SD Connect becomes the HD Connect?
By now, most of you should have heard of the AJA IO. Simply put, it allows you to send uncompressed 10bit 4:22 YUV video down a firewire connection. Its been around for about 18 months now.
When it first came out, I began wondering if rental houses would start stocking them. It would seem to make sense. Instead of buying an interface, you could simply rent one as needed. This would be particularly useful for studio shoots.
Well, no one in Sydney (AFAIK) rents them. So about a year ago I put up some cash and bought a Decklink Pro. Now, cause I'm a powerbook man through and through, that card resides in a good mate's G4. It WAS meant to be bought in the budget of a project which has kinda really badly imploded... so even though it wasn't meant to be mine, it kinda is. Which sucks. I'd much rather a Decklink HD.
Anyway. Personal angst aside, a competitor to the AJA IO has recently appeared. Its called the SD-Connect and is made by a company called Convergent Design. Its pretty full featured, offering composite, component, S-video, SDI and 1394 (firewire) in/out on the video side and on the audio side four channel balance/unbalanced analogue, AES/EBU and embedded-audio over SD. Its also got ethernet. At the moment, it doesn't offer uncompressed via firewire, but apparently that will be coming in the first half this year. Personally, I wouldn't want to buy one until the uncompressed support comes along, but thats me.
Anyway, turns out that my preferred rental house for weird production bits*, DigiHire, have bought a number of the SD-Connects and are renting them for $50 a day. Its free if you rent a deck from them - and they have J series decks for about $250-280 a day.
Once uncompressed via firewire happens on the SD-Connector... this will be a great thing for low-budget projects. While SDI Cards aren't that expensive any more - I mean, a Decklink is [currently, pre-NAB - and there will be a price drop post NAB] $295US - being able to rent your interface for free when capturing off digibeta is pretty farkin' awesome. I wish I had access to renting an SDI interface about three years ago when I first started working with uncompressed footage.
What is really killer from my perspective is that, apparently, Convergent Design are working on a HD version of the SD-Connect. Presumably, it'll be called the HD-Connect. Digihire promise to get one of those too... sexcellent. If it has HD-Component (which it should) on board and HD-SDI out (which it will - otherwise you're not really HD, are you?) or sd-downconversion via firewire [awesome]**... this will be excellent when working with the Z1P. You could theoretically capture straight to disk uncompressed 4:2:2 HD 1080i signals. Even if it only did downconversion to SDI being able to use the Z1P as an uncompressed SD camera with HD size sensors would be very useful. While it won't be one of those ready-made solutions of hd-component to hd-sdi that will be appearing on the market shortly, it should be pretty flexible conversion wise.
Hmm. Yummy.
*[Seriously. These guys rent a 1 inch tape machine for all those regular times you want to capture off 1 inch]
** Presumably it will offer downconversion to SD - and then all it'd need to do is bus the downconverted footage down firewire.
When it first came out, I began wondering if rental houses would start stocking them. It would seem to make sense. Instead of buying an interface, you could simply rent one as needed. This would be particularly useful for studio shoots.
Well, no one in Sydney (AFAIK) rents them. So about a year ago I put up some cash and bought a Decklink Pro. Now, cause I'm a powerbook man through and through, that card resides in a good mate's G4. It WAS meant to be bought in the budget of a project which has kinda really badly imploded... so even though it wasn't meant to be mine, it kinda is. Which sucks. I'd much rather a Decklink HD.
Anyway. Personal angst aside, a competitor to the AJA IO has recently appeared. Its called the SD-Connect and is made by a company called Convergent Design. Its pretty full featured, offering composite, component, S-video, SDI and 1394 (firewire) in/out on the video side and on the audio side four channel balance/unbalanced analogue, AES/EBU and embedded-audio over SD. Its also got ethernet. At the moment, it doesn't offer uncompressed via firewire, but apparently that will be coming in the first half this year. Personally, I wouldn't want to buy one until the uncompressed support comes along, but thats me.
Anyway, turns out that my preferred rental house for weird production bits*, DigiHire, have bought a number of the SD-Connects and are renting them for $50 a day. Its free if you rent a deck from them - and they have J series decks for about $250-280 a day.
Once uncompressed via firewire happens on the SD-Connector... this will be a great thing for low-budget projects. While SDI Cards aren't that expensive any more - I mean, a Decklink is [currently, pre-NAB - and there will be a price drop post NAB] $295US - being able to rent your interface for free when capturing off digibeta is pretty farkin' awesome. I wish I had access to renting an SDI interface about three years ago when I first started working with uncompressed footage.
What is really killer from my perspective is that, apparently, Convergent Design are working on a HD version of the SD-Connect. Presumably, it'll be called the HD-Connect. Digihire promise to get one of those too... sexcellent. If it has HD-Component (which it should) on board and HD-SDI out (which it will - otherwise you're not really HD, are you?) or sd-downconversion via firewire [awesome]**... this will be excellent when working with the Z1P. You could theoretically capture straight to disk uncompressed 4:2:2 HD 1080i signals. Even if it only did downconversion to SDI being able to use the Z1P as an uncompressed SD camera with HD size sensors would be very useful. While it won't be one of those ready-made solutions of hd-component to hd-sdi that will be appearing on the market shortly, it should be pretty flexible conversion wise.
Hmm. Yummy.
*[Seriously. These guys rent a 1 inch tape machine for all those regular times you want to capture off 1 inch]
** Presumably it will offer downconversion to SD - and then all it'd need to do is bus the downconverted footage down firewire.
posted by stu willis at
6:12 pm
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