capture card for feature film

Building a brand new system for a feature film, and finally upgrading from my old G5 to a MacPro and FCP 7. Will be editing ProRes 1080p 23.98. My needs are simple, though. Audio to a mixer and out to pro speakers, audio and video out to a DVD recorder, and monitoring on a decent quality big screen TV like a Panasonic VIERA or similar, probably via HDMI. This is for offline only. We'll be doing temp color correction and vfx for screenings and audience previews, but picture will be ultimately conformed and finished elsewhere. I'd love to buy a Kona 3 and a reference quality HD monitor, but surprise surprise, we're on a budget. So I'm looking at lower cost solutions, like Kona LHe, Matrox 2, Decklink Studio. I've never worked with these before. Any thoughts or gotchas I should know about?

Kona LHi is what you need, not the LHe. The LHi has HDMI out. As does the Matrox MXO2 and MXO2 LE. Either one of those with an HDTV will be good. The MXO2 slightly better in that you can calibrate the monitor externally with the MXO2 software.

I like both of those options. No experience with the Decklink.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Wow, did I just post this... Pretty much my exact situation. Any detractors for the MXO2 LE? That one allows calibration as well, right?

Also about Video cards, am I OK with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB. I'm mostly a narrative editor. But I do do the occasional music video. Do I want the upgrade to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB [Add $200.00]

All the MX02s do the calibration.

The Mini is already qualified to work with Avid MC 5. Might be something to consider. But the Mini adds pulldown to 23.98 on output, doesn't hardware scale RED 2k to 1080, and the audio is unbalanced. Oh and no SDI or RS-422 of course. I guess that's a pretty big difference .

I wish Avid would hurry up and qualify some more capable cards.

As far as GPUs, it might be worth waiting for the next gen Mac Pros to reveal themselves to see if new options become available. Then again, that could be June 7 or 8, or could be next year. Who knows?

- Justin Barham -