Hey again.....

I ran this by the hardware guys this am..... and here is what Dave had to say.

" I agree that newer laptops with Express Card could have a single lane PCIe 2.0 (this is optional according to Wikipedia).  However, Mojo DX was designed in 2006 with PCIe gen 1.  The bandwidth required for 10 bit (16 bit over the PCIe cable) does not work with gen 1 PCIe single lane.

Some of the Open I/O vendors implemented V210 compression when sending 10 bit over the PCIe cable.  These will play and capture 10 bit using laptops with Express PCI.  Avoid USB 3.0 I/O devices.  I have tested a few and they do NOT work!!  Too many issues with drivers and bandwidth requirements.

Personally, I would get one of the new thunderbolt I/O devices from AJA or Blackmagic.  We have had no issues with these and performance is good  (currently testing AJA IO4k and BM Ultrastudio 4k)."

HTH

Marianna 

and more fodder

" Oh, he missed the part about adrenaline 10bit on an old XW8200.  The software was pushing DNx to the hardware over firewire.  Bandwidth required is either 145 Mb/sec or 220 Mb/sec.  The adrenaline HD card was doing the decompress.  This required a special firewire driver to get the bandwidth required for DNx220 with 8 channels audio.

Current architecture sends uncompressed HD (8 bit or 10 bit) over PCIe to Mojo DX or nitris DX.  The product designers decided not to go with V210 compression so that we could upgrade to 12 bit in the future (which has not happened at this time)."

Marianna 

Hi Mercer,

It appears that the AVID Certified products question regarding 10-bit support with Laptops has been answered by Marianna.

Bluefish444 have done many tests in house with numerous Thunderbolt Expansion products and so far have found them to be very fast and extremely flexible. The advantage of using a Bluefish444 card inside an expansion chassis is simple really as you can consolidate multiple devices into a single chassis while still accessing the benefits of Bluefish444 hardware and our fully featured AVID Open IO integration. 

A good example of the above is the Thunderbolt 2 devices from Magma or Netstor which can house AVID Certified Bluefish444 SDI/HDMI devices along with HDD/SDD and HBA or RAID controller. If you are on the road alot then you can transport the storage and Video IO in a single device with One Power and One Thudnerbolt connection.

You are more than welcome to enquire with Bluefish444 to find out the recomended configurations.

http://www.bluefish444.com/

Another good alternative is the New Bluefish444 Low Profile card pictured below, alongside a Sonnet SEL device which all in all is a really nice compact high quality solution.

As i mentioned before we are more than happy to guide you through the options available for you to provide SDI/HDMI support for Media Composer.

Regards,

Tom Lithgow

Bluefish444 

Bluefish444:

Another good alternative is the New Bluefish444 Low Profile card pictured below, alongside a Sonnet SEL device which all in all is a really nice compact high quality solution.

Thanks Tom, but my laptop doesn't have Thunderbolt, very few pc laptops do yet, only I think the Lenovo W540 on the certified list. I agree with both you and Marianna it's the way to go, but muggins here didn't buy that laptop. In any case I wouldn't want a pci express expansion chassis as it gets away from the whole point of portability and since I am building a new desktop workstation in the near future (for Pro Tools and Avid) it's not necessary. But I do like your products (looked at them years ago for the old XW8200) I'll consider them then.

Thanks once again Marianna, very thorough! I am disappointed in the USB 3.0 answer, I would of thought bandwidth wasn't an issue, though I know implementation varies wildly depending on the motherboard. According to test software (windows SDK) usb 3.0 performance on my laptop is reliably full speed. However I know the drivers are a real problem and so far not impressed with BM support (who are the only makers of 3rd party usb 3.0 I/O).

Just to be clear to I don't need, or work with, uncompressed 8bit or 10 bit HD, only DNxHD, which is fully sufficient for HD broadcast work that I do. So the bandwidth requirements are much less. Though I reaalise the HD-SDI/HDMI signal is uncompressed and that's perhaps what you meant? Don't all 3rd party I/Os decompress in hardware anyway?

I fully trust your wise advice but I'm going to have to test the Shuttle and the Ultrastudio myself though because a) I don't have Express card on this laptop (Lenovo Z510) either and b) I'm assured (from BM) that they work at least with Davinci Resolve. So hopefully I can get some portable HD finishing solution there. Otherwise I'm stuffed and I'll have to do all finsishing at base on the desktop.

Thanks too for your candid revelation of the Mojo DX - PCIe gen 1 is making it look a bit EOL now. But hopefully this thread is of some use to others as it proves with the right Mac or PC laptop (with Thunderbolt) you can put together a viable mobile Avid solution for both offline and online and Avid has finally removed this limitation from the ReadMe.

Thanks for all your help (and Carl too) you've answered enough questions, I'm on my own now!