CUDA card or Kona 3 – Pick 1 for use

[Chris Knight]

There was a period, about two years ago, when AJA didn’t even respond to emails or phone calls (CS4 had just been released). It was very odd, because when I first got an AJA LHe (back in 2006, when Windows cards were called Xena), they returned my calls within 5 minutes, had beta drivers out weekly, etc. Since I got everything working as well as I can in CS5, I’m not changing a thing until I know the company starts caring more about their Windows customers.

[Tim Kolb]

A couple things…

First…very few third party vendors had much luck with CS4…you’ll recall that the software changed over from having one set of video settings for the -project- to having video/audio settings for each -sequence-… This completely broke every third party software or hardware product that used the hooks to the project and Adobe did not get the developer info out early enough in the cycle and frankly most third party vendors struggled with it until it came time to move on to CS5 development lest they be behind in their efforts with that release… This ended up being the case for many of the third party vendors, and unfortunately CS4 was a pretty good release otherwise so all the egg appeared to the users to be on the third party vendor’s faces unfairly.

Second…yes, AJA is definitely an Apple-centric company in many product lines…the KiPro line which captures ProRes being a clear example.

…at NAB once again in the AJA booth, we had two of us who were Premiere Pro/Windows guys on one station in the booth running all the CineForm and 3D content, and nearly all the other stations were Macs with FCP…other than that behemoth out in front running four full HD SDI outputs to tile and create a 4K image on that monster Sony LCD on the main aisle…that was Adobe running as FCP7 can’t handle 4K. FCPX can handle 4K, but with no RED support, I doubt we’ll see a lot of FCPX users Log and Capturing to 4K ProRes files…

I think that AJA is likely quite focused on where they’ll be placing their efforts in the future and I suspect that PPro as well as Avid figure in quite heavily.

AJA is a company that makes seriously solid hardware and has had historically excellent support. I’m not saying that they’re perfect as their targets are always moving, but they are definitely motivated to keep the reputation of their products consistent.

In the current environment I think that Matrox’s success with the MX02 line and BlackMagic’s early implementation of Thunderbolt will continue to motivate them to take care of their customers.

On CUDA and AJA…for the CUDA contribution the the Media Encoder, you should see no real change. Keep in mind that part of what makes the Mercury Playback Engine (which is present regardless of CUDA augmentation) so efficient is the ability to drop resolution while editing on any format.

(CineForm has this specific to their codec and Premiere Pro used to have something called “draft” mode, but nothing as well-executed as Mercury seems to be).

Half resolution is decoding/displaying a quarter of the pixel count…and when you calculate an effect, you get an advantage from only having to process a quarter of the pixels (or even less if you set the resolution lower). CUDA acceleration on top of that makes for a very responsive editing experience.

When you are using an SDI output card, you’re typically sending out video full res, so there is four times the work to be done on the frame decode…and then also on any effect you’re processing…then the frame (as I said before) has to be “back shipped” from the display card GPU to the CPU/PCIe buss to go out the SDI card, so you’re decoding more data, sending more data out to the CUDA engine, then you’re using bandwidth in that same pipe to pull the full frame back to the CPU whereas with a non-SDI sequence, you be processing the frames and squirting them out the DVI port into the ether…

It’s not that you have to choose one or the other…they’re simply designed for different purposes.

Chris’s advice was as solid as it gets for the most time-effective way to go about this at this point in time. Edit on a sequence that doesn’t use the AJA card and nest the sequence or copy/paste it into an AJA sequence when you need to master out…that gives you the best of both worlds. If you have an SDI monitor for a client monitor, that may not be possible, or you may consider giving the client a panel that can take a DVI or DisplayPort drop.

Does that help clarify the situation?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tom Daigon]

Yes Tim, thank you very much. The 2 step approach makes sense…but doesn’t work in a production facility environment where clients are sitting with you and watching the HD/SDI signal on the screen judging performance, lighting and nuances. Working with the Kona signal in this situation is mandatory.
If I were working alone I could see doing it the other way, but 60% of the work I have done is with clients present. I have had lots of very good experiences with AJA and I feel that they will be focusing more attention on Adobe given the major shift of users to CS5.5.
Its nice to be clear in my mind about the CUDA card approach as opposed to the AJA card approach and the strengths / drawbacks of each.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Chris Knight]

FYI, When I’m not using the Kona – and as Tim suggested – I use a DVI output to a plasma screen, and the quality is pretty much on par with the SDI signal (certainly good enough for client viewing). The Kona goes SDI->VTR->Blackmagic converter->HDMI->plasma, and – other than a slight gamma shift, the two are pretty close. I really only need the Kona for VTR I/O.

[Jeff Bernstein]

As of today, you will want to use the AJA Adobe CS5.5 9.0.1 plug-ins with the AJA 9.0.3 driver. So much for syncing version numbers. The 9.0.3 drivers fixed the issue with Nvidia and Kona cards being in the same computer under the 32-bit kernel. If you look at the release notes, you will notice, as noted above, that AJA rewrote their drivers to play nice and take advantage of the Mercury Engine.

And just to clarify Tim’s statement, I worked with Tim at the AJA booth at NAB. We were actually showing FCP7 outputting 4K. In this case, the standard we were using was the Sony 4xHD standard. As a result, the dimensions are 1920x1080x4. The math works out to just under the QuickTime limit of 4K. We were playing back both uncompressed and ProRes footage. To playback the uncompressed 4xHD signal, we had (2) Sonnet 8-gig fibre raids striped together so as to avoid the remote possibility of a dropped frame even though one raid would suffice, especially with the latest firmware on the RAID.

Though, I think I would have preferred stealing one of the 4K projectors from Barco to show off the footage that came from the Epic camera. 😎

[Tim Kolb]

[Jeff Bernstein] “And just to clarify Tim’s statement, I worked with Tim at the AJA booth at NAB. We were actually showing FCP7 outputting 4K. In this case, the standard we were using was the Sony 4xHD standard. As a result, the dimensions are 1920x1080x4.”

Thanks for that, Jeff…

I got an email from HQ letting me know that that machine was running FCP (for any of you who feel that AJA and other manufacturers ignore these forums)…

I could have sworn I looked at the interface and it was Adobe. My mistake. (for those of us who like our tools but don’t make them a religion, the UI for FCP and PPro are far more similar than not…and I apparently am due for an optometrist visit…)

So…please pardon me on that one. My mistake entirely.

Also in all the pipeline explanation, I forgot to get a plug in there for the newest Kona drivers that have advanced substantially in the ability of a Kona sequence to benefit from CUDA performance augmentation.

So Tom…I think you may be headed for a far better experience than you originally thought!

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tom Daigon]

Tim,I think you are right. AJA has always impressed me with the professionalism of their products and wonderful tech support. Im glad they are NOTHING like Apple. 😉

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com