VHS capture with a Mac mini and AJA Io LA?
 

I've a fondness for XP and ATI, but dabble with DVRs and the occasional Firewire capture box.

Someone was letting go an AJA IoLA for $11.

This is a Firewire box for OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard" maximum.. so the equivalent of Windows XP. It captures SD in Uncompressed 422 at 10 or 8 bit.

I've a Mac mini 10.6.8 Core duo running Final Cut Pro 7

The combo of my Mac and FCP7 or Quicktime7 seem to capture well.. but I'm clueless where AJA and Mac capture is concerned. I'd upload a clip but 60 sec is 1.79 GB

I guess beyond comparing it to a typical Hauppauge or Blackmagic HD capture device I'd like to learn what to watch out for.. or whether its something that really isn't viable for VHS capture.

Has anyone experience with the Apple / AJA ProIO line of products?

Thanks

-- update --

I had a fun evening sorting out the minor issues with the IoLA on my mac mini.

End result is rather amazing for capture on a Mac, it looks very good.

I found Final Cut Pro 7 and Quicktime 7 had no problems with it. The AJA drivers installed and offered up the encoder via those two programs as a specific type of hardware device.. its not treated as a Firewire camera.. its its own thing, but works very well at video capture.

In the end though I found their AJA VTR Exchange application was best.. snappy, light weight and just enough app to get the job done. They have mostly the s-video, component, composite capture presets for Uncompressed 10 and 8 bit at several frame rates. Or they have presets for DVPRO and DVPRO50 encoded files.

The only problems I ran into was confusing the drivers and firmware for the other products (Io, IoLD, IoHD) with the drivers and firmware for the IoLA. The installers don't stop you from installing the wrong ones, they simply don't work.

Once I stopped trying to the apply the wrong firmware or drivers.. it was rock solid.

I tried to upgrade my Mac Mini some months ago, but it balked. I had cloned the HDD to a new SSD, did the upgrade there. But it doesn't work. I may leave it as 10.6.8, or at least leave that HDD untouched, and try some of these capturing methods later this year.

I think you'll be pleased.

If your not I'd really be interested in the critique.

I bought the AJA IoLA few weeks ago hoping I could get it to capture under a generic firewire driver on Windows XP or 7 but I was wrong, It was detected as an unknown device. I will put it up for auction if anyone interested.

Edit:
I saw your review of the device over at TH, Very impressive, It is indeed as stable as the BE75, very solid performance.
Maybe we can do side by side comparison, Capture one minute 8bit 4:2:2 file and send me the tape to do the same with the BE75 and will send the tape back to you, What do you think?

Sure.. but I'll have to get back to you on Sunday. I need to do yard work for my Mom today.

I left out a lot of info on the AJA Io LA.. that review was getting long enough.

AJA is a company in the US started by a Television engineer and his wife in Grass Valley, CA.

Their Mac OS X line of products is particularly nice.. but you have to be willing to stop at OS X 10.6.8 and ditch the whole windows angle for capture. Once its a file though.. windows can handle it no problem.

I'd love to offer you something for your Io LA.. but it might not be very much since you can pickup the Io LA very cheap on eBay. - The hard part is finding OS X 10.6.8 gear.

I'm really curious about LordSmurfs opinion about this gear.

It may not be a good idea though since we may not have the same model VCR, That will defeat the purpose of the comparison between the BE and the Aja. I have a basic Sony VHS VCR and a S-VHS JVC HR-S7600AM.

JVC VCRs don't vary that much. My 7965EK (PAL) is probably comparable to the 7600-AM. Or the 7800U.

Jwillis I will capture one minute of a NTSC commercial tape and I will send it over afterwards, You don't have to send it back:
I will do one cap VCR TBC/DNR ON and another cap TBC/DNR OFF, I will leave TBC/Frame sync ON on the capture device assuming your Aja is built in some kind of image stabilization too. Lets do 10bit 4:2:2 and use the same script to convert to mp4. Whenever you're ready PM me a valid address.

The AJA had what John Abt called a TBC built-in from the start, but didn't fully enable it until a later firmware release. As far as I know its fully enabled in the 10.6.8 version of the firmware. There are no obvious checkboxes or sliders for reducing or disabling it.

As for VCRs.. I do have a working JVC HR-S7600U with the dynamic drum. I think I picked it up at a garage sale and it wasn't used much. The drum gears do work.. If LordSmurf is correct and they don't vary that much perhaps we have similar gear?

I don't have any commercial grade tape however, best I can do is low grade consumer stuff.. I was just a young boy when all of this was in its prime.

