[Jeron Coolman]

As soon as I finish my current project, I will upgrade to CS3 🙂

[Jeron Coolman]

I feel for you Todd. I’d be pretty upset if I had as many problems as you are having. Makes you wonder what kind of testing occured while the machine was at Promax?

Have you tried pulling the Aja card out of the machine and running some tests without it? That is what I would do if I suspected problems with the board. Also, have you tried Aja support on these problems that you suspect are the Xena card?

I had my Xena card in a dual Xeon machine and it worked fine, then I moved it into my new dual quad-core machine and it is even working better 🙂

[Jeron Coolman]

“Is there a difference in AJA AVIs and standard DV AVIs?”

I thought you could only capture through the Aja into an uncompressed format and when you capture through firewire you capture into a compressed format. I was wondering if you saw a difference between an uncompressed Aja capture + Aja preset and a compressed firewire capture + Adobe preset.

“It now *appears* that the black previews in question are all AVI files that were captured via firewire into a standard DV project, not an AJA DV project.”

“It’s only when the project is displaying the video externally on a TV monitor that this problem arises.”

I didn’t know you could preview through the Aja with a standard DV project, so these statements conflict in my knowledge domain. Are you saying you only have these problems when you send ANY type of video from ANY preset (Aja or Adobe) through the Xena to an external monitor?

Is it possible you are experiencing some sort of PCI bus conflict with the Xena card? Are the machines that work, the same hardware as the machine that doesn’t?

Another shot in the dark, did you delete your Premiere Pro presets? I thought I read something in the last release of drivers (before the 3.0 that were just announced), that if you were upgrading from a previous version you should/would reset the Premiere Pro presets.

[Jeron Coolman]

Installing and running CS3 on Vista 64 is supposed to be supported, albeit still as a 32 bit application. Have you done any testing with CS3 and Xena 3.0 drivers on Vista 64?

I don’t want to migrate my dual quad-core machine w/ 8 gigs of RAM from WinXP 32 to Vista 32. I’m waiting for all of my software and drivers to support Vista 64, even if they are just 32 bit apps/drivers.

[Jeron Coolman]

“Also, sometimes when trying to render (hit ENTER), we get a Disk Write error window that says we don’t have access privileges to our previews folder. The previews folder is a local drive that we have full rights to write to.”

This would make me very suspicious about the problem lying with the Xena drivers or software. Maybe the flaky previews are just a symptom of a problem external to Premiere Pro and the Xena?

Does the rendering work without the Xena card? Or at least maybe a project that doesn’t use a Xena preset? Have you tried one of the Adobe SDI presets that support the Xena card for output?

[Jeron Coolman]

Yes. In fact, I bought the Xena for previewing my timeline in Premiere Pro and ended up appreciating it more in After Effects 😉

[Jeron Coolman]

Tim,

Great article! Really good idea/paradigm. I’d love to see more like this for other topics.

Sorry if I missed this in either one of them, but my questions/concerns are this…

Will I ever be able to use ProRes as an intermediate codec in other NLEs than FCP on my Windows XP (soon to be Vista) machine?

More specifically, will I ever be able to ingest HD-SDI through my Xena card into ProRes and edit that in Premiere Pro and work with the ProRes media files in After Effects on my Microsoft Operating System?

I’m not too clear how the codec is licensed and what Apple’s plans are for it. I can see benefits to them keeping it just to FCP (ala DNxHD and Avid), but I could see benefits to them opening it up to other applications and operating systems.

Thanks,

Jeron

[Jeron Coolman]

Thanks Tim!

Its good to know I’m not loosing my mind…

…well loosing more of it than I thought 🙂

[Jeron Coolman]

David,

I think the “should in most cases” comment is more of a “general computing comment” than one specific to images with a Xena card; e.g. I should be able to use use a RAID 5 for a media drive, but every time I’ve tried, it never worked very well 🙂

Being a software developer of over 20 years, I NEVER say “It will work” 🙂 The best I give is “It should work”. There are just too many factors involved that could make it not work; e.g. maybe an image sequence won’t playback smoothly because the media drive hosting them is a USB drive on an oversaturated bus causing jerky playback.

I create TIFF animation image sequences in 1080i resolution in particleIllusion and import those into After Effects and Premiere Pro and they’ve always played back in real time on my PPro timeline.

I don’t have experience with Blackmagic products, but when I was trying to decide between them and the Aja ones. I ended up going with the Aja hardware because it seemed to offer more “hardware acceleration” for the media I use.

Jeron

[Jeron Coolman]

David,

I had a funny feeling that the Blackmagic was supplying more of a “computer display” signal through the DVI than a “1080i” signal, because the Dells just don’t seem to like the 1080i signals (from HD devices; camera, HD-DVD player, etc.) that I give them, but they love a “computer display” signal at 1920×1200.

I’m not sure if I’m going to need a converter with the LG monitor. I’m moving my studio and at the same time, finishing a new dual-quad core machine, with 4 terabytes of Areca raid storage for my Xena card. I bought the Dell, saw the poor picture, then bought the LG to use in order to monitor my timeline via component out of the Xena.

Yesterday, I finally did some testing with the LG and the component connections. I used to use an HD TV connected with the component connections of the Xena. The TV one of the lower HD resolutions than 1080i, so it would downscale the picture to the lower resolution.

I connected the Sony HDV deck to the HD Connect LE and connected it to the Xena via HD-SDI. I connected the component out of the Xena to the component in of the LG. I connected the component out of the HD Connect LE to the HD TV’s component in.

I then captured some uncompressed HD via Machina and watched the same footage playing on the HDTV and LG side-by-side. The difference in quality was huge. The LG looked alot better, so I’m pretty sure it will be fine for my purposes.

I think I’ll just keep the Dell as a 2nd computer monitor and if I decide I want a pure digital connection to the LG from the Xena, I’ll get an HD-SDI to HDMI converter from Convergent Design for around $300.

Jeron