[Dezmond]

The 720p59.94 wouldn’t play properly on a 24p timeline with re-rendering the file to 720p23.976. This is due to the fact the AJA automatically adds the 2:3 pulldown on a 720p23.976 timeline so then the 720p59.94 file would play in slo-mo. Hmmm…So basically you want to shoot 720p23.976 with the Varicam and also shoot 1080sF23.976 with the Sony HDV Camera( in their 24F mode) and then have them both play nice in PPro2/Xena with the least possible hassle. I don’t work with Varicam (only experimented) so any ideas would be pure conjecture, but it seems that you would have to render one format or the other. You could capture the 720p23.976 Varicam material ( to a 720p23.976 file) over SDI and then capture the 1080sF23.976 data via FireWire as HDV MPEG2( FYI – It works capturing 1080sF23.976 HDV over FireWire with the Canon XL-H1 so I assume it should work fine with the Sony 24F mode too). Then you could either software render the 720p23.976 to 1080sF23.976 or vice-versa.

Also, the Xena 2k doesn’t have Analog Inputs (only outputs – The Xena LH and LS have Analog Inputs though) so you couldn’t capture Analog from your Sony HDV camera without an Analog to SDI Convertor. Since it doesn’t seem that the Xena 2k cross-conversion could help in your scenario it might be better just to get the LH since it does have Analog Inputs( in case you ever need to use that for your Sony HDV Camera )

Dezmond

[Dezmond]

Hi Tim,

Only the Xena 2k has HD cross conversion. The LH just has HD to SD down conversion. The cross-conversion on the Xena 2k does allow capturing of 720p59.94 data from a 1080i29.97 source, but you can’t capture to 720p23.976 from a 1080i29.97 source.

Dezmond

[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).

[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

[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

[Dezmond]

Hi Drik,

I had previously talked with AJA about this and they told me that 8-bit RGB/BGR 4:4:4 and 10-bit RGB 4:4:4 colorspaces(one exception ‘r10k’ in QuickTime) aren’t supported in SD mode on the LH yet for capture or playback.

Dezmond

[Dezmond]

Hi Andrew,

Try deselecting all of the audio channels in the Export To Tape Dialog except A1 and A2 and that should let you perform the insert edit.

Dezmond

[Dezmond]

Dean,

The AJA 720p30 settings in PPro2 and Machina (from my understanding) are only intended for Panasonic Varicam footage – where it can read “active” frame flags in the HD-SDI stream to only capture the 30 frames. 1280x720p always transmists data (via HD Component Analog or HD-SDI) as 59.94fps or 60fps. Since the software can’t detect any ‘active’ frame flags on the HD Component Input(since none exist) – it won’t capture anything. I agree – it probably should be documented better.

You could however just capture the HDV MPEG2 data via FireWire with the HDV Capture Module that ships with PPro2. The AJA board can play out the compressed 1280x720p HDV MPEG2 video out of the AJA board from a 1280x720p 29.97 AJA Project. Just make sure you have a AJA project that is 1280x720p29.97 and the AJA Video Output(in Playback settings) is set to 1280x720p29.97 – the AJA board will then correctly add the 2:2 pulldown to play out at 1280x720p59.94 in real-time(Once again – I think that should be documented better by AJA too!!) FYI – you can also downconvert the SDI or analog to SD in realtime too.

For any effects and/or rendering – there’s a handfull of color effects that AJA has realtime acceleration for, and you can also set your video rendering engine to use MPEG2(keeping all rendered effects as compressed) or you could set the rendering engine to 8/10-YUV uncompressed so you don’t lose any quality on rendering.

Hopefully that helps

[Dezmond]

Are you capturing in PPro2 or Machina? What is your ‘Audio Input’ set to and if you are capturing in Machina you need to make sure that “Video + Audio” or “Video – Audio” is selected.

[Dezmond]

You could also just capture the HDV MPEG2 video via FireWire – the Xena board is able to play out HDV MPEG2 thru the board with realtime color effects.