Esus asked on this thread on the DUC, Do I need a Mojo?

I’ve been struggling with this for a while, to no avail–so hopefully someone on here can give me some direction. I’m trying to send QT video from my Pro Tools sessions to an external (composite) monitor, primarily for ADR. I’ve tried sending one of my monitor outputs, which kinda works, but it takes the monitor away and screws up the resolution. I’m guessing I have two options now. One is to try a scan converter, which I can resize the picture and still split the signal between my VGA monitor and the composite monitor, or get a Mojo.
If I go the Mojo route, I’ll have to get one second-hand (eBay). If so, what do I need, and what should I look out for? I don’t need to capture video or show HD files, just send the video to the external monitor.  I’m on a G5 dual 1.8GB Mac, running PT 7.4 on an HD2 system.

tom_lowe replied…

The Canopus ADVC110 is the cheapest alternative to a Mojo that doesn’t require scan converters and is fully qualified by Digidesign. You do have to compensate for the FireWire delay, but a rough (and Digidesign recommended) idea of where to start is around 18 quarter-frames.

infiniteloop added…

….but the Mojo hogs a whole firewire bus. Major bummer.

reichman added…

The ye olde Aurora Fuse-X works perfectly in that configuration, provided you stay in 10.4.x and have PCI-X slots. Almost no latency, and able to work with all Quicktime codecs. On the other hand, no further support.
If you upgrade to a MacPro, the Blackmagic card is great.

Ian Palmer said…

The mojo wont actually play some codecs very well. My system (G5, Tiger, HD2 7.3) has a mojo which will slow to outputting about 1 frame a second after 10 minutes using H264. Mp4s just wont play smoothly.
If you go the way of the Mojo then I’d recommend using MPEGStreamclip to convert any files you have to DV. Besides DV will give you the least strain on the system overall. It takes a short while but is worth it overall for smooth playback.

Craig F added…

The mojo wont actually play some codecs very well. My system (G5, Tiger, HD2 7.3) has a mojo which will slow to outputting about 1 frame a second after 10 minutes using H264. Mp4s just wont play smoothly. Intraframe codes kill all Pro Tools rigs, they plain suck.

Nathan W. suggested..

I use a Gefen 1:4 HDMI splitter, 1 HDMI in to 4 HDMI out. Works pretty good. You need a DVI-D to HDMI adapter linked to a satellite LE system (you gotta get DV Toolkit 2 for timecode on the le system) using DVCProHD. I like the Gefen because there’s hardly any delay. Gefen support is good too. DVCProHD doesn’t work very well unless you’re using a satellite LE system, this is esp. true with the new protools 8 systems. There’s a few bugs though including the “white bar” where you try to fit the video to screen using a 1920X1200 resolution but it doesn’t fit the entire screen perfectly.

Phill. asked…

Sorry to be thick here, but is DV25 the Same as DV Pal and DV NTSC? We use Canopus boxes to output the video to various monitors and projectors, but as I understood it the Canopus will only accept DV Pal at 720×576 or DV NTSC at 720×480.
Is there any way to output the picture to the firewire port but also have it on one of the Mac monitors?

Frank Kruse replied to Phill….

1) Also DV PAL 24fps is fine. WIll generate the ghost-frame on the fly.
2) no.

tigas came back…

Frank, are you saying that the Mojo or the Canopus will generate the ghost frame? That’s not our experience.
We run most files we receive through MPEGStreamclip (batch-mode to DV25) to use with our Mojos. Besides, there are two rooms that do not have Mojo, and those have a DV bridge.
There’s no point in complaining about the size of DV files any more, unless you’re forwarding them to someone else – but in that case, send them copies of the H264. Storage is really cheap nowadays – it’s not external 9GB SCSI drives any more.But, a real reason not to use Mojos is that you basically lose the internal Firewire bus. We’ve never been too successful in making a second FW bus work properly. That means copying external sessions into internal storage before use. Big time-waster.

My experience tallies with Tigas. I find that although DV files are large they put much less load on the computer than compressed files like H264 files.

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