MXO2 vs Decklink for monitoring

Question

Master suite cs5
I am looking for something that will improve my external monitoring. (dell ultra sharp)
I am not really concerned with its encoding capabilities and i only use avchd, prores and dvcpro. Compressor (fcs2) is fine for h264 encoding. My capture is normally from an sd card.
I am not even sure if a Flanders and a Kona3 is necessary as the internet slowly takes over traditional TV broadcasting and high quality h264 begins to be a standard.
What i am trying to get is a better way to monitor the color as i am creating looks with PP, AE and magic bullet.
so could i go for a cheaper alternative and get better monitoring than my current BM intensity via hdmi?
cheaper than mxo2

Answer 1

I use a BM SDI Decklink card, and it works pretty well in Premiere. I say pretty well because there is a very slight lag to it. As the Transmit technology is new in CS6 I'm fairly forgiving of this, hopefully new updates from Black Magic and Adobe fix this over time.
It works fine from any sequence preset for me, not just the Black Magic ones.
If you want better monitoring, I would definitely be looking at upgrading your monitor, not your output card.
Jim Simon wrote:
Compressor (fcs2) is fine for h264 encoding.
You may want to rethink that.
"...you’ll be happy to know that Adobe Media Encoder is much easier to use than Compressor, encodes faster, and produces much higher quality [H.264] output..."
http://www.eventdv.net/Articles/News/Feature/Tutorial-Encoding-H.264-V ideo-in-Adobe-Media-Encoder-CS5.5-and-Apple-Compressor-4-80446.htm
I'd be interested in more details about that, like what settings they used in Compressor and what the relative file sizes were between the two outputs. I've done a lot of h264 outputs from Compressor and I've never seen anything like the obvious levels of data loss they're showing. That said, I use Compressor 3, they're using Compressor 4. Maybe someone who's familiar with Compressor 4 can confirm whether things have changed and they no longer have a high quality output mode or something?