Mac Minis for Video Ingest

We are in the market for some capture cards for the new 2012 Mac Minis.

I am curious if anyone is using Mac Minis to capture video from an Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt (Or Ultrastudio Express) directly to ProRes 422 using Media Express?

My plan is to get a 7200 rpm drive for each mini in an External USB3/Firewire 800 enclosures.

Anyone tested anything like this?

Each room will have different requirements, but 1080i 29.97 would be the largest frame size/rate.

Thanks for your help.

I'd go for the ultra studio express or the mini recorder, depending if you want to replay the video

Hi,

we are using the previous model MacMini Server to capture a 1080p60 HDMI video signal to ProRes 422.

We have the following setup:

MacMini Server with two internal drives
Ultra Studio 3D connected via Thunderbolt

We are grabbing the video to the second internal disk of the MacMini. We have tried to capture to an attached Synology NAS storage but that did not work because even though the tranfer rate of the NAS was fast enough we had occasional transfer rate drops that would lead to frame drops in the recorded video.
Recording to the internal disk works nicely without any frame drop, even at 1080p60.

After the recording has finished, we just copy the recorded file to a NAS for further use with FCP X.

So I would be careful if you plan to attach an external storage with USB or FW. Check it first to see if you can get a sustained transfer rate to the external drive.

The choice of Capture device is basically depending on you capture requirements. Basically any one would do as long as your video timing is listed in the technical data of that device.

We are not using Media Express. Instead we have designed our own capture application.

The main reason for that are:

time code for the captured video - Media Express can not put a time code on the video that is based on the Mac internal clock.

Remote control of the capure Mac - Media Express can not easily be scripted

Capture to AFP volume (even though that we are not using this anymore) - Media Express can not really record to external AFP volumes. The recording will silently fail once a certain file size of the captured video is reached.

Our capture application can remote control a number of MacMini recorders (we currently have 6 of them) from on master machine. We can gang the recorders or record individually.

Hope this helps...

Klaus