In addition to the Rolls MB15b, you might also search for the Aphex 124A. I've seen used models sell for under $50.

Henry Engineering makes a similar product called The Matchbox HD that can be found used at discounted prices; however, in side-by-side comparisons between the Aphex and the Henry, the Aphex sounded "more musical" and "less processed." I don't know how the Rolls would compare to the Aphex.

The Rolls MB15b arrived with the XLR M-F cables.

Performs really good with both the AJA Io LA and the AJA Io HD.

So lessons are:

1. Upgrade any 5400 rpm drives in mac minis to 7500 rpm and no dropped frames, even when capturing both audio and video at Uncompressed 10 Bit

2. AJA analog audio Input is by XLR connector only, and expects Studio levels not Consumer levels, so you need a consumer to studio "driver" with RCA consumer connectors on its Input side and XLR studio connectors on the Output side. The Rolls MB15b is still available new from BHPhoto for this purpose. But there are other choices. I like the Rolls.

(warning: the AJ IO LA originally came with a AES/EBU (Tascam style) breakout cable from a DB-25 to eight XLR connectors.. its less common to find these with the cable because its so big and heavy it increases shipping cost.. they can be expensive.. but sometimes people will ship with the unit simply to dispose of it. Custom made DB-25 to a couple of connectors can be made, but are less common and the precise wiring pattern can be a bit confusing.)

3. Video stream is across IEEE1394 firewire, but it is in a proprietary format, the stream "can be" lightly compressed using the IoHD as Apple Prores 422, but the IoLA and IoHD both natively support Uncompressed 10 bit and 8 bit by default with four channel audio. The audio is uncompressed. Including audio does not introduce frame drops. Frame drops are reported by the AJA VTR capture application.

4. The stream is proprietary, it is not DV and the device does not appear as a DV camera to the operating system, so it can not be controlled by the generic camera controls of the OS X operating system. Photobooth, Vidi, iMovie and other generic Mac TV and Video apps will not see the AJA equipment as a possible source. The stream can also not share the single firewire connection with other equipment, it uses too much bandwidth. Neither the AJA IoLA or AJA IoHD have a secondary "daisy chain" firewire connector. They are strictly point to point.

5. AJA commissioned and distributes a capture app for these products called AJA VTR Exchanger. It works with either, and also controls their RS-422 output port for controlling Studio VTR equipment, but RS-422 is not useful to consumers without a studio VTR... the feature can safely be ignored and doesn't effect capture.

6. Quicktime is loaded with plugins to see the AJA IoLA and IoHD as capture sources for creating new Movies when the drivers are installed. There is a separate AJA Control Panel application for diagnosis and setting things Quicktime does not enumerate.. this is somewhat similar to the "Crossbar thing" application on Windows for controlling things Windows apps do not expose. Its a helper tool.

7. These were primarily designed to work with early Final Cut Pro and not Final Cut Pro X. Drivers are only available for 10.6.8 Snow Leopard ("the most stable" and last of the classic OS X versions). The AJA IoHD had drivers for 10.8 Mountain Lion, but I have not tested them. None of these have drivers for any version of Windows. Windows will detect a generic firewire device and stop it cannot expose any other features.

Opinion:

The quality and level of control over the image are (to my un-professional eyes) the best I have seen compared to anything else. But its a lot of gear and wiring and bulky.

Final Cut Pro X eliminated the log and capture tool built into Final Cut Pro, it was somewhat like the internal tool Virtual Dub uses for capture in that you started FCP then started the log and capture tool to actually capture video. Same as Virtual Dub you exited the capture tool to actually edit the captured video.

Since drivers are no longer available for post OS X 10.6.8 in most cases and Apple decide to not allow 10.6.8 to run on any Mac after Sandy Bridge in 2011. Any Mac made after 2011 and running anything newer than OS X 10.6.8 will not be able to use this hardware for video capture. (Much like XP you need a dedicated box for capture, and then need to edit there or export and edit elsewhere.)

Its not a pretty arrangement of equipment. The majority of Apple users would be repelled by the setup. Its a very professional studio level setup of equipment.

This gear went for thousands of dollars in its time, but often falls below one hundred dollars today and I got the IoLA for ten dollars.. but its a "lot" of trouble to set up.

So you upgraded the hard drive to 7200 RPM. For posterity, which Core 2 Duo is in your Mac Mini, the 2.4 or 2.66 GHz? And how much RAM? It supports between 2 and 8 GB.

