Is my AJA Kona LHi Necessary?

[Alex Gerulaitis]

When playing back HD material via a graphics card in CS6, I observed tearing and fuzziness in the picture even when set to full resolution playback. That fuzziness and tearing wasn’t there when the same video was played back via a BMD card. So it seems to me that monitoring via a graphics card isn’t quite the true video you could get out of a dedicated video I/O card. Or was it just me?

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Ben Callahan]

Hey Dave,

Thank you very much for your help. My system right now will ONLY be used for AE. So I’m not sure that the LHi is doing me any more than my standard “third display” set up can do.

Does the LHi take any of the load off of the graphics card? Should it in theory be able to play smoother because it is a dedicated video card?

Thanks,
Ben

[Todd Kopriva]

> Does the LHi take any of the load off of the graphics card?

No. They do different things.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Ben Callahan]

Thank you, Todd. So then I should be able to RAM Preview at full speed through my third display, just as well as it does through the LHi if not better?

Do you believe that the LHi is not necessary for my RAM Previews? I just want to be able to playback as smooth as possible. And if the LHi helps that, then I’ll keep it. Otherwise, I’ll get rid of it and stick to my third desktop display for Full Screen playback.

Ben

[Todd Kopriva]

I’m making no comment about the value the AJA device. Others can do that. I was just confirming that the GPU and the AJA device do different things, so having an AJA device doesn’t—for example—relieve your GPU so that it can do more acceleration of computation for the ray-traced 3D renderer.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Alex Gerulaitis]

Todd,

Would you be willing to pinpoint scenarios where a dedicated video I/O card would be preferable to a graphics card / CS output, for monitoring purposes?

The video quality difference that I saw (and mentioned above), is it something inherent to the graphics card output? Or was it just a fluke in my testing?

Thanks.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Ben Callahan]

Hey Alex,

Might have gotten our answer!

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/98/879818#879820

Let me know if that answers it for you. But I think that covers it for me… I think this would indicate that your scenario was a “fluke”.

Ben

[Alex Gerulaitis]

To be honest, it doesn’t do it for me. I’d love to hear more of a “broadcast engineer” perspective on it, and was hoping to hear from Todd, as I am sure he has a thing or two to say about it, but may be bound by Adobe’s partnerships.

For one, desktop monitoring doesn’t lock in the frame rate. If your video is 24fps, can you be sure it’s shown as such on the desktop? If not, how is it “broadcast quality”? Can you be sure the video is not scaled and is true pixel-to-pixel? … and so on…

[Todd Kopriva]

It’s more the other direction: I don’t want to appear to favor one hardware maker over another.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Ben Callahan]

Thank you for your response, Todd. Understood about your curbed responses 😉

Can you then answer this:
– Should CS6 be able to playback a desired framerate smoothly on a third desktop monitor without the addition of a third party I/O card?

– Additionally, Alex had a question about the broadcast quality of frame rate and scaled image. Can you shed some light on that?

Thanks very much for your time and input in this conversation.
Ben