DTvideolabs Playback Pro/Industry standard?

[Walter Soyka]

[Charlie Kosheff] “I have been running into more and more AV presentation companies that play back ProRes422 using this product. I have been finding spotty results in terms of playback for presentations. The files skip frames on playback- anyone else have any experience with this?”

A post like this would be welcome on the COW’s Live & Stage Events forum, where there are several active Playback Pro users.

A proper Playback Pro-based system should have no trouble playing back ProRes — but performance scales with hardware. Do you happen to know what sort of Mac they were playing out from?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Charlie Kosheff]

Thanks for the heads up on that forum. I will check it out.
They were playing back off a new MB Pro with external firewire 800 drive, 7200RPM.

[Jeremy Garchow]

The only thing that bugs me about playback pro is it doesn’t play through a baseband video stream (such as a Kona card). To me, that means there’s nothing keeping QuickTime in check.

I would also think that you’d need a faster computer than a MBP or at least be assured that you were using the dedicated graphics card and not the lower power built in option.

[Craig Leibowitz]

I am a V1/TD for Live events, and have been using Playback Pro quite a bit over the past few years. I recently had issues with some very large HD files as well, so I went out and bought my own system(for a crapload of money!!! says the PC guy..that’s me).
The solution is making sure you have the combination of a fast enough Hard Drive(7200rpm), and either a Raid Drive, or, in my case, I use an E-sata drive via PCI express port on a 17″ MacBook Pro Core i5. This gives me a max of 2.5Gbps throughput, which is much faster than the firewire 800 connection.
The DTVideo labs engineer sent me this when I emailed in to figure out what was up.

“Yes, an internal RAID 0 formatted using the largest block size (256k) on a Mac Pro is preferable for full HD (1920×1080 AppleProRes 422 codec 30fps)
Although some of the newest MBP units now have quad core processing and 1 GB of dedicated video RAM so they are capable.

Also, keep in mind that PlaybackPro is a single channel player (one data stream – no crossfades or direct cuts) so it requires less resources. PlaybackPro Plus is a dual channel player to allow for crossfades and direct cuts but the two streams require more resources (more disk bandwidth, more GPU and CPU processing).”