Maxx Digital Mobile Rocket in House
3/24/2010 05:00:04 AM by admin | 
The new year has brought us a new gift! We just received the first Mobile Rocket from Maxx Digital of Huntington Beach, CA. The mobile rocket has given us the ability to bring the Red Rocket on set using a laptop and one of our grading monitors playback .r3ds realtime and through rocketcine and apply one-light passes before the transcode. Just having the ability to set the one-lights to all the reels on set with the DP supervising is absolutely amazing!! But, that's not all the Mobile Rocket gives you all the benefits of the red rocket including the increased transcoding times, and the playback of 4K footage from a laptop. First impressions:
Before the day began i installed all the necessary drives and firmware into my laptop make sure everything was working proper, and everything worked flawlessly. Only problem i had with the laptop red rocket combo was the dialog box that pops up initially on rocketcine launch warning that the rocket needs a 8x PCI to work properly, but the rocket works fine anyways. I just don't like the idea of having to explain what that dialog box means every time i fire up this rig for the DP.
Working on set:
The mobile rocket is durable, clean, and compliments a Mac Book Pro very well. The rubber feet on top the box provided a neat lift for your laptop to rest upon, and the Red Rocket badge on the front of the box is easily distinguishable as a Red product. All the necessary I/O is provided by Maxx to marry the computer to the mobile rocket to make a very well designed professional system. After setting up my 10 bit 1080p monitor to the provided red rocket HD-SDI BNC i took a step back and was just impressed with the presentation of the system, and how neat all the cables are streamline my new system looks.
Before lunch the gaffer was instructing his crew for the next setup; which gave me sometime to work with the DP on a few looks for reels that had been shot the previous day. Now i had a few minor issues with playback; when stopping a clip the frames would jump around the clip trying to find the last frame. Regardless this little hick up was not a big deal we applied one lights to 6 reels in 45 minutes; ready to transcode.
Direct link to Maxx's mobile rocket: