[Buck Wyckoff]

Ah, that whole tga / tiff bit confusion….

I am using 24-bit tiff, 8-bits per channel, 32 bit total when I add the 8-bit alpha. But tga in MAX is referenced as 16, 24, or 32 bit. Confusing as they both ask the same thing in different ways, except tiff goes beyond 8 bit in each color channel. I tend to reference tiff the way we did in 1990.

I agree, 8-bit is all you need for standard video work. Anything else is a waste.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Thanks for your response. I’ll look into these issues. The following is a response I just made on the Matrox forum. I include it here because I detail for things about my system that may enlighten. Thanks again.

Thanks for the input. Being a 10 year Velocity guy, I’m still learning the ropes with Premier. The main difficulty for me is knowing what aspect of Premier is being handled by software (Premier/Matrox/OS) and hardware (PC/Matrox) in any given situation. When I have a performance problem, it’s tough to know what is responsible.

This morning, I forced my entire timeline to preview render and it plays in realtime, though there are a few quality issues. I’ll have to look into what I can do with preview render settings.

I guess I’ve always rendered image sequences, tga for decades, but I do tiff now, 24 and 32 bit, depending. A recent article talked about this and suggested what I feel as well. A video format render is dangerous because if it is interrupted for any reason you lose the entire effort. An image sequence render saves every frame and you can always pick up where ever you leave off.

Lately, my SD animation projects in Premier worked with the raw images without preview rendering or anything. I can play two/three raw still-seq clips stacked on video layers in realtime with two/three 32bit stills layered up as well.

Anyhow, for HD….

I generated an MJPEG in Max by playing my pre-rendered tiff sequence as a background ifl, basically using Max as a tiff collector into a MJPEG. I went well, though I did see a quality drop (I had it set to 100 quality).

Premier isn’t liking it. It starts to play and quits. The interface is sluggish to respond to my moving the CTI and playing again. When it does, it consistently stops at the same near halfway point on the clip. It was a 301 frame tiff sequence (1.74GB) and turned into a 112.7MB avi.

My system may have something to do with it. It’s a Sager Notebook. That is a 12 lb. monster with 3.2GHz quad-core processors. Not mobile CPU’s. 12GB RAM. The internal SSD Raid and external eSata G-Raid are giving me great performance. The main problem with this form factor is the inability for put a monster graphics card in it. I did get a NVidia GeForce 280M. Pretty great, but nowhere near what I could have in a desktop system.

I would have thought the hard drive was my playback bottleneck, but someone else posted that Mercury engine playback on the graphics card was the critical component for realtime HD playback. I may need to give Boxx a call.

Anyway, thanks for the response and let me know if you think of anything else that will let me get through this with what I have.

Regards,
Buck Wyckoff
Buckward Digital

[Buck Wyckoff]

I thought it was clear. Animation sequence images for an HD project cannot be viewed and worked with in realtime. So what process, from an animators POV would get the job done?

Thanks.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Just fixing my Subject to clarify.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Thanks for the info. I guess I can uninstall Dreamweaver, Indesign, OnLocation and other misc CS4 programs as I haven’t even touched them in CS4, keeping the CS4 programs I’ve used: Premier & Encore. Then install the entire CS5 Master Suite.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Hey! That’s pretty smart. I got around to that solution with Combustion composites in the past, but it didn’t dawn on me this time. Thanks!

[Buck Wyckoff]

Thanks, but I did that and it looks the same as applying a dissolve (of the same duration) to the start of the clips. During the dissolve, you see the background through the inset.

[Buck Wyckoff]

I’ve been a DV and HDV guy for quite a while and recently started using Premier Pro after moving away from dps Velocity NLEs.

My friend just got the 7D. He’s new to video. We shot some 1080,30p test footage and I brought it into my Sager notebook. It has 3 SSD’s in a Raid 0 config with the Matrox Mini02 breakout box, CompressHD technology and Premier Matrox sequences with Matrox I-frame Mpeg codecs.

The MOV file dropped onto the timeline played jerky and the video was about 5 seconds out of sync. When I paused the payback, the system would not stop until it got to the end of the clip and then the CTI jumped to the end of the sequence. The MOV plays smooth in the QT player.

I figure it had something to do with the captured video spec. I did not set it up and I don’t quite know the nuances & options of the 7D’s video capture….yet. I want to learn more. The quality of the video through decent lenses is NOTHING like I’ve experienced in the prosumer DV world.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Thanks. I did find and have bought the Neat Video plugin. Seems to work very well.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Why is it that importing the image sequence as a clip and editing that on your timeline is “impossible”?

I understand it is a lot of raw data. I think it is possible given an adequate system for that specific need.