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.

One other thing. Avid sells the hardware seperate from the software. So, even though the Avid hardware is expensive right now that could change in the future and already getting MC at the reduced price being offered to Liquid users would save you a bundle more if the hardware gets less expensive or if Avid opens up to some third party hardware. I have always thought they should support the AJA cards because that is what FCP uses and if Avid could use that card on MAC'S with FCP it would be an even greater incentive for FCP users to switch to MC. You never know.

You should still be able to use your Aja card as an external device as well.  Of course I cannot test this as I no longer have my Aja board but you should be able to capture video through Machina and import it into MC.  It may have to do a slow import but it should work.  When you are finished editing in MC you should be able to export a AJA AVI or Quicktime file that you can play through Machina to a HD-SDI device.  I know it is crude but it will work until you can buy the Avid hardware for MC.

Matrox also makes two hardware devices that hook up to a DVI port on your video card.  One is the older model MXO device for the Mac only.  The product is actually marketed to MC users so you know it works well and it gives you a proper HD-SDI signal.  On the PC side Matrox now has their DVI scan converter which basically does the same exact thing as the MXO but for Windows based PC systems.  Neither product allows you to capture but they offer a almost perfect solution for HD-SDI output.  This may be all you need if you work in a non tape based environment like I currently do.  The really nice thing about these solutions for HD-SDI output is that they will work from systems such as the Imac or PC's that do not have the proper PCI-Express x4 slots.

Of course a full Avid hardware based system gives you more then just raw I/O but the above can work as a work around for now and are even great solutions for a secondary MC edit system.

I personally feel that AVID has done a VERY BAD job of explaining why their Hardware is as expensive as it is. the advantage to the Avid HW is that it has HW acceleration and RT conversion power. The AJA HW and others like it are passive so there is not RT encoder for format output. this was also an advantage to the origional FAST HW is that it did all the format conversions over the Ccube/lsi chips. The sad thing is that as we move to file based production that HW accelerated I/O's become less and less relivant as fewer need to come from or go back to tape.

Rumors fly that soon (12-18mo) Avid will open up to 3rd party HW, we all know how rumors are...