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AJA Kona Support in Premiere CS5.5
I posted this in a forum on Adobe’s website, where I was told that posting here might get better feedback. Thanks in advance for your help.
I’m new to Premiere, and I’ve encountered some unexpectedly poor performance that I’m currently attributing to my AJA Kona 3, but I’m wondering what I can do about it. I downloaded a trial of CS5.5 and installed the latest AJA drivers (9.0.3) and Adobe plug-ins (9.0.1). Here’s my system configuration:
Mac Pro 4,1
2 Xeon 2.93 Ghz
16 GB RAM (10 GB allocated to PP/AE/AME)
OSX 10.6.5
AJA Kona 3
No CUDA-enable GPU
External RAID storage array w/ fiber interfaceI’m working with a mix of source materials – XDCAM EX footage, ProRes 422 or Animation graphic renders, DVCPro HD or Uncompressed captures – all at 1080/59.94i
For starters, sometimes I have clips that shouldn’t have to render that begin stuttering or failing to play, but after I stop and attempt to play that portion again, it works fine. This becomes very problematic during Export to Tape operations, when it can play through most of a sequence then hang up at the end. It seems most prone to this when switching between video codecs in the same sequence where they are not marked with any render-indicating color. I assume this means the Kona is handling those clips and should be able to play them without any problems. Is there some configuration issue I should look at that will address this? Maybe RAM allocation?
Secondly, I can’t figure out how to output timecode via the 9-pin RS-422. It seems that Premiere is not sending any timecode information to the Kona, because when I enable timecode overlay from the AJA Control Panel, it doesn’t show anything. If I open a Quicktime file using AJA TV, the timecode will display as expected. Is there a configuration option within Premiere that I’m overlooking? Not offering TC output seems like it would be a major oversight, so I’m assuming this is something I simply can’t figure out.
Third, I’m experiencing an odd issue when scrubbing the sequence to find edit points in the audio. When I scrub frame-by-frame, it seems that the audio being played is always from the frame I just scrubbed FROM, not the frame I scrubbed TO (i.e., the current frame). This is not intuitive, and also not how Premiere works in non-AJA sequence presets. I’m assuming that this is just an AJA bug, but wanted to mention it in case I’m overlooking something.
I know this is a lot for one thread, but I appreciate the community’s time, expertise, and help. I really am excited about working with Premiere instead of FCP, but these issues can be frustrating.
Thanks,
Josh -
14 Replies
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Do a search in this and the Premiere Pro forums and you’ll come up with some good info that was discussed recently.
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style! -
Hi Jason. Im the person at the PrP forum that suggested he post here and get some help from the experts at AJA 😉 Both Users and engineers can be good sources of info. And the folks at AJA excel at providing knowledgeable tech support.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
[Josh Pappas] “2 Xeon 2.93 Ghz”
You need to have an 8 core machine minimum to make the AJA Kona work correctly with Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 I’ve already documented that in this forum. Particularly for ProRes material.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media -
Sorry for not being clear – It’s two Xeon processors, and each has 4 physical cores.
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Oops! Didn’t mean to give Josh the runaround, but I knew there were some good threads on this subject.
Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style! -
[Josh Pappas] “Sorry for not being clear – It’s two Xeon processors, and each has 4 physical cores.”
Well then that should be good to go.
I’m not sure what to suggest for anything else you’re having issues with at this time. I’m also brand new to Premiere Pro as well. We were having slow / stuttering playback issues originally but then determined that was due to the four core machine I was testing on. Since I moved to the 8 core, playback has been very smooth and normal with ProRes, XDCAM and P2 material.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media -
We’re talking about increasing the RAM in this workstation, so maybe that will help. It seems that it’s easily using all 10 GB of the current allocation for PP/AE/AME, and sometimes it feels like we’ve hit a wall when it runs out while multitasking. I’m looking at 32 GB, which doesn’t seem unreasonable from what I’ve read.
Thanks for your help. I’ll post an update if anything changes.
Josh
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What Graphics card are you using?
Tom Grotting
Digital Pictures
Minneapolis -
I’ve got two Nvidia GeForce GT 120 cards for dual DVI output, but no CUDA support, unfortunately. That’s another upgrade being considered, but probably under next year’ budget.
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I may have found an issue that sheds some light on this. I pulled up AJA’s recommended slot configuration, which says that the Kona 3 should be in slot 2 or 3. Ours is in slot 4. I’m going to move some things around to see if that helps.
Out of curiosity, the system specs show slots 3 and 4 as both being PCI-e x4 slots, so what would be different about being in 3 instead of 4? If it works, it works, but I always like to know why.
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