[Jeff Brown]

What are you capturing from, and to what format???

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

MPEG 4 has different “levels” Level 1 through 3 are limited to small images (as you found). Try Level 5, that should let you do full HD.
QuickTime defaulted to 720×480 because you has NTSC-DV selected. Only one frame size allowed for that format (DV).

hope it helps,
Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Paul, I have not tried this myself, but perhaps the FinalCut workflow is adaptable to PPro? –>

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ross_shane/aja_kona3.php

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

For starters, don’t change to Flash before editing in Premiere: edit the AVI footage you captured. And check your project settings: if you capture square pixels, edit with square pixels.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

If you are shooting at 29.97, you should edit at 29.97.
If you are shooting interlaced, you should edit at 29.97 interlaced. You will probably see an improvement in the still pan & scan, too. Although, Premiere does not do excellent graphics (still) motion; that is better done in After Effects.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Budget aside, I’d say it very much depends on your workload, and the type of workload. If you start doing AfterEffects projects, or lots of encoding or transcoding, a second machine to render would be a plus. This can be hefty in RAM and processing, but for a render-only machine, you can do away with a fancy graphics card (built-in graphics is fine). Share the drives from your main workstation, and you don’t need more than a boot drive, and once setup is done, you don’t even need a mouse, keyboard, or monitor: use something like RealVNC to remotely access the desktop of the render machine. However, that won’t be the sort of box you want to do an audio session with. On the other hand, if you are just editing and scoring, use one machine until you find yourself frequently waiting around to do the next task. At that point, budget should be easier, because you are more expensive than a 2nd machine (even in the non-profit scenario).

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

Michael– I’m saying you need to realize that Kona cards are video I/O cards made for postproduction suites and real-time editing. Not compression or accelerator cards. So the upscaled HD signal is a signal, not a file.

There might be other cards that do the sort of thing you seem to be looking for.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

You might do better asking in the Mac-specific Kona forum…

But surely there is a way to output a selected frame from a QTime movie. Photoshop, maybe?

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

The Kona cards do nice up- and down- conversion, but they do hardware signal conversion. So, you need “somewhere” for that HD signal (HD-SDI) to go on the output side. Can you capture with a different machine? Or is this for web use? (If so, why convert to HD only to down-convert to a web codec?)
Kona cards are primarily for real-time video post-production: capture and editing. You might be better off with a software solution. More details would help. i.e.: what are you doing with your video?

-Jeff

Jeff Brown
Fire Mist Media
http://www.firemist.com

Workstation:
Boxx 8700 dual-quad
4 GB RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 4500
WinXP Pro
AJA Xena 2K
CalDigit HDOne

Main Software:
3ds Max
Combustion
Photoshop
PremierePro

[Jeff Brown]

Thanks for posting your solution!

-jeff