Do I HAVE to capture uncompressed with a XENA LHe?

[Tim Kolb]

You would need to have CineForm Prospect HD to have compressed HD editing capability as far as I know…

I’m not sure if you could theoretically just capture into another codec or not with Premiere Pro/Xena LHe. You would have to “customize” some project settings to do it and I haven’t tried it myself…

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Jack Kelly]

Thanks loads for the reply!

Cineform Prospect HD does look tempting but I’m put off by the price. I reckon I can build myself a decent RAID array capable of handling uncompressed HD for the price of the Prospect HD software.

I believe the Blackmagic cards can capture HD to JPEG – it’s a shame if the AJA cards can’t do a similar trick. It looks like I’m stuck: I can’t get a Blackmagic card because they don’t support 25p and the don’t do HD-to-SD downconversion on WinXP and I can’t get an AJA card because my RAID array can’t capture 250MB/sec. Bummer.

Thanks,
Jack

====================
Jack Kelly
London
Dir / Prod / Camera
Jack-Kelly.com – my homepage
====================

[John Ladle]

8 bit 1080 uncompressed is 120mb/sec to be clear.

you’d be surprised what performance you can get from a sonnet e-sata. i just had one for a month as a science experience, but am still grinning at how fast it is for uncompressed 8 bit on 5 drives.

you did not mention your source, but you can ingest HDV natively and mix it, btw.

[Jack Kelly]

Hi,

Thanks loads for the reply. Yes, I’m investigating RAID solutions at the moment. I currently have a 4-disk RAID10 array using a Highpoint adapter and I’m getting reads of about 120MB/sec. Not fast enough yet but getting there.

Does Sonnet cards work under WinXP?

At the moment I’m using HDV but more and more HDCAM & DVCProHD jobs are coming along.

Thanks,
Jack

====================
Jack Kelly
London
Dir / Prod / Camera
Jack-Kelly.com – my homepage
====================

[Tim Kolb]

[uncompressed] “8 bit 1080 uncompressed is 120mb/sec to be clear.”

Actually “mb” stands for microbits…”Mb” is megabits…”MB” is megabytes.

I suspect you mean MB-Megabytes.

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[John Ladle]

120MB/sec indeed. sorry, i almost always use lower case except when i shout. perhaps i should add technical accuracy to the exceptions for acceptable use of capital lets on posts!

sonnet does indeed work on XP and OS X. initial raw speed tests for the single 5 drive fusion 500p are 200MB/sec, and it can be aggregated with mulitple units on a multi lane card. i am less concerned about raw data transfer and only care about streamcount. on the mac and PC , i have uncompressed 8-bit hd (120MB/sec) working great while doing projects and it is suprising because i have always used scsi 320 and recently fibre. for my compressed hd, i have 4 or 5 DVCPRO HD streams going with no dropped frames. i am impressed–especially for the money. the housing was $499 and the card is $299 (USD). so although it is not free, if you pop your drives over to this unit, you can get very good performance with the chassis and card costing less than my soon to be ebayed fibre card.

so while fibre was cool because it has some neat overhead and film possibilities with the 4Gb, eSATA is cool because really large RAIDs are as low as $700 USD plus the cost of the raw drives. it does have raid one, and there is not a raid 5 scheme, but vs. fibre i was looking at for the desktop it is prefectly fine for local projects or heck, buy two. popping in 5 750GB drives @ 265 each, the chassis and the card was under $2000 USD for 3.75TB. not bad. cant wait for the 1TB drives to drop down….

A friend of mine acquired one as well and we both have had no problems and at 53 cents/GB, if i had a problem, i dont know how angry i would be. this is cheap even for on the shelf storage.

[Jeff Brown]

Jack– also, check out http://www.caldigit.com. More cheaper local RAID storage. Not tested myself, but I’m still spec-ing a future HD system.

-jeff

[Alan Lacey]

to be absolutely accurate mb/s = millibits/s

Alan