Decklink HD+AE+AMD+Quadro FX1500 ?

[Gene Colburn — email address bounces notices]

Some of Decklink products, Multibridge Pro, Multibridge Extreme, Multibridge Eclipse, support AE comp Views on DVI outputs. Bear in mind however that XP64 does not support QT
Timeline playback is still dependent on System specs, and complexity of comp so not realtime.

[Mrproductions]

Thanks, but any QT incompatibility must be with Decklink. Though a 64-bit version of QT doesn’t (yet) exist, all features of the 32-bit version run flawlessly under x64. Inside and outside of AE. I’d very much like to hear from someone who has a setup similar to ours — x64, FX 1500, AE, and a Decklink HD card. Anyone?

Thanks!

[Bill Buchanan]

I’m running a dual-boot sys–xp32 and xp64, using an decklink hd extreme, intel core duo, and a quadro 1500. Sys works like a charm on both sides. I use the x64 side primarily for editing (PPro 2) (large projects with 1000s of clips) and the xp32 side for rendering, etc.

I’ve done very little with AE on either side, but I know it works well on the xp32 side and suspect it will with xp64, since PPro 2 does.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

[Mrproductions]

Thanks Bill, this is my fault for not being more specific with my question. What I need to know is, how well does a Decklink HD card (of any flavor) display ram previews under AE 7 or CS3 when running under X64? We use AE exclusively in the X64 environment.

I’ve spoken at length with Decklink Support about this on several occaisions and unfortunately, their U.S.-based support team is cannot provide an answer (the Decklink engineering team is in Australia and cannot be reached directly, so everything is secondhand).

While Decklink has some 64-bit Windows drivers, and the cards do provide some functionality in X64, they claim there is an issue with ram previews in both AE and Combustion when running X64, and displaying the output to an external HD monitor. Essentially they say it won’t work.

They (the engineers) further claim the problem stems from Decklink’s dependency on QuickTime for generating the ram previews??? Sounds bizarre because you’d think that the whole idea behind AE’s “ram” previews obviates any file format of any kind — it is rendered to “ram”, after all.

Anyway, I do know there are issues with QT 7.2 that did not exist in 7.1, and, I have heard that AE CS3 may generate ram previews differently than AE 7. I also know that QT 7.1 performs flawlessly under X64 — we’ve encountered zero issues in X64 when working with QT HD files, or any other QT feature for that matter.

What Decklink’s support staff cannot answer is: Under X64, does using an earlier version of QT resolve the ram preview issue? Does eliminating QT’s nasty little “qttask.exe” fix the issue? Or, does using AE 7 instead of CS3 resolve the issue? Or is it the other way ’round? Maybe it’s AE 7 that has problems and not CS3. Unfortunately, Decklink Support could not tell me “what” version of AE or QT were used for testing under X64 because they simply don’t know, and inquiries to the engineers have gone unanswered. Maddening.

One interesting thing Decklink Support ‘did’ mention was, I’m not the only one asking this question.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Let me/us know if you get an answer to this (good luck – BMD have been appauling at replying to posts/emails recently if I’m frank)

..I need to spec up an x64 based system soon and was going to go for Decklink or Xena (surprised there’s no Xena support) I guess there’s stuff like Bluefish 444 and DVS boards, but then there’s also a MASSIVE price-hike.

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0