What class machine can record ProRes in software?

[Steve Eisen]

You can capture ProRes on a G4 with the correct hardware. Your hard drives need to be able to handle the throughput.

Normal quality is targeted at 145 Mbps, and high quality is targeted at 220 Mbps.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Director-At-Large
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[John Heagy]

The data rate has little to do with the ease of capture. The load is on the cpu when compressing HD ProRes in software. I can gaurentee a G4 will not be able to capture HD ProRes in software. With an IO HD… yes, because the IO is doing all the heavy lifting, maybe that is what you meant by required hardware, but my question was about software encoding of HD ProRes.

So we got FCP6 and did so tests of our own using the ProRes codec in a custom app. On a Quad G5 with 2G of ram we were able to capture 10bit 1080i for 15min until it dropped frames. All 4 processors were nearly pegged at 380%. We were able to capture 8bit without dropping, processors were at 300%. Both without preview.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Steve Eisen] “You can capture ProRes on a G4 with the correct hardware. Your hard drives need to be able to handle the throughput.”

Doubtful. the Computer CPU is doing the conversion to ProRes. Don’t think a G4 is going to cut it if Dual G5’s can’t do it. Even with an AJA Kona board in a G4, that won’t do it either because the Mac CPU’s are still doing the conversion to ProRes, the Kona is simply providing the video source.

You’ll need an Io HD to do the ProRes capture on a G4 since that does the conversion in the hardware before it gets to the computer.

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

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