Xena vs Decklink?

[John Ladle]

i dont think vegas has a card that is truly integrated with it–i.e. monitoring a signal, stuff like that…

for premiere pro 2.0, the xena HS is written by Adobe if you believe in press releases…and the card is only $990 for both HD and SD. i ordered that up as i am trying out premiere and it seems like the best way to go. maybe others have different opinions.

[Andrew Kramer]

The HS card does not record DVcPro, nor does premiere support this format at this time. (As far as I know)

Andrew

[Timothy Eaton]

Hi Andrew,

I’m a Premiere Pro Video Collection user and plan to upgrade to the Production Studio. I have two questions about the Xena HS card:

1)Will it downconvert an HD timeline to SD in real time (hardware or software)? 2) Can I capture HDSDI through the HS card using a DV codec as an offline solution, before batch capturing HDSDI uncompressed?

Thanks,

Tim Eaton

[Andrew Kramer]

The card does not offer any real time down conversion, nor does premiere have any offline capabilities.
As far as using DV then upconverting manually, I’ll have to think about how that would work so let me get back to you.

The problem is whether you’ll be able to sync the timecode correctly cause if 00;00;00 is 00:00:01 you’ve got trouble.
Give me some time to figure this out in my head. lol

Andrew

[Tim Veal]

The card is $990? I thought I saw it listing for $1500 on The Videoguys website. Still, isn’t the Decklink HD Pro card aroung about the same cost and offer the HD-SD downconversion? Also, while Premiere doesn’t support DVCPro HD, I’ve heard of people capturing to Blackmagic’s HD codec and using that with Premiere. That’s why I was wondering if Aja had their own codec too. I’m not trying to go off on one card vs the other. It’s great having more than one option. I’m just trying to get the differences between the two so that I can see which one fits me.

[John Ladle]

not a big fan of proprietary codecs–they tend to break from version to version, os to os, etc…

take a look at BMD on the Apple side–they dont even ship those with the drivers anymore…or the pinnacle codecs everyone used on the mac side that are reverse engineered to play back on other systems…

i know the Xena LH/LHE has the ability to capture in all of the standard quicktime plus DPX and AVI, curious about the HS…

a lot of what people are asking of the HS is simply limited by the scope of Premiere. Pro–i.e. offlining, dvcpro HD, etc…and i dont know that it cant==getting my copy and card soon…will find out shortly what it all can do…

[Tim Veal]

Let us know what you think when you get it up and running.

[Lance Bachelder]

The best solution for Xena users is the Cineform codec. You can take any HD format, including all flavors of HDV and convert them to 8 or 10 bit 4:2:2 full raster HD files that can be cut in real-time. Aspect does up to 1440×1080 8 bit and Prospect does full 1920×1080 at 8 or 10 bit. No need for offline/online. These are manageable size, theatrical quality .avi’s that surpass anything available in FCP or Avid.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California
Cow Forum Host- Magic Bullet

Apple Dual 2Ghz G5 ATIx800, 2.5GB RAM, OSX Tiger FCP Studio
Intel P4, 2GB RAM, PNY 6600GT XP Pro – Vegas 6 Studio

[Jason J rodriguez]

[Lance Bachelder] “No need for offline/online. These are manageable size, theatrical quality .avi’s that surpass anything available in FCP or Avid.”

I’ll second that 🙂

Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA

[Kevin Christopher]

Hey is there any demo material available using cineform and Green screen?

I just Can’t give up my 10 bit system, but I want to move on.

Kevin