Mbox2 Smacked my HD Video

[DonM]

Here's an interesting one I wanted to share with folks ...

In addition to my audio work, I produced events, and did THIS ONE on February 9 focused on The Beatles first performance on the Ed Sullivan show on the same date in 1964. The event was a multi-media event with audio, video, live presentations and ultimately the original 1964 broadcast.

One of the films I produced interviewed folks regarding that event. Worth watching . We did a tech rehearsal a couple days prior and my 13" MacBook Pro (specs below) drove the VGA dual LED projectors perfectly ... the video looked great.

The night of the show, I plugged an Mbox2 into my MBP to drive the house PA and when we did our reheasal, the video started to look very very slightly chopped or maybe strobe like. It wasn't that much of a problem I thought, but the video people were freaking out. We tried everything - even the local video was affected. During our isolation of the issue we realized we hadn't used the Mbox during the prior days rehearsal. You've guessed right, the Mbox2 on USB was smacking down the video refresh on my MacBook. The Mbox's affect was less evident on some of the period footage I was using, but the HD stuff was definitely affected. I moved to a Firewire interface and all was fine.

No criticism of the Mbox, just a worthwhile piece of data in case someone runs across a similar issue.

MacBook Specs:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,5
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
Type: GPU
Bus: PCI
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0863
Revision ID: 0x00b1
ROM Revision: 3427



Best

-D