Using the MXO2 Mini

One of my clients started the move towards HD and added 1080p LCD monitors and Matrox MXO2 Minis to their suites to output and view HD. I personally own the Blackmagic Intensity card but had considered purchasing the MXO2 Mini. One problem - it wasn't out yet at the time and somehow I had convinced myself I needed to get an HDMI out solution ASAP. I kind of wish I waited for the MXO2 Mini.

If you're not familiar with the Mini, check out this link. Essentially it's an external box that's available with both "desktop" and "laptop" options. The box has HDMI in/out, component, a convertor for S-Video and RCA audio outputs for audio monitoring. One of the big selling points of the MXO2 series is the monitor calibration tool that you'll find in the System Preferences tab:

Here you can tweak the brightness, contrast, hue and chroma of your outputted image. There is also a "Blue only" checkbox that helps you set up your monitor when used in conjunction with color bars. When you install the drivers for the Mini you'll now see several dozen output options in Final Cut Pro. It's a bit daunting to sift through, but every possible outputting format seems to be there. This is one real strength of the box - format support. You're extremely limited in your output options with the Intensity, but with the MXO2s you have just about every flavor of HD, SD and frame rates to choose from.

There are some bugs with the box. Audio seems to be shaky. Frequently audio will distort and sometimes cutout altogether in playback in Final Cut. Usually after a moment or two the audio would return, but on a couple of occasions I had to restart Final Cut to get the audio to come back. Also, lip sync seems hard to achieve when viewing A/V out of the HDMI. There are of course offset tweaks in FCP, but I can never seem to get it exactly right. That, and it seems to be a fluid situation with sync - sometimes it's on, other times it's off just a bit. Hopefully an eventual fix will come out for this.

Another quirk seems to be in the way it handles 720p video, especially if you have certain LCD monitors like the Vizio. At first, anytime I tried to output any flavor of 720p video, the resulting output would yield green and distorted video. Doing a Google search revealed others with the same problem and the fix seems to be to change the "Set main channel format to:" option to 1080. Doing this with the appropriate 720p output setting in FCP yielded noticeably sharper video. The TV is still receiving a 1080p image, but the Mini must be actively uprezzing the video to 1080p. Whatever voodoo magic that's taking place seems to be for the better.