The Great “Video Preview” Myth

[Steve Roberts]

Hmm … a challenge.

I’ve just tried the FW preview for the first time on this Dell XPS Gen2 laptop running XP, by hooking it up to a little Optura Pi. I hooked up the FW cables, launched AE 6.5, set up a comp, then set the display prefs to IEEE 1394 NTSC with the first three boxes checked (previews, mirror, interactions). Worked like a charm during RAM previews and scrubbing. At least on the camcorder’s flip-out monitor.

Maybe I’m mything something (sorry) ….

1. Have you tried it on computers that have no Avid installed?
2. Have you tried it without the Avid running?

I smell conflict with the Avid. As you know, sometimes two apps don’t share the preview very well. Could this be it?

Steve
(by the way, you probably know this Bendex, but for anybody else reading, IEEE is pronounced eye-triple-ee. It’s an Electrical Engineering Association. Or Institute.)

[Chris Smith]

[Bendex] “I would do anything and pay ANYTHING to have this feature work.”

About $800 bucks for a Decklink Extreme card to give you uncompressed component output. Will look better than the compressed DV signal thru FW any day.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Mylenium]

I think your problem is somehow related to the Sony hardware. Thought they have dropped their insistance on using their “iLink” flavour of firewire, there are still problems with their hardware. I believe they don’t send certain control bits which would make the hardware plug&play compliant. Perhaps that is the problem. On my end I have had little problems. Though I don’t use this feature most of the time, it works for me even on the cheapest of hardware combinations (budget computer with consumer DV device). The only drawback is that it sometimes will only work as NTSC where it should be PAL.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Bendex]

I must admit that I haven’t tried it with no Avid installed, but I have tried it with no Avid actually running.

When I select the IEEE option in “Video Preview” and press OK it tells me:

“After Effects warning: device Type doesn’t match Output Mode selected. (81 :: 1)”

It’s probably the deck. What alternatives do you suggest? (without having to buy a new expensive deck)

Bendex.

[Mike Smith]

It sounds very unlucky for you.

You must be the victim of a system conflict: I’m looking at uncompressed, realtime full-SD preview from AE via a Decklink card right now, and can switch to firewire preview via a DVCAM deck via the preview settings in a matter of moments … so it really is worth persevering to find out where the conflict lies in your system. It it’w with Avid software, that should be well documented.

It saves a lot of time to preview rather than have to export / play out to video / come back and change things.

Do you use Photoshop – does the preview work on that?

[Clint Fleckenstein]

Works fine for me on my Canopus machine here at work and on my dpsVelocity at home. But I use the Velocity plug-ins for previewing out of that one anyway.

Clint

[Sean Cusson]

I use a Matrox RTX.100 card to preview with, but I can also preview straight from Firewire using a Sony DSR20 DV deck.

Sean Cusson
Q media design
sean@qmediadesign.ca

[Phil Biggs]

On my PC, I’ve never even had the option of firewire output in my AE preferences dialogue. The only option available is “Desktop Only” – not even a greyed-out firewire option. It works fine on my Mac using the same DV deck and cables (and same AE version) – but I have to use echofire for PC PAL previews. Answer me that and stay fashionable!

[Steve Roberts]

Firewire preview for Windows was added to recent versions of AE, starting with 6.5, I think. Echo Fire was necessary before that.

Steve

[Jonathan Miller]

Just so we can eliminate the obvious…

Your DSR-11’s input is switched to “DV” and not “S-Video” or “Video”, right? It’s right on the front of the deck.

Sometimes these simple checks can save the day.

Jon