AJA and realtime

[David Battistella]

The aja has the following realtime acceleration.

It helps DVCPRO HD footage
It does real time up and down conversion.

if you are planning to use FCP you should be made aware that “most” of the RT you get is a combination of the speed of the drive system (this determines how many streams can be had) and the speed of your mac. so if you want the most real time, you by the fastest mac and the fastest drives.

The KONA 2 accelerates the performance of certain DVC codecs (check teh website for which) and it will save you a ton of time and rendering by up and down converting on the fly.

David

PS with a 4 gigabit fiber card and a mac g5 2.7 gig I can pull about 10 streams of dv before having to render (the drive is a HUGE 4210)

[Shane Chadder]

Thanks David

If are pulling these 10 streams realtime can you print to tape without rendering? Or is there some “prepare” work the computer does before you go out to tape.

Can you include DV on an uncompressed timeline and print to tape without any rendering of the material or do you have to render it all?

[David Battistella]

You could theoretically edit to tape without rendering if you wish. If there is a light gren bar in the timeline then you can print to video@full rez, but it is nice to render everything. I always do this on an AVID as well.

No mix and match media in an uncompressed timeline. If you drop DV into the uncompressed timeline you will be seeing the red bar. The frame sizes are different too. Unompressed 10 bit is 720X486 but you loose six lines in DV 720X480.

David

[Shane Chadder]

Thanks so much.

BTW Decklink is doing realtime DV and uncompressed on the same timeline in Windows. I don’t think they do as many real time streams as AJA tho. I guess I’ll have to decide which is more important.

We are moving from a Discreet Edit / Digisuite world where you only renedered certain FX and just printed to tape everything that is realtime. I’m hoping to keep that workflow.

Shane

[Gary Adcock]

[David Battistella] “The aja has the following realtime acceleration.
It helps DVCPRO HD footage, It does real time up and down conversion. “

the Kona 2 also assisting with the HDV native codec also, offering realtime transitions, monitoring and playback of this compressed format also.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Rich Rubasch]

Shane, you might want to check out Avid Xpress Studio HD…It can play HD, SD, DV and HDV all in the same timeline and all realtime. It can up or downconvert on the fly in realtime.

FCP is limited in its realtime capabilities because every clip you drop in a given sequence must match the sequence settings or it has to be rendered to the sequence settings. It allows tremendous flexibility in using various codecs, frame rates, field order, etc, but everything must match the sequence settings.

Avid is of the opinion that this is not the best workflow, and with the original Xpress with Mojo, you could mix DV and SD on the same timeline. Now, with the HD version of Xpress Studio they upped the bar by adding HD and HDV resolutions along with realtime up or down convert on the timeline. The HDV implementation of this technology is due out in the Fall, but the system is shipping now.

I have the Aurora Pipe Pro Studio card on a FCP setup, but I recently saw the Avid demo and was impressed by the mixing of different sources on either a DV, SD, HDV or even HD timeline.

Have a look,

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Gary Adcock]

[Rich Rubasch] “Avid is of the opinion that this is not the best workflow, and with the original Xpress with Mojo, you could mix DV and SD on the same timeline. Now, with the HD version of Xpress Studio they upped the bar by adding HD and HDV resolutions along with realtime up or down convert on the timeline. The HDV implementation of this technology is due out in the Fall, but the system is shipping now.”

since Avid’s only use their own hardware, have poor implementation for third party products, does not support off speed footage from the Varicam, is still promising HDV support, oH and did you mention that you cannot use FW HDcapture or Storage with the Mojo attached? that is not a solution it’s a kluge.

I can play multiple types of content in my FCP timeline on a 2.7 g5 with proper amounts of ram. Rather than selling this person your services why not ask a better question
“Why are you Mixing content? Most clients do not give you a hard drive with content – you get tapes- in a professional environment digitize all of the tapes in the same manner. Mini DV can be captured as 10bit and beta can be captured as DV. Make the content yours there are many products AJA makes that can solve this problem from the IO is SD to the Kona2 for HD. and the work.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Rich Rubasch]

If you have HDV, DV and SD sources, you would not want to downconvert the HDV or the Beta to DV, most likely. What the Avid allows you to do is digitize the Beta via component to Uncompressed SD, the DV via firewire to DV, and the HDV via firewire to HDV, then start cutting in a sequence of your choice and the system does the converting on the fly.

Are you kidding? This isn’t a better solution to multiple formats? Because, if you can imagine, you can then build the program in an SD sequence and output station dubs to your Betacam via component, then copy the same sequence to an HDV timeline and output to the HDV deck realtime to an HDV master.

Although it is true that you can digitize to whatever size/codec you wish and then cut that way in FCP, you are then locked to that resolution and codec for the rest of the edit. AVID realized that in the short term, you might want an SD output, a DV output and an HDV output from the same sequence, and without rendering, you get that with Avid Xpress Studio HD.

I’m a FCP guy myself, but saw the Avid demo and a light bulb went off!

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Shane Chadder]

Thanks Rich

The mixed formats make sense to me to. Why uncompress dv to take up 5x the disk space when there is nothing to be gained. If you can work native DV on an uncompressed timeline all your renders will be uncompressed and everything else passes through as camera original.

I know of Avid’s DV express, but most of our equipment is SDI and I think you have to go up to Adrenaline to get SDI. Canopus Edius is very good that way, (can mix Pal and NTSC realtime to) but again getting SDI i/o is a premium closed box.

There are a couple of other boxes that will do mixed timelines, Leitch’s Velocity and Matrox’s Axio. We may get one of these for packaging work but it is overkill for long form docs where something like Decklink may be enough.

Decisions decisions.

[Jim Blokland]

Hello:

Another thing to consider…in my research on Xpress Pro with Mojo, I found a little-advertised tidbit — that uncompressed in AVID with the Mojo is limited to 8-bit. Something to keep in mind, especially if your work is graphics-heavy.

Best, JIM.

OSX.4.1
Dual 2.7 G5
3.5 GB RAM
Radeon X800 XT
Kona 2 / K-Box