[Devin Crane]

Your least expensive option is to search for a composite switcher, going into the computer with 4 feeds will end up being more expensive. Like Bob said there’s the Pipeline Quad from Telestream but it only excepts SDI feeds not Composite. The Tricaster is a professional product at best not a Broadcast switcher by any means (hence the Broadcast Forum). The Sony Anycast station or Grass Valley Indigo would do all that you are looking for, but at around $15-$20k. I think the Sony even encodes to WMV.

[Devin Crane]

“Meanwhile, companies such as Autodesk have determined that shifting the processing to the GPU does not work nearly as well as optimizing for the new hyper-threaded multi-core processors, so they have gone completely in the other direction.”- David Roth Wiess

Probably because they are dependent upon other companies’ OSs and can’t get as far as if they were in control of their own. Besides Open CL is a totally new standard that not many people have been able to delve into and is much different than just running scripts off of the GPU. FCP and Motion have been doing that for years with marginal success.

I’m just looking forward to an upgrade that will start to utilize more than 2 processors, and cut my render times from 3-4 hours back down to 45minutes or less. Other than than that I’m happy.

[Devin Crane]

“Given that all workstations are essentially built around identical architecture, I think your expectations for Snow Leopard may be a bit high.” – David Roth Wiess

Not quite, Snow Leopard will be utilizing Open CL which will be able to use the GPU to do calculations other than for graphics. Early test done by Nvidia have shown performance increases by 4x encoding HD footage to H.264. What was suppose to have taken an hour to do was done in a fraction of the time. I wouldn’t be judging Snow Leopard to your current Windows 64bit computer.

Devin Crane

[Devin Crane]

Shane Ross wrote-
“https://www.telestream.net/pipeline/overview.htm

Once the clip starts capturing, you can start editing it. While it is still capturing. And the computer was capturing TWO streams of ProRes HD…both available right away. Gotta have a good Fibre raid for that too. This was on display at the Active Storage booth, my buddy Jordan Woods showed it to me.”

That’s what I was stating to but you mentioned it could be done with 2 Kona LH cards in the same machine?

[Devin Crane]

“I saw this in action at NAB. Two Kona LH cards in one MacPro capturing two streams of HD, and then allowing you to start editing right away.” -Shane Ross

Shane, how was this being done? What software? Or once the clip is being captured can you just start cutting in FCP?

[Devin Crane]

Telestream pipeline lets you edit in multicam live in FCP while you are still recording. Very slick. There was another product called picture ready that would allow you to do this but you needed 2 servers per camera, way over kill. This is just one device that hooks into your system via 1 gigabit per camera.

[Devin Crane]

When Apple comes out with the next update for FCS, it is believed to be a rewritten version since Mac OSX is dropping it’s support for Carbon (Final Cut Pro’s current code) and going to Cocoa (64bit). With that said even if it comes out at the WWDC (June) it will probably be fairly buggy at first. So it would probably be better to get the current version and upgrade down the road.

[Devin Crane]

When Apple comes out with the next update for FCS, it is believed to be a rewritten version since Mac OSX is dropping it’s support for Carbon (Final Cut Pro’s current code) and going to Cocoa (64bit). With that said even if it comes out at the WWDC (June) it will probably be fairly buggy at first.

[Devin Crane]

How are you playing back the DVCPro Footage FCP or Quicktime? QT defaults to playback DV footage at low quality. If you go into preferences an check Playback at HQ then this might fix your problem.

[Devin Crane]

Read an interesting article today on Mac Rumors, before you pass judgement it wasn’t a rumor about Leopard’s or FCS3’s release. It was about Nvidia’s Parallel GPU encoding that took HD footage and encoded it in what should have taken an hour and did it in minutes. With Snow Leopard including Open CL and FCS3’s relation to Snow Leopard I don’t believe Apple is just sitting on their laurels. They are just not sitting on NAB’s schedule anymore.