[Jeron Coolman]

There is no way to get HD to an HD monitor with an Avid Xpress Pro system 🙁

[Jeron Coolman]

Thanks for that input Tim,

Others have said that too, which is why I’m confident I had setup issues. The latest version of AspectHD resets the trial period, so I can’t wait to try it out again!

I guess there is supposed to be a way of bypassing the Cineform playback engine and use the Premiere Pro one instead by using the J and L keys. I’ll look forward to trying that as well.

Jeron

[Jeron Coolman]

“Overall, the advantage to CineForm should be both speed and quality. I’m not sure why you would get anything even close to Aspect performance with PPro HDV native…I found it to be profoundly slower in my comparisons.”

Tim it is exactly comments like that which make me think I had a problem with setup or installation. Probably a “serious” problem because CineForm is advertised to provide 3-4 times better performance than native HDV 🙂

I was able to playback 4 layers of native HDV and 4 layers of Cineform just fine, things started to slow down when I added a 5th. The native HDV slowed down less. So when I say I got better native HDV performance, it wasn’t THAT much better.

The “black screen of no playback” was only when I put a Magic Bullet filter on a Cineform clip in the Cineform preset. Magic Bullet filters play back fine with native HDV.

I’m looking forward to trying the new trial of AspectHD that came out this week. Especially since I’m confident I had some sort of setup problem.

[Jeron Coolman]

Dezmond thanks. I downloaded the documentation and checked it out.

[Jeron Coolman]

I have another question are the “Xena real-time effects” from some sort of Aja plug-in or are they just standard PPro effects that the Xena is “aware” of?

I ask because I use one machine as an edit machine and the other as a backup/render machine. When I get to a good render point, I copy the project to the other machine and start it rendering. Then I can go back to editing on the other machine.

Will I still be able to do this if I only have one Xena card in the edit machine?

[Jeron Coolman]

Great, that is what I was hoping it would do. Play back as fast as it could with the non-realtime effects. I’m getting decent performance with the effects I use on native HDV. Most of the effects I use end up playing at real time or very close to real time.

P.S. Magic Bullet does work in PPro as well as AE.

I’ve talked alot with the Aja support people and am pretty sure I’ll be able to get the Xena to work on the AMD dual core, but if not, the dual Xeon has the same hardware as one of their “qualified” machines so I can fall back on that.

[Jeron Coolman]

Dezmond,

I really appreciate the input. When you say I the Xena board can downconvert the HD to SD on the fly. What does that mean? Does that mean I can be editing HDV and view it downconverted on an SD monitor or does it go further than that? Meaning will I be able to take advantage of the downconversion when it comes to exporting an SD version of the HDV work for DVD, allowing the hardware accleration to kick in to downconvert, leaving the software export as if it was only working with SD; e.g. will it free up the CPU of the task of downconverting during the export process?

Another question. You say the Xena has some real-time effects that are enabled on the board. I assume this means I can put one of those effects on a clip and it will be hardware accelerated.

What about other filters like a BCC or Magic Bullet? Will I still be able to play a Magic Bullet filter on the Program Monitor at the same rate (or better?) than I can play it on a native HDV clip?

I don’t want to buy the Xena and then be “locked in” to only using filters, transitions and effects that the Xena knows how to accelerate. I would expect it to accelerate what it can and allow normal playback (as if it wasn’t there) for all of the others.

Thanks again,

Jeron

[Jeron Coolman]

Thanks Jeff,

I don’t mind spending $50 for the “crossgrade”. I just figured it would be easier if I could just order the Universal version it might be easier than placing 2 orders. I wasn’t too sure if the Universal was out yet or not. I was hoping since I couldn’t find an FCP Universal part number that Apple will just send me a copy of the Universal since I ordered it yesterday.

The laptop only has one firewire port which would be used by the deck. I’ve ruled out USB for external hard drive because of its unreliable sustained output. Some Xpress Pro users have gotten by with USB media drives but I don’t understand how 🙂

I’ve seen some firewire ExpressCard/34 announced and SIIG has an ExpressCard/54 which is a SATA controller for two drives. I’m hoping they will come out with an ExpressCard/34 SATA controller. The ideal solution for me would be to run two external SATA drives in a RAID 0 for my media drive 🙂

Jeron