Xena and Cineform Questions

[Dezmond]

Hi Jeron,

The Xena LH is able to playback HDV MPEG2 data in Premiere Pro 2.0. The 1440×1080 HDV video is scaled to 1920×1080 in hardware on the Xena board. The LH also has some realtime color effecte(brightness/contrast, gamma/gain/offset, etc.) that are enabled in hardware on the board as well.

For your HDV projects, you could still just capture the HDV MPEG2 data via FireWire and monitor the video out of the Xena LH board thru Analog Component HD and HD-SDI. For certains video modes, the Xena LH board has a built-in hardware downconverter so you can even down-convert the HD video to SD on the fly(i.e 1920x1080i 29.97 to 720x486i29.97). You could also capture the HDV data thru the Xena LH via Analog Component HD to uncompressed video, but capturing uncompressed might get the quality only a little better – you’d have to judge what looks better for yourself – the HDV Camera/deck doing the conversion from HDV MPEG2 to Uncompressed YUV 4:2:2 or the software in PPro2 doing the conversion from HDV MPEG2 to Uncompressed YUV 4:2:2.

For your SD projects, you could capture the Analog Component HD video coming from your HDV Camera/Deck thru the Xena LH’s Analog Component Input and just have the Xena LH downconvert it(hardware downconversion) to SD video. The Xena LH only captures to uncompressed files so you would not be working with any compressed footage in this workflow scenario.

I would suggest putting the LH on your Dual Xeon system since AJA recommends having a system with two physical processors.

Dezmond

[Jeron Coolman]

Dezmond,

I really appreciate the input. When you say I the Xena board can downconvert the HD to SD on the fly. What does that mean? Does that mean I can be editing HDV and view it downconverted on an SD monitor or does it go further than that? Meaning will I be able to take advantage of the downconversion when it comes to exporting an SD version of the HDV work for DVD, allowing the hardware accleration to kick in to downconvert, leaving the software export as if it was only working with SD; e.g. will it free up the CPU of the task of downconverting during the export process?

Another question. You say the Xena has some real-time effects that are enabled on the board. I assume this means I can put one of those effects on a clip and it will be hardware accelerated.

What about other filters like a BCC or Magic Bullet? Will I still be able to play a Magic Bullet filter on the Program Monitor at the same rate (or better?) than I can play it on a native HDV clip?

I don’t want to buy the Xena and then be “locked in” to only using filters, transitions and effects that the Xena knows how to accelerate. I would expect it to accelerate what it can and allow normal playback (as if it wasn’t there) for all of the others.

Thanks again,

Jeron

[Dezmond]

Jeron,

For the downconvert – it is only used for output, so if you’re editing HDV you can view it on a SD Monitor. Sorry to say it doesn’t go farther than that. It won’t help out on any exporting to DVD.

As for the effects – with the Xena realtime effects – those are hardware accelerated (done on the Xena board) so you won’t so any additional CPU usage. As for any other effects(isn’t Magic Bullet only AE?), the clip on timeline will have a redbar above(meaning it isn’t a realtime clip). The rendering of the effect is done by PPro2 via CPU so the ‘non-rt’ video probably won’t playback in realtime (really depends on system, type of effect, etc.). You won’t see the screen go to black when attempting to play thru non-rt clips instead the Xena will playback the video as fast as it can and will “drop” video frames if it can’t keep up to maintain sync with audio.

Dezmond

[Jeron Coolman]

Great, that is what I was hoping it would do. Play back as fast as it could with the non-realtime effects. I’m getting decent performance with the effects I use on native HDV. Most of the effects I use end up playing at real time or very close to real time.

P.S. Magic Bullet does work in PPro as well as AE.

I’ve talked alot with the Aja support people and am pretty sure I’ll be able to get the Xena to work on the AMD dual core, but if not, the dual Xeon has the same hardware as one of their “qualified” machines so I can fall back on that.

[Jeron Coolman]

I have another question are the “Xena real-time effects” from some sort of Aja plug-in or are they just standard PPro effects that the Xena is “aware” of?

I ask because I use one machine as an edit machine and the other as a backup/render machine. When I get to a good render point, I copy the project to the other machine and start it rendering. Then I can go back to editing on the other machine.

Will I still be able to do this if I only have one Xena card in the edit machine?

[Dezmond]

The Xena comes with 3 AJA PPro2 effects (brightness/contrast, gamma/gain/offset, and log to linear color conversion) – I don’t know if these effects can be used on another system without the board – the Xena though accelerates some native PPro2 effects(about 8 total – invert, brightness/contrast, etc – I think they are all listed in the software manual somewhere).

[Jeron Coolman]

Dezmond thanks. I downloaded the documentation and checked it out.

[Tim Kolb]

Overall, the advantage to CineForm should be both speed and quality. I’m not sure why you would get anything even close to Aspect performance with PPro HDV native…I found it to be profoundly slower in my comparisons.

With the Xena card…there are settings where you can set what you want to have in real-time. You can set this based on the muscle you have in the system with the caveat that if you have asked it to do too much in real-time, you may end up seeing some frame drops when you play through those areas until you render, but it would certainly be visible.

I’m not sure if AJA accelerates “Magic Bullet for Editors” (the Magic Bullet that plugs into PPro and Vegas), but there are some Open GL display cards that can do this. My Quadro 4500 will do it, but I’m not sure if my LH card would do it by itself or not…it would certainly not “black” the screen in any event.

It comes down to this: In HD, everything will take longer than SD. You have the Matrox Axios of the world, but those workflows aren’t completely flawless either…there are limitations to all systems. The key is to figure out what limitations you can live with…

TimK,

Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Jeron Coolman]

“Overall, the advantage to CineForm should be both speed and quality. I’m not sure why you would get anything even close to Aspect performance with PPro HDV native…I found it to be profoundly slower in my comparisons.”

Tim it is exactly comments like that which make me think I had a problem with setup or installation. Probably a “serious” problem because CineForm is advertised to provide 3-4 times better performance than native HDV 🙂

I was able to playback 4 layers of native HDV and 4 layers of Cineform just fine, things started to slow down when I added a 5th. The native HDV slowed down less. So when I say I got better native HDV performance, it wasn’t THAT much better.

The “black screen of no playback” was only when I put a Magic Bullet filter on a Cineform clip in the Cineform preset. Magic Bullet filters play back fine with native HDV.

I’m looking forward to trying the new trial of AspectHD that came out this week. Especially since I’m confident I had some sort of setup problem.

[Tim Kolb]

Magic Bullet is a handful for anything to preview…even my Quadro 4500 on my big system which supports RT playback of Magic Bullet for Editors in RT takes a bit before it can play it.

Aspect doesn’t black screen for me here on my laptop…it doesn’t preview the effect in preview playback, it plays looking like the original with a red X up inthe corner, but when I’m in scrub I see the effect.

TimK,

Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net