I have a SONY SLV-393 but I don't think its in the same League as the gear we're talking about.

Yes the HR-S7600U is an identical model to the HR-S7600AM, The only difference is the later has an additional circuit boards for playing back and recording native PAL. I have a good tape, It's a demonstration tape with testing patterns and short clips, I also have a good quality Tom & Jerry VHS tape, Which ever you like.

Either is fine.. it will be interesting to see the quality of the transfer to digital.

I'd be curious to see if the hard drive in the Mac Mini can keep up with 10 bit uncompressed SD video. Is it the stock drive or did you replace it with a SSD? Also, how good are the AJA Io LA's built-in comb filter and TBC?

I used a 7200 rpm Hitachi drive.

Hitachi HTS727575A9E364

Which was an upgrade from the 5400 rpm drive it originally came with and has 16 MB of buffer.

The operating system and the capture drive were one and the same.

But I have a few options.

I also have a mac mini server 2010 which has two drives that can be addressed as separate drives, or combined into a striped set.. if I need more speed. And there are legions of examples online where people simply extended a cable from one of the internal SATA drive ports out the back of the fan slot to connect an external drive or external RAID drive array.

On my mac mini 2010 desktop, the wifi/bluetooth slot can be re-purposed as a SATA slot without removing the super drive.. but I don't think I'm going to go that route. I'm more inclined to permanently use the mac mini server and bring out an eSATA connection and hook up an external drive, or trayless drive enclosure.. then treat those external drives as bricks to plug into a PC or a drive dock for duplication.

The thing is with these Io devices is they are totally geared for "Uncompressed Capture" so they are a tool. After you snap the capture, then you have to either store the raw footage, or get it to another more powerful computer to "encode" it for your purpose either for smaller storage, or polishing as a distribution format.

If you aren't planning on spending time with it, or need color correction or "more than" cutting out commercials.. then might as well get a DVD/HDD recorder and encode direct to MPEG-2 in one step and by-pass all of this.

I really don't think you want to do this for every tape.. unless you have a priceless collection.. but only for problem tapes.. or special tapes like weddings and graduations. Unless.. that is.. you have a lot more money and time than me.

On the other hand.. simply capturing to one of the mac mini server drivers dedicated to the task of capture footage may be enough.. even for Uncompressed 10 bit. The guidelines for RAID for Uncompressed 10 and single drive for Uncompressed 8 were written at a time when 5400 rpm was practically all that was available. A few years later 7200 rpm would be available. A single 7200 rpm might be all that is needed for Uncompressed 10 bit. Offloading that over USB 2.0 could then take as long as it needed.

And then your right.. an SSD is a possibility.. very large SSD are inexpensive today.. but prohibitively expensive back then.

Comb filters are only for CVBS or Composite.. I haven't tested that.. because these Io devices all have S-Video din connection ports. But its a legitimate concern if your 4 Head VCR only has composite out. The TBC was built into the design from the start, but only activated or fully brought online with a firmware update that came almost a year later. There does not appear to be any way to turn it on or shut it off.. other than downgrading or upgrading the firmware.

-- merged --

An excellent OWC article on 5400 rpm vs 7500 rpm vs 5400 after the advent of PMR in 2011

When Slower is Actually Faster

4200 rpm 38 MB/s
7500 rpm 48 MB/s
5400 rpm 115 MB/s

The AJA ProIo line (Io, IoLA, IoLD) ended their support run in 2010

Which means normal disk speeds for the Io user guides printed in 2004 was quite a bit different from what was available in 2010.

Combining PMR with average improvements in drive technology, for a single drive, no RAID striping:

The user reported sustained write transfer speed for my HITACHI HTS727575A9E364 is 118 MB/s

So probably around triple what an Io would expect to see back in its day. That I captured to the operating system drive probably explains why Uncompressed 10 bit was dropping a few frames. I only had 3 GB of memory on the mac mini I was testing with so it was no doubt swapping out to disk.

I also "cheated" just a bit.. Final Cut Pro 7 isn't supposed to work on embedded Intel video processors with no VRAM. But changing a few plist values in the installer by passed the lock out and let me do that.. but the limitations of the mac mini for running Final Cut Pro show up as more swapping out to disk. But otherwise FCP runs fine on a mac mini.

I do prefer the "AJA VTR Exchange" capture application however.

Its much smaller, cleaner start up and intuitive than even creating a new movie with Quicktime Pro 7.

And it just "feels" better designed for the AJA product.

A little more perspective.

The Apple online museum indicated that the Xserver RAID array with 4 drives just broke the 100 MB/s barrier and only with 7 drives or better approached 150 MB/s.

