Kona LHi or keep Decklink Extreme HD (1st gen)

[Bryan Roberts]

So then RT performance though, while actually editing in FCP, there’s no difference. The Kona LHi will just cross convert much faster etc. when going to new codecs like XDCAM to ProRes or Red to ProRes but both should perform just as well editing in FCP with ProRes footage? Also, the card isn’t in bad shape, it’s not off Ebay. My director friend purchased it while I was with him back in winter 07′ when he wanted to capture tapes from his film shot on an F900 and he bought it new from Melrose Mac in Hollywood for $1050 or something like that and then captured all the tapes for the film and that is all that it was used for. He’s been using his 2 macbook pros since then.

And my question about the memory wasn’t what KIND to buy, that’s pretty obvious. I thought there were tricks to get the best performance out of your mac, like multiples of 4 or something, or was it each platter needs to be divisible by 4. That’s what I was asking, my memory is coming from Crucial.com, I’ve had nothing but great experiences with them…

FCP / AVID EDITOR
Features : Television
http://www.DefiningFilms.com

[Steve Oakley]

don’t forget the MXO2 in this…. its portable, and you get both laptop and tower interface cards. the new ones about to ship have h.264 hardware encoding ( yes it costs extra, but ) that at the end of the day can be a really great thing to have when you need to make web previews. its faster then RT encoding even for HD material. they also have the cheaper mini if you don’t need all the I/O. they do have HMDI in and out though, and its color managed which is pretty handy for matching your LCD up better.

[Bryan Roberts]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I was trying out my Decklink HD Extreme and it was ok for my needs but does some weird stuff. It does actually give you an expanded desktop display when outside of FCP but when I run full screen videos on it outside of FCP, it has a little bit of stepping going on and the hertz were just a little too low for my plasma that anything other than video displayed had a slight strobe to it – I couldn’t adjust the hertz high enough. Also in FCP, since it only plays out broadcast standards, it was doing weird things motion wise and with occasional green speckles with a mixed timeline I ran it through that mixed ProRes 1080 24p with DVCPRO 1080 24p. I don’t plan on doing any color correction and apparently the hardware acceleration with the Decklink Extreme card is almost negligible since it’s just the scaling so for now I’m going to try out the TripleHead2Go from Matrox that Shane has been using (sell the Decklink Extreme card for $600), running my two 24 inch monitors off of it and then the second DVI port to my plasma. Then in the future if I need a capture card, I’ll prob go LHi but since 99% of the time as a film editor, the footage is already captured onto a hard drive for me or lately I’ve been dealing more and more with file based cameras and I just need the monitor for clients to view cuts and to get a bigger picture of my edits, I hope this will be the best solution…

FCP / AVID EDITOR
Features : Television
http://www.DefiningFilms.com