KONA LHe HDV Hardware Acceleration?

[David Roth weiss]

[Bruce Feagle] “Does anyone have any experience with how much hardware acceleration the KONA LHe card has for HDV?”

Bruce,

Blackmagic and Kona cards are video capture cards not hardware accelerator cards.

Unlike the Blackmagic cards, the Kona cards do scale both HDV and DVCProHD via hardware onboard the card, taking that burden off the computer processors, however that is the extent of the hardware acceleration.

“No job is worth doing more than once…”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Bruce Feagle]

[David Roth Weiss] “the Kona cards do scale both HDV and DVCProHD via hardware onboard the card, taking that burden off the computer processors, however that is the extent of the hardware acceleration.”

hmmm.. Scaling only. How can AJA and an un-named sales person claim HDV acceleration? Kind of a stretch. Pun intended. 🙂 What I want is an inexpensive way to monitor my edit on the big screen.

Thanks guys.

Bruce

[Graeme Nattress]

AFAIK the BMD cards also do that hardware scaling – they just don’t go on about it or call it acceleration.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[David Roth weiss]

[Graeme Nattress] “AFAIK the BMD cards also do that hardware scaling – they just don’t go on about it or call it acceleration.”

That’s funny Graeme. AJA sure had me fooled. I guess that’s what marketing hype is all about about.

David

“No job is worth doing more than once…”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bruce Feagle] “hmmm.. Scaling only. How can AJA and an un-named sales person claim HDV acceleration? Kind of a stretch. Pun intended. 🙂 What I want is an inexpensive way to monitor my edit on the big screen.”

Because the scaling is CPU intensive. By the Kona performing the scaling operation, this opens up a lot more realtime functionality within the system. You get more transitions, filters and the like by using the AJA Kona boards.

So it’s not a stretch at all.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[John Ladle]

[Graeme Nattress] “AFAIK the BMD cards also do that hardware scaling – they just don’t go on about it or call it acceleration.”

there is hardware acceleration in the kona product and that is unique to the kona product. it taps into the RT extreme architecture and the kona LH applies hardware scaling to the HDV, XDCAM or DVCPRO HD. it does produce realtime as you can play back more than a dozen streams of those formats at once on a dual 2.0 G-5.

FWIW.

-j

[Chris Poisson]

Bruce,

If you have an Apple Cinema display or other large monitor, you already have a cheap monitoring solution, just go into the view menu in FCP and select ACD full screen. Your DVI port is quite capable of sending a great image.

If you get a Matrox MXO, you can also calibrate the same monitor, but for viewing you can already do that.

[Martin Baker]

Hmmm I dunno. Have to agree with Graeme, I’m not convinced that AJA has any more secret sauce than BMD does in this area. Appears to be just hardware scaling from FCP timeline to the HD-SDI output.

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps
———-
Avid2FCP
For Avid editors learning FCP

[John Ladle]

well, that would be more toward the opinion end of things and not science. i set up a test, put in 16 HDV clips and see which one renders and which one plays back, there is your scientfic answer.

[David Roth weiss]

Martin, Graeme, et al:

Here’s interesting text quoted directly from the Kona 3 Product Brochure. I’m not saying I know it to be 100% accurate or not, but they do use the word “exclusively,” so perhaps the BM cards are mising something after all.

“Final Cut Pro users will love our DVCPROHD, HVD, and Apple Dynamic RT Extreme hardware acceleration, developed in close cooperation with Apple and available exclusively on high-end Kona cards.”

David

“No job is worth doing more than once…”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles