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best HD video output card?
any suggestions on the best card to preview HD on an external monitor from AE? I have heard a lot oof good things about the Blackmagic cards, but i’m not sure if there’s a better alternative out there. I am running AE 6.5 on a Dell XPS w/XP Pro. Budget is not a huge concern, I just need a good output card. Thanks!
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4 Replies
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AJA Video Systems makes the best video cards out there right now. The Xena series runs on Windows machines. http://www.aja.com. We run three of their Kona cards in our Mac / HD systems here and they’re used in a LOT of HD broadcast including NASCAR, Super Bowl and World Series.
Support is second to none as well, so if you need any help along the way, they’re there to help.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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For my money, Blackmagic are the leaders of the pack. Never had a single problem with their gear – it just works.
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Maybe a dumb question but: what do these cards do apart from capturing? Are they just there to encode HD in realtime when you render a project or can you even speed up previews within the applications(Premiere+AE)?
On the Aja website for the Xena HS card it says something about plugins for AE. Do this plugins contain effects/codecs or what is it?
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[Stefan Tapper] “Maybe a dumb question but: what do these cards do apart from capturing? Are they just there to encode HD in realtime when you render a project or can you even speed up previews within the applications(Premiere+AE)?”
On the Mac side of things, the AJA Kona series captures and converts video to any format. So if you have DV footage and you want to work in HD, the Kona 3 will Upconvert your footage to HD. It will Downconvert HD to SD. It will also pretty much capture anything to anything. Digibeta to DV, DV to Uncompressed 8bit, BetaSP to DVCPro 50, etc…… So in addition to just capturing and displaying footage, the AJA boards can also convert footage being captured to another format.
I’m pretty certain the Xena series mirrors what the Kona boards can do, and I think they even have a few features not available on the Mac.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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