AE I/O Card

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

[quote] do any of the cards out there support HDV natively? Also, do you have recommendations for cards that play well with AE?

[/quote]

AE supports HDV natively, but all internal processing and previewing is uncompressed. Note that even if you use HDV as source, there’s no compelling reason to master back to HDV tape or files. It will only introduce unwanted compression, and it’s not a standardized delivery format anyway.
So when previewing this way from AE, HDV sources will look perfectly, but non-HDV material (graphics, text, etc) will not be degraded my HDV’s MPEG-2 compression.

Cards from AJA and Decklink both provide video output from AE. It’s up to you choosing which brand and model you prefer. I understand both will also let you preview HDV projects from PPro, but it would be a good idea checking with the vendors.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Tim Stonesifer]

Thanks for the thoughts. Few of us at our station (even the engineer) think that HDV is the ideal format. However, with a desire to go to HD, but lacking the budget, HDV is what we’re stuck with – at least until we get the funding. I’ll look around the Premiere forum to see what people say about the AJA/Decklink’s compatibility with HDV – the companies’ websites surprisingly aren’t very helpful.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Tim:
You don’t need a budget.
HDV is fine as an acquisition format. You can master to a digital file, and bypass tape for mastering. There’s no specific advantage for mastering to HDV, even if the content originated in HDV. Of course, unless you are required to do so. In that case, plase ignore this.

In any case, you can’t add HDV compression to AE’s video preview. It will always be uncompressed, except when previewing DV25 or DV50 over Firewire devices. An editing application works differently in this regard.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Tim Stonesifer]

Thanks Adolfo. Yeah, we’re still figuring out the HDV workflow – I’m sure we’ll get it figured out.

I’ve been digging around a bit since I first posted, and the Matrox Axio has come up as another option. Have other AE users used this card before? It seems to have more of what we’d be looking for on the Premiere side, but AE is my top priority.

[Steve Roberts]

The usual workflow, as far as I’ve heard, is to get out of HDV as soon as possible. As soon as you ingest, encode to something like ProRes. Then work in AE and/or your edit app, then output to your mastering medium such as Digibeta, ProRes, DVD, whatever.

As Adolfo wrote, HDV is an acquisition format. It’s not a post-production format.