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Aja and Cineform and Premiere – Oh My!
After fiddling around with many different configurations and going back and forth between Apple and Windows for the last couple of years, I recently made the commitment to The Adobe Production Studio and Premiere Pro 2.0. So I just received my new dual processor HP xw8200, equipped with the Aja Xena LH board, SCSI adapter with Medea RTR3 VideoRaid, 4 GB of RAM. I’ve also been using Cineform Aspect HD, and I’ve been advised it plays nicely with the Aja board. So I’ve been very excited to make the most of these tools and speed up my workflow.
Except now I’m faced with so many project setting options that my head hurts. My source material will be coming from the JVC HD100, as well as Betacam SX. I’ll be able to use the SDI in and out uncompressed for Beta SX — that’s SD and I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on my preferred settings for that.
When it comes to the HDV footage, I’m trying to determine which project settings will give me the best results, in terms of quality and real-time performance. Cineform HDV? This only seems to give me the ability to ingest via firewire, and I can’t find a way to use the Aja board to output the image via component to my HD monitor – which is a major reason I bought it. Adobe HD-SDI would be an option, except it doesn’t have a setting for 720p 30, which is the most common format that I shoot on the JVC camera. When I select the Aja Quicktime capture, using the Aja serial control and component input, the footage looks beautiful on my monitor as it’s capturing. But it doesn’t show up in my Premiere bin, and despite the fact it says it’s capturing, I can’t find it! I even tried giving the file unique names and then searching my computer, but I don’t see it. Finally, if I’m using anything other than the Cineform capture, it seems like I’m not taking advantage of it.
This doesn’t even take into consideration the option of using the Aja Machina software for capturing, which also had me scratching my head as to where the video went after I supposedly “captured” it.
I really spent some time researching the best combination of hardware and software and thought I had a pretty good handle on it, but now I’m more confused than ever! Sometimes I wish I could just be an editor instead of an IT guy, but I don’t think that’s possible these days…
Any insights or references would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much.
Dean
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3 Replies
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Dean,
The AJA 720p30 settings in PPro2 and Machina (from my understanding) are only intended for Panasonic Varicam footage – where it can read “active” frame flags in the HD-SDI stream to only capture the 30 frames. 1280x720p always transmists data (via HD Component Analog or HD-SDI) as 59.94fps or 60fps. Since the software can’t detect any ‘active’ frame flags on the HD Component Input(since none exist) – it won’t capture anything. I agree – it probably should be documented better.
You could however just capture the HDV MPEG2 data via FireWire with the HDV Capture Module that ships with PPro2. The AJA board can play out the compressed 1280x720p HDV MPEG2 video out of the AJA board from a 1280x720p 29.97 AJA Project. Just make sure you have a AJA project that is 1280x720p29.97 and the AJA Video Output(in Playback settings) is set to 1280x720p29.97 – the AJA board will then correctly add the 2:2 pulldown to play out at 1280x720p59.94 in real-time(Once again – I think that should be documented better by AJA too!!) FYI – you can also downconvert the SDI or analog to SD in realtime too.
For any effects and/or rendering – there’s a handfull of color effects that AJA has realtime acceleration for, and you can also set your video rendering engine to use MPEG2(keeping all rendered effects as compressed) or you could set the rendering engine to 8/10-YUV uncompressed so you don’t lose any quality on rendering.
Hopefully that helps
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Prospect has settings for 720p 30…set up a Prospect project for 720p 30 (it should be labelled as HDV somehow in the listing I think…) and capture via CineForm HDV FireWire.
First though…with the LH card series, you will need to ununstall the AJA drivers and reinstall all BUT the Premiere Pro drivers as CineForm has their own drivers for the card and the AJA Retail PPro drivers (which would give you the AJA project settings) conflict. You do want to have the rest of the AJA drivers installed however as the AE output and Photoshop output is great, and the system needs some drivers to operate the device.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
Thanks Tim and Dezmond for the suggestions and info. Tim, is this procedure documented somewhere?..I must have missed that in the manual :).
I’ll contact Aja support to ask them about it, but it really goes to my point regarding the need to be a IT
pro or software engineer in order to edit these days. It also seems strange to me that these drivers would be in conflict – didn’t Cineform just have a promo that bundled their product with the Xena card?Thanks again for the responses.
Dean
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