frame advance audio scrubbing with PP CS5.5?

[Cliff Stephenson]

Alright, another update.

I reinstalled my Blackmagic HD Extreme 2 card this afternoon alongside my AJA LHi.

First thing… I had no issue running both cards simultaneously. I simply used a different HDMI input for Blackmagic than for AJA. Both cards worked wonderfully in the same machine at the same time. The results were interesting.

Blackmagic just released 8.2 beta 2 which is why I was interested in reevaluating that card. Frame by frame audio scrubbing still isn’t functional in this latest beta (hopefully it won’t be too much longer- Matt’s message about the bug being fixed was just yesterday). But here’s what I found, performance-wise, with both cards (this is all cutting with native XDCAM EX 1080p 23.98)-

Blackmagic: MUCH smoother with video scrubbing than the AJA. You could very easily grab your CTI, either in the source window or timeline, and scrub through very fluidly, but without audio. However, when moving through footage backward or forward at higher speed (using either the J or L keys), the Blackmagic seems to choke a bit. The audio scrubs appropriately fast, but the video seems to move at almost real time, making it impossible to to hit “L” a couple of times and move to a specific point in a clip. It’s almost like the video portion can’t keep up with the audio. This behavior is only in Premiere Pro. Final Cut 7 always had smooth video scrubbing at all speeds.

AJA: Much choppier on video scrubbing, but smoother on fast forward or reverse. Dragging the CTI through the timeline or the source window makes it very hard to “scrub search” for a specific place in a clip or edit. It hits basically highlight frames and if you pass something you like and see a great frame (like a slate I scrubbed past this morning) it could take you another minute or two to actually track it down and you really have to do it via either real time playback or fast forward/rewind. The Blackmagic is much better at being able to find that clip just scrubbing back through the video moving the CTI. Audio is REALLY spotty on the AJA though. It doesn’t output when you play a clip about half to a third of the time (especially when moving from source to timeline and you end up having to pause and play to get it to output again). With the Blackmagic, I never had any problems getting the audio output to my monitors. The AJA also has the video funkiness I mentioned earlier where the video briefly drops out when going from source to timeline and back or clip to clip in the source. The Blackmagic video was consistently present with no drop outs.

So overall, having now used both cards on the same machine and being able to switch back and forth, I’d have to say I’m leaning more toward the Blackmagic again. If they can get frame by frame audio scrubbing up and running in the next beta and also improve the power and fluidity of fast forward/reverse, then there’s no reason to not use Blackmagic 100% of the time. But without frame by frame scrubbing, I still can’t use it yet. Amazing how such a simple, often overlooked feature can cripple a card’s ability if it doesn’t work right.