Kona 2 vs Axio

[Les Kaye]

[gary adcock] “Apple shuns all 3rd party vendors and/ or developers that try to offer hardware acceleration for FCP.”

Thanks Gary. Which raises the question – wasn’t the Cinewave card accelerated? Since I’m relatively new to FCP, and am returning back to the Mac world I where I started, I defer to you (and everyone’s knowledge) here. Are you saying that Aja and/or other hardware developers could offer hardware alternatives, but don’t?

I don’t doubt that you’re right, but I’m sorry, I just don’t understand that. Unless Apple was developing their own hardware acceleration down the road…

-Les

[John Ladle]

it is my understanding that writing to FCP’s realtime extreme architecture is the only official way for a card vendor to accelerate FCP. to my knowledge, AJA is the only manufacter who does this with hard–accelerating comrpessed HD formats like HDV, DVCPRO HD and IMX/XD CAM allowing the apple processors to focus on things other than uncompressing and playing such computationally intensive formats.

apple is developing it’s hardware accelerations, they are called dual core G5s, quad processors, etc…

looks like a pretty good development cycle, they’ll also hardware accelerate EVERY ONE OF YOUR OTHER APPS!

[Les Kaye]

[Walter Biscardi] “As for what you’re looking for, we get RT CC, Slo Mo, multiple graphics layers, plus a lot more here no problem running a Dual 2.0 with a Fibre Channel Array.”

To expand (belabor?) my response below, this is pretty much why I’m curious about Axio’s real-time, since if Konda offers this in SD, then where’s the Axio advantage?

That said, although the Kona 2 works well for us in HD, the real-time is more limited in HD.

Regards,
-Les

[Gary Adcock]

[Les Kaye] “Thanks Gary. Which raises the question – wasn’t the Cinewave card accelerated? “

Sorry Les
the Cinewave card you are referring to was discontinued 2 years ago,
BUT when it shipped for FCP 3 and 4 –yes, it did offer acceleration, mixed content for FCP just as the
Matrox RT cards did to a lesser extent, but apple has not really allowed any of the other hardware companies to accelerate anything since. That would not keep you buying a new computer every 12-18 months. ( my replacement schedule –yours may very with with the economy)

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA

[Mike Schrengohst]

I saw an AXIO demo last week. 3 people including myself were in attendence. I have had DigiSuites since 1997 but I would say that Matrox has missed the boat. It looks like an FCP system is in my future.

[Tony Manolikakis]

Les

Up until two months ago I was the Senior Product Manager at Matrox, Axio was my product, I helped develop it from an idea on paper to a shipping solution. I have also been an editor and director for the better part of the last 10 years. I cut my short film on edit. Have worked on music video, DVDs etc. I recently left Matrox to focus exclusively on a new post production and production business, although I still do some demoing for them. Our main editing system is Final Cut Pro. I really disliked FCP until I saw version 4, to me it became really useable at that point. We are in the process of evaluating systems for online HD work. Axio is clearly the front runner, though the likelihood is that we get both a Kona 2 and an Axio. So I think I am in a pretty strong position to discuss this. Axio does everything they say it does on the brochure. Everything. An it will do even more moving forward. I have never lied on any brochure that was ever created for one of my products. There are many people in the industry who consider Matrox support to be outstanding. This has not always been true when the Matrox hardware was used with 3rd party software that did not use Matrox developed plugins. Axio does way more in realtime than Kona does. This is fundamentally because Matrox is able to not only accelerate Premiere Pro, but take over playback completely so that it is the Matrox engine that does the playback. Apple does not promote this type of environment. They prefer the simple I/O model. Axio is not appropriate for all users and of course if you do not like the editing application there is not much of a point to go any further. If this discussion is not appropriate for this forum, you can email me directly to discuss it further.

I have a question for the Kona 2 guys. What can you actually do with dual link and Kona2 today. I think I saw a demo of 444 capture at NAB but does that work at all inside FCP now? If this has already been addressed please point me to the info. Thanks.

Tony Manolikakis
Rev13 Films

[Aja Sales department]

Hi Tony-

KONA 2 has been capable of Dual-Link 4:4:4 capture and playback within FCP for the past six months. Perhaps some Cow users can chime in on their experiences with the card.

KONA 2 does some pretty unique things, like 10-bit hardware based up- and down-conversion, that can be applied on input and/or output. Also, KONA 2 hardware accelerates the scaling work on the playback HDV codec in FCP, as well as 720 and 1080 DVCPRO-HD, and we also hadrware acclerate Apple’s Dynamic RT Extreme. This results in more processing power on the G5 which means more RT in FCP. We are the only company that offers this hardware acceleration, which fits perfectly into Apple’s RT design.

Also, recently introduced video+key output on KONA 2, which is a very unique feature.

All in all, KONA 2 is by far the most powerful card available for the Mac and OSX. And we back all that up with an international 3-year warranty (with Advanced Exchange) on all of our desktop products.

We hope you chose to join the AJA/KONA family of users. If you need additional information in your decision, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you,

—
AJA Video Systems
(530) 274-2048 Intl.
(800) 251-4224 US
sales@aja.com

[Tony Manolikakis]

Thanks for the reply. I DO think the Kona2 is an interesting product. I would be interested to hear other users experience with dual link HDCAM SR specifically. Thanks.

Tony Manolikakis
Rev13 Films

[Martin Baker]

In the early days of FCP capture cards there were other examples of hardware acceleration besides Cinewave and the RTMac – Blackmagic certainly offered RT dissolves in hardware, as did Aurora’s Igniter. They had to do this because at the time the Mac CPUs weren’t fast enough to support RT rendering in software. But the days of rendering complex effects on a PCI board are well over…why? Because it’s expensive to develop, has a limited market and isn’t scalable. To give one example, for any RT effect offered on Cinewave, Pinnacle would have had to reprogram the effect for their own specific hardware chip, so the stuff we REALLY want accelerated (3rd party effects) becomes unfeasible to recode into all these different hardware versions. (I’m excluding the scaling hardware that AJA and Blackmagic have on their cards because that seems a perfectly good way to handle incoming and outgoing video.)

So…the way things are going, we’ll get more RT effects and quicker processing in the future through using the GPU (graphics chip) and distributed rendering amongst multiple systems, not through assistance from an extra processor on the capture card.

FWIW Cinewave managed to do mixed codecs on the timeline because the CPU actually decompressed the movies and then handed the output to the Cinewave card for compositing. As far as the Cinewave was concerned it was still handling uncompressed streams of video, it knew no different.

There’s no technical reason why mixed codecs in the same timeline can’t be done in a software only system – we can do the decompression and compositing on the CPU, they just aren’t joined together in the middle! Here’s hoping that a future version of FCP gives us this feature because as more and more acquisition formats appear, being able to mix native codecs together is a REALLY big advantage.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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[Gary Adcock]

[AJA Sales Department] “KONA 2 has been capable of Dual-Link 4:4:4 capture and playback within FCP for the past six months. Perhaps some Cow users can chime in on their experiences with the card.”

Tony
I concur, I have done 4 DL projects and one direct capture DL on set. I am currently working on another project that will be conformed in 4:4:4.
I have to admit that one of the coolest things is being able to do a real time Downconvert of any HD content. I have more than a few people that are amazed that I can send out a lowly composite NTSC signal from a DL video stream.

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA