Another opinion brought to you by the 

Bob Zelin U N L E A S H E D Series.

The new AJA I/O Box

If you work for AVID, you might not want to read this.   The AJA I/O is a miracle.  It allows Apple's crummy little Final Cut Pro to act just like an AVID product, and it only cost a little over $2000.  Actually, Final Cut Pro ain't so crummy anymore - it's pretty damn good, and the AJA I/O box makes it dangerous.  

The concept of the AJA I/O eliminates all the nightmare problems of building a high-end FCP system.   In the old days (pre April 2003), you had to buy a card, a bunch of converter boxes for both audio and video and VTR control, put them all together, load a bunch of drivers, and hope that there were no conflicts, or the particular version of MAC that you owned worked with that particular version of card, or that one card didn't conflict with another card.  I have personally gone thru  - "don't use the ATI card with this card, and don't put over 1 Gig of RAM with that card, and make sure you download this driver for that version of MAC".   It was infuriating, if I was not willing to keep up with every variation for every card, or every computer, or every version of MAC OS that I was using for that particular system.  Pretty confusing stuff.  

And then it happened - NAB2003.  AJA released the I/O box.  It didn't make a difference what your graphics card was.  If you had a MAC that was fast enough to run the new FCP4 program, you simply took ONE FIREWIRE CABLE, plugged it in between the MAC and the AJA I/O box, and you had a 10 bit serial digital uncompressed non linear editing system, that was easy to use, and incredibly stable.  Only two cards went into your MAC - the graphics card that came with your MAC, and an ATTO SCSI card (the UL3D card) that didn't even require any drivers to be loaded for it.  After doing systems for so many years, it was amazing to see how easy this was to setup and use.  

The actual process is simple.  You get your MAC, you turn it on (make sure you are running MAC OS-X 10.2.6), you load Apple's Final Cut Pro 4, you load the AJA I/O CD, and you plug in the AJA I/O box.  I swear that's it.   The RS422 deck control port is built right into the AJA I/O, so you don't have to worry about getting a Keyspan or Steath Port adaptor to work.  

The AJA I/O has every damn converter you can think of built right into it - 4 channels of balanced analog audio (on XLR connectors), 4 channels of AES/EBU audio, 8 channels of ADAT Audio, SPDIF Audio,  analog composite video, analog component video, S-Video, Serial Digital Video (yes, it's 10 bit uncompressed), and RS422 for VTR control.   AND all the outputs are active all the time, so when you play out from the FCP program, you get all the analog and all the digital outputs to work all the time. I want to make this article longer, but it's so easy, that's really all there is to it.    

OK, now for the problems.   What is wrong with this simple solution.   First, ANY non linear system, including this one, needs a big mama drive array to work, in order to get serial digital uncompressed video.   Nothing is wrong with this fact, except for the fact that it's EXPENSIVE.   More than the cost of the AJA I/O and FCP4 put together. So don't think that you are going to use cheap Firewire drives to get this to work.  Not even 2 striped Firewire 800 drives.  It won't sustained playback of uncompressed video.   You want to actually do a real job on this - you are going to need a big drive array from StorCase, AVID, HUGE Systems, Medea, Rorke, etc, etc.   I don't know anything about serial ATA (SATA) drives, but unless these work, there ain't no cheap solution to get around this.   

Second, and the #1 complaint from users about this product is it's internal propagation delay thru the box.  This mean that the audio and video coming out of the AJA I/O are not in sync with the audio and video that is seen and heard on the MAC.   There is about a 10 frame delay between the two.  My initial reaction to this was - "hey, I will just look at, and listen to the output of the AJA I/O box  - who cares".   But it's not that simple.  If you mark in and out points on the keyboard while you are watching the output of the I/O box, there will be a DELAY  - your marks will not be accurate.  So the correct procedure while editing is to look at the MAC screens, and listen to the audio output of the MAC, and make your edit decisions this way, and then when you play back, look at the AJA I/O output.  This may seem like a pain, but it's really not.  You take the audio out from the back of the MAC, and stick it into your audio mixer.   Use two faders on the mixer to monitor the audio out of the MAC, and when you need to listen to the AJA, simply raise those faders (and change the menu in the audio/video settings).   It's really not that bad, and considering this solution costs a lot less than an AVID system, you can suffer a little bit.  

The third problem (and I am just whining here) is that there are a LOT of setup menus.   You can use the EASY SETUPS in FCP4 to get thru it, but when you finally get around to finding out why your sequence won't play back (the dreaded unrendered error), you poke around in the Audio Video Settings, and you will see MILLIONS (ok, around 20) different selections for every tab in the setup menus.   If you are used to an AVID, it will seem a little intimidating.   Many of my support calls are due to the fact that these setup menus are not set up correctly.  But like anything else, you get over it.  

What else can I say - there are a lot of cards out there for FCP, and now, you have to be nuts to consider any of them.  This box is so cheap, and works so well, and eliminates the need to have to buy any external converters.  You will have NO SUFFERING FACTOR in setting up this system.   And when you become rich and successful, and decide to go HD, you can buy the AJA Kona HD card, pop it into your MAC (for $3995), and have NO CONFLICTS with the AJA I/O box. Does it get any better than this?   Now if AJA can only convince Sony to drop the price of HD VTR's, then we will be set ! 

Synthetic Apeture has released a program called EchoFire that works with the AJA I/O box that is pretty amazing too.  The AJA I/O was built specifically for Apple's Final Cut Pro 4.   But people kept saying - " I use After Effects and Photoshop - what do I do".  Echofire tells these Adobe programs to go right thru the AJA I/O box, so you can dump them out to tape, and an NTSC monitor.  AND you get a nice software scope (waveform monitor) to check your critical levels (I just used that feature to see why the AJA's levels didn't' match an AVID system, and it worked great - it was a software setting).  It's just part of the inexpensive Echofire program.

I have not seen a "blown out" version of AVID's Xpress Pro with Mojo yet (the new version that does component video), but I can only assume that AJA is going to give AVID a run for it's money.  The AJA I/O is amazing.

 Keep on ranting - keep'em on their toes !

Bob Zelin in Orlando 

**Any advice given, and all opinions expressed, are strictly those of Bob Zelin and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Virtual Media or any of itês employees. Bob Zelin is an independent consultant, and a well-known member of the Avid community. He is not an employee of Virtual Media or any of itês subsidiaries.