Ok most of you fellow Xe users will know I have been very vocal about what options we have to move to MC. Well with the recent annoncment of the very cost effective upgrade to MC I feel I need to take a fresh look at the situation. Look we were kind of in a odd situation. Chrome Xe just came out when the switch took place. Things are now a bit different.
I understand the need to HD-SDI equipment and sadly that it still going to be true for many of you. I feel however that it is really worth it to take a look at the upgrade offer. Yes the HD-SDI hardware is still expensive but you can save $2000.00 on the software which is a pretty big savings. Of course this may still not help all of you. What I ask is that each of you at least give the trial a shot and see how it goes. I am in the exact same boat as many of you are. I resisted the move to MC for as long as I could mainly due to financial reasons and how much I loved Liquid. I just wasn't ready to let Liquid dry up but now evaporation is beginning to happen.
I no longer have a Chrome Xe system. My career moved into more of a animation and interactive design world and not as much video editing. I just did not need the support for HD-SDI equipment. Plus everything I was editing was file based material shot at 23.976 and using a second computer monitor or HDTV hooked up via HDMI was doing the job for me just fine. With that said moving to a software only MC makes sense because I just do not need the full support of HD-SDI anymore. Now I know this will not be true of all of you but hopefully there will be options in the future. I hope someday Avid will decide to at least offer crude basic support for 3rd party HD cards. There is the Matrox DVI scan converter which will convert your second DVI port into a HD-SDI adapter. It supports proper hardware scaling for HD and SD video formats and can be a good affordable solution to feed your MC projects into a HD-SDI deck. This can help you make the move until you can afford to by a full Avid hardware system. Of course this doesn't help you capture but you should be able to use Machina with your Aja board to capture video that can be imported and directly transcoded into DNxHD files.
I suggest reading the tutorials that Avid has to offer. There are hundreds of them. When you have done that download the MC 30 day trial. Since you watched the tutorials and read some of the documentation you will be able to maximize your 30 day trial to it's full potential. If you like what MC can do then take advantage of the offer.