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Premiere Pro CC with an external audio interface (Mac OS X)
Dear fellow editors,
My facility will be updating to the 2013 Mac Pro soon and we are looking how to transfer/support some of our existing hardware to work with the new Mac Pro and it’s new interfaces (USB3/Thunerbolt). Our current setup has a previous generation Mac Pro with a Blackmagic Decklink PCI-express-card hooking the mac to an extra external monitor and two Yamaha studio monitors for sound.
Since it will not be easy to recuperate the Blackmagic card, and since Premiere has always had troubles sending sound over the blackmagic card (be sure to check the numerous threads here that feature the same issues), I’m wanting to change the setup. I was thinking hooking my third ‘full-screen playback’ monitor directly over HDMI to the new Mac Pro’s HDMI port, but I still need a solution to hook up the studio monitors (audio).
My logic is that a simple audio interface over USB would do the trick. I only need to output sound to just the two Yamaha monitors and I only need 1 input for 1 mono external microphone for some voice recording. Will a device like the Focusrite 2i2 (https://us.focusrite.com/usb-audio-interfaces/scarlett-2i2) do the trick? I’m kind of new to the world of pre-amps, audio interfaces, etc. so I’m not sure. On paper it would seem to do everything I need.
Has anyone had prior experiences using focusrite equipment with Premiere Pro and/or FCP7 (the two software I need to use)? Or any other non-blackmagic-AJA-Matrox interfaces just for sound alone? Getting new blackmagic hardware (thunderbolt) would be slightly overkill to what I need. Are there any compatibility issues (drivers,…) that I may be overlooking?
Thanks in advance,
Merlin -
2 Replies
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Hi Merlin,
Sorry to see that you received no response. I’m actually curious to hear what setup you went with in the end. Did you find that using a decklink card and seperate audio interface device such as the 2i2 created an out of sync audio and vision issue? Or are they nicely in time, i thought maybe the decklink would delay the vision a bit as its doing some of its work converting to the uncompressed signal.
Be great if you could let us know.
Regards
CraigMac Pro 2.4Ghz 8 core, 24GB RAM, GTX 670
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Craig,
I had no direct need for an audio input/XLR mic in our facility, so for sound we eventually used the direct audio output of the computer (new mac pro 2014) with a split cable to both speakers (a cable that splits from mini jack to 2 x male jack, like this: https://www.bax-shop.nl/jack-jack/devine-va5015-jack-3-5mm-stereo-2x-jack-male-1-5m-verloopkabel). From a professional audio POV probably not the best setup, but more than adequate for our speakers/editing need.
For video output we now use the Blackmagic Mini Monitor over thunderbolt to SDI. Thunderbolt connects the Mac Pro to an SDI monitor. A decklink card is a similar solution for older mac pro systems using PCI-cards.
In terms of delay: none that we have noticed so far (or at least so minimal it is not noticeable), using the mercury transmit. Under preferences, playback, you can send the video-signal using the mercury GPU-accelerated engine to any external monitor or full-screen secondary monitor or even set a delay in case you do need one. Best to test it out first.
greetings,
Merlin
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