How does this compared to the Matrox MX02s?

I have three Macs:

Mac mini 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm (one drive) > Macmini2,1 - Intel Core 2 Duo - 1.83 GHz, 3 GB memory (all tests were performed on this one)

Mac mini server 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm (two drives, stand alone) > Macmini4,1 - Intel Core 2 Duo - 2.66 GHz, 8 GB memory (redundant testing)

Mac Book Pro (mSata, thunderbolt to eSATA) > MacBookPro 9.2 - Intel Core i5 - 2.5 GHz, 8 GB memory (redundant and 10.8.5 testing)

What I have tested of the Matrox have been quick setups with the PCIe card in a PC and with the Thunderbolt adapter on the Mac. It seems Matrox gear of this era is more comparable to the AJA XT or Express line of devices which came after the Io series. Io series was mostly about Uncompressed and late in the game introduced hardware compression with Apple Prores 422.

That is about all I know right now.

I guess we'll see for sure if you test it, though both Matrox and AJA seem to use similar Analog Devices chips in their newer devices, so the video quality would probably be similar.

Jwillis here is my samples:

One is 15 sec AVI 4:2:2 10Bit Video, 24Bit 48Khz audio:

The other is 1:30 sec encoded into MPEG-4 4:2:0 8Bit Video, 16Bit, 48Khz @ 192Kbps:
I used ffmpeg with this simple commend:
Both files exceed website limit of 99 MB, So I used my personal cloud account to upload samples, Don't use DropBox player, instead just download to your hard drive and playback with your preferred player.
The tape will be heading your way shortly so you can do your captures, Keep the tape I don't need it.

Latreche34,


Can I ask what the brand and model of VCR was used to play back the tape?


As in was it JVC, Panasonic or other brand


As in was it a 9600, 9611 or AG1970, AG1980 ect..

JVC HR-S7600AM it is almost the same as any HR-S series with TBC, Don't you have the HR-S7600U ?

Yes.. I have an HR-S7600U

Good, the S7600U is identical to the S7600AM in NTSC mode. The tape has been shipped out today.

Hey guys, since you are among the few who have played with this equipment, I am going to continue the thread and ask here how to make this setup work.

I have set up an IoLa as jwillis84 suggests.

* Using a 2008 MacPro running Snow Leopard with a 7200 RPM drive.
* Source is a known working Panasonic AG-1980.
* IoLa has up-to-date firmware.
* Using VTR Xchange version 4.0 and Control Panel V 1.2. Final Cut Pro has never been run on this computer.

I am connecting via S-Video cable out of VCR to IoLa input. Selected S-Video as video source.

Front panel of IoLa acknowledges presence of S-Video signal and that Firewire is being employed to deliver data to Mac.

AJA Control Panel recognizes and identifies the IoLA. The MacPro detects the IoLa as a Firewire device. However neither Control Panel nor VTR XChange recognize any video signal passing through the IoLa.

In AJA VTR XChange I can select audio presets, but not video presets -- the button is non functional. When I go to the main pane, I see the message "VTR not connected." A pop-up window says: "Couldn't create a video channel. Check your video device connections and try again." Also: "The selected video source is not supported by AJA VTR Xchange. Please choose a KONA or Pro IO Video Source."

Control Panel says: "No Video."

I'm guessing some of the messages want me to use a VTR via the RS-422 connection, but clearly some of them refer to the signal from the VCR. Any advice?

The version of OSX I use that I know works with the AJA IoLa was 10.6.8

The version of AJA VTR Xchange is V4.0

There were multiple firmware updaters for the IoLa from 2.1 to 3.7 it started out fairly basic for Uncompressed capture only later versions added in the TBC function. It was mostly an ASIC FPGA circuit board which was field reprogrammable.

The edge chips could provide more features than the firmware in the early release could support, so they just switched those features off until they could get around to properly supporting them.

In addition to the firewire, firmware updates and the capture application, they also had profiles for final cut pro, so that you could capture from within final cut pro and compress the capture to things like ProRes.

For 2002 it was quite a bundle of parts, but a few years later much simpler solutions existed.

There was a diagnostic tool which I can't recall that draws pictographs of the inputs and outputs, but never quite worked correctly for me.. I mean it sort of worked, but it didn't work on some later versions of OSX like 10.7

OSX 10.7 was when things like audio capture started breaking, even Videoglide just gave up and threw in the towel and turned off audio capture for many devices.

