The Io HD from AJA is a transportable plug-in solution for working with HD and SD in Apple Final Cut Studio. |
In my last column, I described the process of getting clips in many different formats onto a single timeline for playback in a live show. The event was an awards presentation for a film festival and involved live announcers, playback of the above-mentioned clips, static graphics and previously edited segments. In the past, I’ve used a multiprocessor tower to play back the edit timeline in real time, and that allowed me to control the playback with the pacing of the live announcers.
This year, I got a surprise when I received only laptop computers from the supplier and realized that I didn’t have an HD SDI video output to feed into the HD switcher along with the cameras. “No problem,” I thought; I had arranged to have an external interface box shipped in to deal with other playback issues during the festival. I’d just have to move the show timeline over to one of the laptops, and that wouldn’t be a problem because I was using a redundant external drive set to prepare the timeline, and it contained everything that I needed for the show. Then the fun began.
I was using Apple Final Cut Pro 6 under Mac OS 10.5 to edit the show. I had a copy of FCP 7, but hadn’t had a chance to install it yet. Fifteen MacBook Pros for training sessions and presentation use arrived with FCP 7 installed under the new Snow Leopard operating system (OS 10.6), so I migrated to it with no apparent problems by moving my external mirrored array with the entire project from my 13-inch MacBook to one of the faster MacBook Pros. So far, so good. I continued to build the show and wire up the live playback system.
Then the AJA Io HD interface box arrived, and I attempted to install the drivers and test the configuration. When I had problems making the package work, I started reading reports on the Creative COW about problems with the Io HD and Snow Leopard. Apparently, a new driver to make the two work together hadn’t been released yet. But running the Io HD with FCP 7 under OS 10.5 seemed to work in most modes, including those that I needed. So I tracked down a machine with FCP 7 and OS 10.5 and migrated again. This time, I printed the timeline to a QuickTime file and completed a few last-minute edits on a much simpler timeline, using the QT movie. Using the old Io HD drivers, the system worked pretty well. Just to make sure, I rebooted before the show and had no problems.
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