[Frank Gothmann]

It depends what your workflow and usage scenario is. Basically, anything Quicktime under windows is somewhat slow.
Both Cineform and HQX demonstrate this so well because both can also render to avi (and in case of HQX also to MXF) and both do so at much, much higher speed.
I use HQX AVI a lot because we switched to Edius as our main NLE and the render performance is breathtaking, outperforming any other codec no matter what the container or platform is. Exporting a 90 minute 1080 Prores HQ file to an HQX AVI in Edius takes me 15-20 minutes, saturating every core of our machines at nearly 90 percent and you can manually increase the highest quality settings going even way beyond what HDCAM-SR can deliver. It also supports alpha channels. Going out to HQX mov is also fast, faster than DnxHD for example, but nowhere near as fast as AVI.
Cineform on the other hand allows you to work very fast when you choose avi and, if you need to then move work to a Mac, you can quickly rewrap to .mov.
It also seems to work better with Premiere than HQX.
As usual, my suggestion is to try them both out and see what works best for you. You can get HQX for free from the Grassvalley site and Cineform is available as a trial.
I’d also suggest to look into Edius if you have the time and regularly edit on windows (or play with the idea of maybe editing under windows), It is an extremely versatile and powerful NLE that can make your life a lot, lot easier and it is a textbook exampe of how stable and reliable windows software can be, no matter what your hardware environment is. If you’re coming from FCP7, you should be up and running within a day or two, they’re very, very similar in approach.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

Yep, either Cineform (which has the advantage that you can render as an avi which is much, much faster than QT and the simply have the Cineform utility rewrap it as a mov if you need it) or use Canopus HQX (which is the native Edius codec) which is cross platform now, does frame sizes to gusto, is higher quality than Prores and it is free and both encode/decode on win and mac.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

Depending on your workflow, you may be ok with BM but there is a lot of stuff that is just buggy or simply not working as advertised (plus a lot less features)
Eg: no way to capture from a 444 source to Prores444 in Media Express. You can select it, but you won’t get an image. Uncompressed is the only way. And it’s not a limitation of the card as it works just fine in FCP7.
If you do a speedup with Cinema Tools (eg. 24 to 25fps), Media Express won’t accept the file anymore. Aja VTR Exchange will take the file just fine.
If you are using the card under windows, you can capture 444 uncompressed ok but you can ONLY output it with the card set to output p and not psf.
On OSX it works just fine with the card set to psf.
Hyperdeck shuttle won’t output any psf at all although the website claims it does.
Under windows, expect some stability issues. Zero issues whatsoever with Aja or Bluefish444.
There are more issues but this is just some stuff that came to my mind.
All that plus much better features on the AJA card relating to timecode and flexibility would make the Kona my first choice (or Bluefish444).

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

[Craig Seeman] “Apple must make a “professional” push to show how the combination is worth a six or seven figure secure investment for a facility.”

They’ve shown already that it is not a secure investment. With both soft- and hardware. We needed two more machines and employed a new guy full-time last month. I am in Europe. If we had not gone PC last year I would have been forced to look on Ebay for a Mac Pro because I need PCIe connectivity. Very secure.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

[Craig Seeman] “That would change if Google made an NLE though.”

Or Samsung.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

Hardly surprising coming from that source, isn’t it?
Let’s assume what he’s written is true.

Apple’s R&D and programming is 100% USA.

– Wow, with 20 people in the pro apps division, that really makes much of a difference.

Apple only speaks of their products own merits, they don’t bash other NLEs.

Well, not other NLEs. Yep. But apart from that, pretty much any other product that is competing with them. BSOD icon for windows file sharing anyone.

Adobe gave a free copy to every vendor on the Central 1st floor (where they were located), and asked vendors to use it instead of FCPX.

– Yep, they asked them? Did they order them? No. What’s wrong with that?

Apple allows vendors to chose on their own.

Did Adobe ask them or order them? And how is Apple allowing or disallowing anything when they are not even there officially. If they don’t like it, hey…. show up… officially… and then… “ask”.

Apple has sold many, many more copies of FCP X than they ever sold of FCP 7, in the same amount of time.

– Where is the “many many more” coming from? If it’s three times more than FCP7, given the price point, it still means they haven’t made more profit with it than with 7.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

Would be truly great if they managed to nail it. Cause next CS release looks extremely positive overall.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

In general, there shouldn’t be an issue. The decks require proper set-up, some more than others, but that’s not related to the cards.
Depending on your workflow, there are quite a number of other issues that come into play and make the usage of those card utilities vs. a dedicated NLE very annoying and time consuming, especially when using Media Express from BMD.
You are generally much better of with Aja in my experience.
On the whole, it’s doable but much more convenient and flexible to use an NLE.

With all the new features in Premiere, I keep my fingers crossed this has substantially improved as well. Monitoring, capturing and playout via CS6 has been terrible. It’s useless compared to the stability and general performance of MC or Edius.

It’s great to have new features and stuff but let’s get the basics right before moving on.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

[Steve Connor] “Of course if you need to you can ingest tape from other sources quite easily using your video cards capture utility”

Unfortunately, there are quite a few workflows where the card utilities are pretty useless or cause a lot of extra work.

“Tape is dead” is far from true in my experience. 70 per cent of the stuff we get or have to deliver tape and that won’t significantly change for quite a while.
Fortunately I have to say; a lot of the stuff we get on hard drive has issues you usually don’t see with tape because it’s coming from bigger post houses.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

A friend of mine is having brutal lagging issues with FCPX on an new iMac while the exact same project is doable on a 2010 MacPro so there is probably no best advice here.
It may be your machine, it may be your install, it may be not.
Unfortunately, in my experience, Apple’s in-house software often behaves very weird and unpredictable with no proper means to figure out why and when. I have seen Motion projects that suddenly took three times longer to render after a simple reboot, nothing changed in the project itself.
I certainly wouldn’t spend another 3k on an iMac if your current machine is only 2 years old. From an economic point that’s insane.
Plus, in the worst case scenario you will encounter the same problems.
The architecture in an iMac is more modern with a more modern instruction set but you are talking about issues in very basic UI operations that can hardly be related to that. If a 2 year old Xeon tower has problems running a single app and everything else is fine, something is wrong with the app.

The fact that you even have to ask yourself these questions is the core of the problem here, not any functionality, track based or magnetic timeline dogmatism or whatever. Reliability and consistent behaviour is the key, certainly to me.

I’d put another hard drive in, do a clean install and see if this or a new project behaves different. Then you’ll know more.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement