DeckLink HD Pro 4:2:2’s realtime capabilities

[Yves De muyter]

Maybe BMD has to become a little bit more clear about RT-effects. Are those done on the DeckLink or just on the CPU? Since the CPU doesn’t have to do any decompressing/compressing, a lot of CPU power can be used for RT effects! This is how AVID does his trick with the mojo. The mojo doesn’t do a single effect!

I must guess that the AXIO will do fx on their board (it’s what matrox always has done). It has the advantage you can do more effects in parallel, it has the disadvantage that the number of fx are limited to what the hardware can do.

-Yves

[David Battistella]

Currently there aren;t really any cards that actually add hardware capabilities to Final Cut Pro. Some older cards did this by adding specific FX to a daughtercard, but Apple stopped supporting that with version 4 and the RT engine. RT extreme is a Mac Preocessor based function and the amount of real time you get is purely dependant on the speed of your Mac computer and actually, the speed of your drives. For example: if you have an xserve raid you can expect far more RT, than if you have a firewire drive.

When you launch FCP, you might notice that there is a portion that says (profiling for RT extreme) that is FCP determining what It can do with your RAM, CPU and Drives.

NEWS FLASH. The cards are only the through port, they add nothing to the RT capabilities of your system. The card is just the Piepline, that’s it.

David

[Bob Cole]

[David Battistella] “NEWS FLASH. The cards are only the through port, they add nothing to the RT capabilities of your system. The card is just the Piepline, that’s it.”

That’s what I wanted to know. Thanks.

— Bob

[Bob Cole]

[Bob Cole] “The cards are only the through port, they add nothing to the RT capabilities of your system. The card is just the Piepline, that’s it.””

There’s a thread above this one that seems to suggest otherwise. I don’t understand.

— BC

[Sean Oneil]

David is wrong about cards in general. The Cinewave is/was a card that did all of the effects processing. Media 100 was the same way (using it’s own software, not Final Cut). Most Avid products still work that way I believe.

With Blackmagic and AJA, just about everything is doen in software. The advantage is you get a less expensive card, and you can always increase speed by getting the lastest and fastest computer (which is always improving at a rapid pace).

The Decklink HD Pro does have a hardware scaler built in for high quality HD upconversion and downconversion. This works independently of Final Cut and is controlled in the System Preferences.

The Decklink cards, I believe (not 100% clear on this myself) have a small handful of legacy effect capabilities built in. But setting the effect handling to Final Cut Pro is vastly superior because the software rendering using a G5 is much more powerful. 3-way CC for HD may be the one and only exception.

[Sean Oneil]

Pardon me, you guys are talking about PCs.

I played around with Premiere Pro a while back. It uses Direct3D hardware rendering (similar to Motion on Macs), so every single thing I tried was real time on the computer’s display. I mean everything. Lens flares, multiple codecs, mixed resolutions, you name it. Set the sequence settings to “Video For Windows” and set codec to “None” to take advantage of this. Of course there’s no way to output it to a deck or video monitor using these settings. But once you’re finished you can copy and paste it into a new project (i.e. a Decklink project) and then render it all at once.

Long story short, if I used Premiere I wouldn’t waste my money on that new Matrox thing.

[David Battistella]

Sean,

I am well aware of the offerings out there. I was specifically talking about current cards for FCP. To keep the price point low card manufacturers (based on Apple’s policy too) have stayed away from putting additional processing on the cards. Remember the ICE cards for after effects. Typically this type of “extra” processing becomes dated. I would love to see a true DUAL channel card for FCP, with simple things like 3-way CC, dissolves and titles being passed over to the cards processors (which AVID does) but it seem that there is no demand for this type of product.

The way it stands now in FCP, is the fastest mac and the fastest drives give you the most RT. Period.

David

[Sean Oneil]

[David Battistella] “I would love to see a true DUAL channel card for FCP, with simple things like 3-way CC, dissolves and titles being passed over to the cards processors (which AVID does)”

Well I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the Decklink HD Pro does this as well. Maybe not on a PC, but in Final Cut you can change the effect handling so that the card handles it. And the HD Pro is a dual-channel card.