I've learned this coencided with when Microsoft moved from XP to the Vista sound mixer api re-write.

The whole idea of audio video capture was originally intended as a "game development" api.. so they didn't take real audio video capture seriously.. and it tended to have high latency and synchronization problems on both Apple and Microsoft products.

At the time DV hardware codecs, external to the Mac or PC were considered "consumer" quality and good enough for most people. Professionals use DV25 and higher end external equipment to capture and then import it into the Mac or PC either over Firewire or PCI or USB.. but mostly as finished Files.. so there were no sync issues.. the transfers were already digital files.

Only once external hardware got good enough.. and could do MPEG2 captures and stream real time over Firewire, PCI or USB did things heat up and Personal Video Recording of TV shows become a thing.

Uncompressed video capture mostly depends on a "perfect" lossless video and audio signal.. which there was never such a thing.. the longer the capture.. the more frames or samples would be lost and the sync would drift. The shorter the capture the fewer losses and the better the sync. You could sort of fix the sync after capture by splitting scenes and shifting the audio versus video tracks back and forth in an editor.. but is a dogs breakfast. Broadcast video, or Studio video were better at approximating the "lossless" signals that Uncompressed could capture.

But today you kind of have to have a TBC, or some other signal re-generator to force a VCR signal to approximate a perfect signal.. and even then.. its best to make short captures.. not long captures to maintain sync.

Hardware MPEG2 capture more or less re-syncs during capture and has to keep up with any losses in either since the audio and video are time stamped as they go into the compression chip. You pay for that with glitches in the video or sudden pops and clicks in the audio if something is missing.. some low end hardware compression boxes will even just abort the capture when it has underuns of frame or sample data.. some will restart the capture mid-stream and keep going.

Talking about all this makes it sound worse than it actually is.. most times.. you can capture something.. and live with it.. but there is always the pursuit of something better.. which turns this elusive quest into a hobby.

Thanks jwillis84. I think my problem has something to do with not giving VTR XCHANGE something that it is looking for. It won't let me access the "Video settings" panel as you both were clearly able to.

My IO just arrived and I was able to get the "AJA Control Panel" to recognize the analog video signal. However, I can't get AJA VTR XCHANGE to recognize and capture the signal. It seems to want to use RS-422 to control the deck and if it can't do that, it won't recognize the video source.

Your screen capture of the VTR XCHANGE window in your first post indicates it was happy to recognize your video signal, so I must be doing something wrong.

For anyone stuck where I was, I installed a legacy version of Final Cut Pro — FCP6. Once I did that, VTR XCHANGE began to work, even after I quit FCP6. I'm not sure what VTR XCHANGE was looking for, but it's clearly satisfied now.

Hi i do already have a Aja IO HD but i did buy a Aja IO LA so i can test and compare :) but now i need to DIY my own Breakout Cable to the Aja IO LA so i can get the audio i think the Original Breakout Cable is called AJA 12G-AM-8XLR-CBL Breakout Cable

there is a pinout picture on aja homepage but it does not say what input and output are on the 25pol Dsub

my computer is a Mac Pro 5.1 2010 2x3.46Ghz 6 Core Intel Xeon 24gig Ram i have already install Os Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on it

here is the Special version of Snow Leopard that works in Mac Pro 4.1 and 5.1 maybe on older Mac Pro's to

https://archive.org/details/691-6744....0_2010_DVD_DL

is this the right Pinout for the 25pol Dsub inputs and outputs ?

I have that box and I believe that's the correct pinout, I had a picture posted at videohelp let me see if I can find that thread, Okay here it is:

What other laptop requirement for this to work with the Aja box? I'm thinking of buying a Mac laptop with firewire to sell as a complete lossless workflow for Mac users, I will try to find the original Snow Leopard CD if not I will burn one from that link.

Thanks i did look at the link and picture but it does not say what is inputs and outputs on the picture

the link to the Snow Leopard installation file is a special version for Mac Pro 5.1 only i think
the link to that i did get it from this forum post

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...o-5-1.2363578/

here is a List of Macs Compatible With OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard

https://www.macupgrades.co.uk/store/...with_os/10.6.8


and if the Mac only have Firewire 800 then you need Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 adapter like this