Re: what's better sdi or firewire?

The idea of constantly crawling on the floor and disconnecting cabling does seem pretty silly (unless you in fact have a Firewire patch bay) and you have your equipment centralized in a machine room, where you can run your multiple MAC G5 CPU's to a FW400 bay, and patch the single HD VTR (like the HD1200) into these VTR's. I can only assume that users like Walter own a Firewire 400 interface device, like an AJA I/O or I/O LA, and must disconnect the AJA box to hookup the HD1200 (or other FW400 devices) when he wants to use them. If you own the gear, and no one else is using it, I guess this is what happens, but when you are in a multi user enviornment, bringing everything to bays (or a router) just makes sense. If you have 2 or more FCP HD systems, and are sharing a single HD1200, then you either have Gefen (for example) KVM extenders for your CPU's to keep the firewire legnth short for the HD VTR, or you pick up the deck each time, and bring it from room to room, recabling each time you want to use it.

Please don't give the misconception that you simply buy one TecNec $120 firewire patch bay, and you are done. Multi room use of equipment requires all kinds of stuff.

Bob Zelin