Effect handling with hardware – what card?

[Andy Mees]

Hi Jason
Since a pretty long while now the effect processing capacity of your host Mac has outstripped pretty much any hardware handling offered by your I/O card. I’d suggest you’d be best off setting the effect handling to “Final Cut Pro” for pretty much every codec. That said, what card are you using?
Andy

[John Pale]

Some older cards did effect processing. None available now do, as computer processors have become so powerful, its kind of an obsolete function. Just ignore it.

[Jason Brown]

Not using any card. Need suggestions.

I just started at a company doing internal video production. They got a brand new kicking mac pro…but I know I need to monitor the video on an external monitor and I see a need to dub to a SD DVD from the timeline.

Trying to figure out what card would best suit my needs.

-Jason

[Jason Brown]

The SD dub will soon be from an HD timeline. So the card will need to downconvert.

[John Pale]

AJA Kona gets the best reviews overall. Blackmagic Decklink and Matrox MXO 2 also have their fans.
They all can downconvert. None of them speed up effects rendering.

[Jason Brown]

That’s exactly what I needed to know!

Thanks so much!

I’ve used the KonaLHe…seemed fine. Probably just use that.

Thanks again!

[John Fishback]

Checkout the Kona LHi. It does up/down & cross conversion in realtime. While you’re outputting SD from HD now, if you’ll have any need in the future to include SD archival footage in your HD timelines, having the realtime upconvert capability makes sense.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 2 (FCP 6.0.5, Comp 3.0.5, DVDSP 4.2.1, Color 1.0.3)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Erik Lindahl]

Very little is done by your video card when working in Final Cut. Apple completely moved away from dedicated hardware support since I think version 3 of the application. With version 7 just released and sadly no news on the hardwhare front you’re still forced to used the software and primarily your CPU for effects.

MacOSX Snow Leopard, the next major OS-release, is around the corner and it does boat advanced multi-core and GPU features that applications can utilize. It’s likely the next major release of Final Cut Pro will finally use the full capabilities of your system when working on it. Personally I thought this would be one the killer features of FCP7 but yeah, seems the dev-team isn’t quite “up-to-date” with that program…

Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Communication
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[Jason Brown]

Hey John…any of my SD outputs will be to DVD for final dubs anyway, I’ll never be re-capturing that footage. And any SD stuff I work with is DV and we have a firewire deck for that.

[Jason Brown]

I’m looking @ the MXO2-Mini…has component out for DVD dubs, and HDMI out for HD monitoring. I don’t think I’m going to be able to swing the cost of a professional studio monitor with HD-SDI, so I’m just going to use the HDMI to monitor output. Any thoughts on the Matrox box? How about their h.264 faster than real-time encoding option? Anyone use that?

-Jason

P.S. And in response to your comment Erik, it seems naive to think that the CPU can handle it all. I would think it makes sense to have dedicated hardware to deal with specific things and let your processor handle others.

It’s like asking one guy to shoot, edit, animate, color correct, design, and output with DVD authoring…and knowing codecs for transcoding…OHH, wait that’s what most of us do!