Matrox Mojito MAX  is claimed to be a first professional I/O card with an onboard H.264 encoding accelerator. The new PCIe card includes SDI, HDMI and analogue HD/SD video and professional audio connections.

Alongside the release, Matrox has announced support for the new Avid Media Composer 6, on this card and the rest of its MXO2 devices.

The Mojito MAX offers broadcast-quality input and output for other post-production applications, such as Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium, Apple Final Cut Studio and FCP X, and will let users deliver H.264 files for the web, mobile devices and Blu-ray up to five times faster than software alone. 

Other features included in this 3/4-length PCIe card include 10-bit hardware scaling (for up-, down- and cross-conversion, including frame rate conversion) and inexpensive HD monitoring with the Matrox HDMI Calibration Utility.

The accelerator can cope with resolutions from 64x64 to 1920x1080, at bit rates from 100Kbps to 50Mbps, at various frame rates, with a choice of constant bit rate, constant quality or variable bit rate, built-in noise filtering, de-interlacing, and scene detection.

“The time-saving benefits of our unique MAX H.264 accelerator have been long appreciated by users of our portable MXO2 I/O devices, but many customers have been asking for an economical card for Mac Pro and PC workstations that can do the same job,” said Alberto Cieri, senior director of sales and marketing at Matrox.

“Mojito MAX nicely addresses the need for a single-slot card with SDI, HDMI, and analogue I/O plus H.264 encoding speed and quality — all at a breakthrough price point" – which is $995, £749 or €799, including the card plus a complete video/audio I/O breakout cable and an HDMI cable. 

Matrox Video Products Group is also supporting Media Composer version 6 for capture, monitoring, and output with its entire range of MXO2 I/O devices (pictured), costing from $449, £338 or €382. 

“Matrox MXO2 MAX I/O devices are unique on the market in giving Avid editors lightning-fast H.264 encoding directly from Media Composer 6,” said Cieri. “They are also still the only solutions that connect anywhere, Mac and PC, via Thunderbolt, PCIe, or ExpressCard/34 — with the same versatile unit.”

By David Fox