Since Apple was fond of marketing these as capable of multiple streams, and 7 drives fully monopolized one half the array its unlikely 150 MB/s was the norm back in 2003. In fact I think its more likely the 118 MB/s of a single modern 7200 rpm drive will capture Uncompressed 10 bit just fine. I don't think I'll need to make any modifications to either of my mac mini's.

The prime limitation is the 10.6.8 limit of driver support.

You cannot installed 10.6.8 on anything after 2011 Sandy Bridge architecture.. Apple recompiled the OS X kernel to make it impossible. So that limits you effectively to Core 2 Duo, or C2D machines. Some Hackintoshes tried to do this recompiling the Darwin kernel.. but that's a horror show I really don't want to watch.

So its like making a choice between XP or Windows 7.. Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion. This hardware works up to and for Snow Leopard quite well.. but never shall the Ivy Bridge cross.

The all in one computer that I do USB 3.0 capture on was fine with 7200 rpm HDD @ 10 bit SD out of my BE75, I ended up putting in a SSD drive just in case I capture component 1080i/720p materials, I re-purposed the HDD taken out to be used as external storage for the captures.

Ugh..

Just found out what the deal with the Sound Capture with the Io LA was..

Turns out the AJA Io products are all "XLR Professional Level" and consumer is a different "Line Level"

The best description of it with a colorful chart of the relative scales is here

The difference is about 1.1 volts lower for consumer "Line levels" and the XLR Professional levels are expecting a much higher voltage.

The result was I kept capturing really low sound levels.. I thought for a long time something was wrong and finally found that article and went duh.. it needs a pre-stage amplifier or some sort of level converter.

That means using any of the AJA Io gear is going to cost more money than most people are willing to spend to adapter the gear to consumer usage.

Its amazing gear.. but really only for professionals.

Use a mixer from Tapco/Mackie/Behringer. ;)

I've already talked about this in the VH thread you posted in and I posted a diagram there, I'm attaching here. If you have basic soldering skills you can convert to 3.5mm jacks by shorting the cold pin to the ground and you will gain your level back, You can use those jacks with mounting ring like this and run the wires to the board after removing the DB connector.

You can also use RCA to XLR passive adapters where the cold and ground are shorted together, Another way is cutt off the XLR connectors and convert to RCA.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1559192128

I'm not so sure a Voltage level can be corrected with a passive approach, but I will look into it.

I'll revisit the VH thread too.. but I do tend to get lost over there.

I have some pseudo cables I am using to capture the audio I am getting.. but they are appropriately low for the situation of trying to capture from consumer line levels while expecting XLR line levels.

That the AES/EBU connector might simultaneously support consumer levels seems a bit far fetched to me.

(please merge)

I found the VH thread, and took a look at the options.

The problem seems fairly common even today. Rolls makes a device explicitly for this purpose the Rolls MB15b

Its a little overkill in that it is self powered, has line level adjustment for both consumer to pro and pro to consumer.. and it has dual pairs of XLR and RCA as well as 3.5 mm jacks.. so its a "do all" and "all in one" box.

I've had a Rolls mixer for my computer for many years (also bought at BHPhoto) and its never failed me. Their products are all made in the US.. so I think I'll go that way.

They also have Pearson XLR male to female cables in one foot lengths.. which I think Sanlyn or Lordsmurf used to recommend.. so (sigh) .. more money.. but I hope this will put a cap on my adventures through Mac firewire capture land.

If my experience brightens the path for someone else.. that this way comes.. then ok then.

I also recently acquired an AJA IoHD for very little.. seems it rains one type of gear or another when you talk about it.

Its a very sweet box.. but has the same issues with low audio levels.. but works up through OSX Mountain Lion, but also works nicely on Snow Leopard.

I am thinking the same fix with the level shifter/driver will work for it too.. the cable arrangements are identical. (That is XLR for input). But the IoHD has Analog, SDI and HDMI capture with analog or digital audio capture. (Built like a tank however.. and weighs about as much!)

I think I'd summarize for anyone else watching however that AJA IoLA/LD/HD while cheap today, is pro-equipment with pro-results.. but probably beyond most hobbysts means or tolerance to use. A real professional like Lordsmurf or Sanlyn might be able to navigate using it.. but for mere mortals.. there are easier options.. not equivalent.. but easier.

I'm very happy with the AJA Io results when its needed.. but I'm much more inclined to use an MPEG2 based DVD recorder direct to hard drive and offload that on to a PC now that there is software that makes that easy. Its just a better option for dealing with lots and lots of tapes.

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