[Eric Jurgenson]

Thanks Steve and Tim. The workspace hotkey is a biggie for me. I’m glad it’s in there. A very handy suggestion (if you have dual monitors) is to have two user layouts; one with the project window full screen in the right monitor, and another with the effects control window full screen in the right monitor. Having a hot key to switch between these layouts makes it even handier. I’m sure there are more handy layouts, but this is one I use all the time.

[Eric Jurgenson]

If you work with clients and are looking for real time HD functionality that exceeds Smoke on SGI or a DS Nitris at about 1/6 the price, you may want to consider Axio. For example, I can play back three layers of HD uncompressed 1080 24P video with a 3D DVE on one of the video tracks, CC on all video tracks; and two graphics tracks, each with DVE motion effect. All in real time.

The real time chroma key quality is remarkable, even on HDV material, and very easy to set up. This is great for virtual sets. I can even apply blur to the background (still real time) for DOF effects. This capability alone is worth the price of admission, but there is much more.

I can play back three HDV tracks (1080 30i) (with primary and secondary color correction and one 3D DVE) that are decoded on the fly from their native files, which saves a huge amount of disk space.

The Axio hardware utilizes FPGA chips that allow the hardware to be reconfigured and upgraded in the field, opening the door to more functionality in the future.

And I should add that it runs on a powerful platform (dual/dual core Opterons) that won’t be EOL in two years (I refer here to the Freescale Macs).

As for Premiere Pro, I don’t really feel that it’s holding me back. I used to edit on Discreet Edit, which I still regard fondly, but when you look at the whole Adobe package, and the level of integration therein, it’s very respectable. I have high hopes for the future.

[Eric Jurgenson]

If, presuming 2.5″ or 3.5″ HDD’s can handle the 12.5 MB/s data rate of DVCPRO HD, will the HVX200 have the ability to spit live video out the FireWire to an external field drive?

Is anyone making a portable drive at this point that will function as a DVCPRO HD field recorder and directly mount on an NLE (without copying)? I know there are many such beasts in the 25 MB/s DV world. It seems that it would only be a matter of time.

How about a device that would allow easy use and swapping of commodity SATA drives, while containing the power and 1394 interface in a field hardened enclosure? This would be hard to beat in terms of cost and speed.

On another note, does the HD RAID requirement for current P2 cards on the HVX200 mean that it is impossible to record uninterrupted HD video for more than sixteen minutes? Then if you want to continue recording, you have to buy another set of P2 cards or wait while your files are transferred to a hard drive in the field? Does this field transfer device exist at this point?

[Eric Jurgenson]

Thanks guys. This is very helpful.

[Eric Jurgenson]

Thanks, Steven. I’ll try it out.