[Tim Kolb]

I think the Mac drivers are close… I know they are anxious to get them out there.

The CS4 qualified drivers really don’t work at all in CS5.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

CS5 will take the footage in it’s native form…runs like a bandit on a decent system.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

The go/stop thing can be a pain and that’s on the Windows side too…

What kind of configuration are you running? Those formats you mention all run in realtime, even on a dual-dual-core AMD I have…

If I start adding effects, then of course you end up having to preview render at some point where you’ve reached the machine’s limits…but that’s only for getting frame rate on playback, you can still see the clip and manipulate it…

Hmmm… I know that indications have been that the Mac is behind the PCs in the Adobe performance dept as they took quite a break there… I didn’t think the performance gap was that wide though…

I do suspect that Adobe’s ability to encode ProRes is likely in Apple’s hands at least somewhat. ProRes, QT rewrapped tape-borne DVCProHD, and QT rewrapped HDV are all intentionaly left out of QT on Windows. You can’t encode ProRes without FCP installed (or a KiPro)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I don’t know if the benefits of the Mercury engine are ‘lost’…

I’ve been giving Adobe some feedback on some of these demos they are doing…I wish they’d spend a little more time on all the factors that are contributing to the performance you get from Mercury involving everything from the user-controllable resolution drop to leaning on the GPU…to hard drive and CPU speed for that matter.

When you are decoding video on the CPU and sending it to the GPU to preview effects, the video that’s been processed is sitting right at the DVI output, and out it goes.

If you need to bring that video back into the machine to route to a Kona HDSDI port, that’s a different process. When the preview is happening on the GPUs, I would guess you’re really working with what we would characterize as “uncompressed” footage. Sending it out the DVI port is easy…moving it back through the machine can’t help but use resources.

I’m curious what the media settings and the sequence settings were…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

…yeah, the CS5 drivers for Windows have been up for about two weeks…they were out before the Mac versions I thought…I still don’t see a download link for a CS5 driver for the LHi on Mac on the AJA site… (shrug shoulders)

Anyway, hey Josh…

Do you have an analog or an SDI monitor you could use to verify that the signal is getting to the card that way, or have you tried some options already? Is the signal green from all the outputs?

(You have an LHi, right?…)

I might just check and see if you can plug the HDMI cable directly into the back of the Kona card if you have the breakout box to rule out something funky with the box or the interconnect cable.

Then…if none of that works, we’ll need more sequence info and media info and output setting info…as well as any really tasty dessert recipes you may have in your possession.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

OK, I’m going to surprise some people…

Get the Mac version.

Here’s why:

The PC version has 1 DVI dual Link port and 2 DisplayPorts (use any two). DisplayPort hasn’t exactly set the world on fire with how fast it’s caught on, even though it has many advancements…so it’s sort of a PITN for most people who don’t have a DisplayPort monitor, and would need an adapter, etc…

The Mac version has two DVI dual link ports. Easy to drop into most user’s current set up.

They’re the same card.

The Mac version runs in PC or Mac, it’s a matter of downloading the correct drivers. In fact, I’m running the Mac version in my Windows 7 machine (not a Mac with Windows…it’s a PC), with the Windows drivers obviously…no problem.

So…because of the ports on the boards and the universal use, I’d say get the “Mac” version…and sell it to either a Windows OR a Mac user…

(I don’t think the Windows board can work in a Mac…so I believe you’d be limited if you went the other way.)

Congratulations. It’s a shame you don’t have a use for it, but I don’t think you’ll have trouble selling it if your asking price is reasonable.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

just to add to Jeff’s advice… The loop button would play between a designated in point and out point in the sequence…do you have those set?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Ummm…Marcello?

Have you ever edited ProRes on Premiere Pro on Windows?

I’ve got a video on Adobe TV on just such a thing… A 90 minute timeline of 720p60…in CS4…which I edited on a laptop (a big laptop granted, but certainly not a “special computer” with “special drives”)…it runs just fine.

Yes, you can’t encode to ProRes without FCP, but Adobe is really built to go direct out to whatever you want to distribute, and as the video I did shows…you dynamic link the timeline in Encore and author…done.

ProRes delivers what it’s called to, and in QuickTime, there just hasn’t been a huge history of general use 10 bit codecs on the Windows side, so any app that didn’t own some proprietary permutation under QuickTime such as AJA, or BlueFish wasn’t calling for 10 bit.

CS5 with the AJA software/hardware on Windows calls the 10 bit precision of ProRes and plays it. I suspect that PPro CS5 may have it without AJA augmentation during CS5’s cycle as they are very focused on 10 bit color precision implementation.

ProRes is a good codec. I suspect that CineForm is a touch better, as testing has it out performing HDcamSR for maintaining quality in RGB 4:4:4 (the closest version of CineForm’s codec to HDcamSR)…but ProRes is good too.

I’ve worked with lots of intermediate codecs over the years and I’d say that of the codecs in fairly common use, from a datarate-to-visual-quality standpoint, CineForm is probably the best, Canopus HQ (only available in Grass Valley Edius on Windows) is probably number 2, and ProRes is probably very close to Canopus HQ (the Canopus codec and ProRes are both DCT transforms which use the familiar ‘blocks’ that we’ve all noticed when they show up in aggressively or repeatedly compressed footage…CineForm is a wavelet transform…even when stressed, it can’t produce any blocking artifacts).

Let’s be careful that we aren’t condemning Premiere Pro because FCP has ProRes encoding and PPro doesn’t…there are lots of factors involved in any comparison you’d care to make. Final Cut is a solid application with a large installed base and lots of good functionality, but I think some FCP users are still picturing Premiere 4.0 circa 1996 in their mind when they advise people on their choices.

Even a very knowledgeable colleague of mine at NAB (2 months ago in 2010) who is an FCP user/instructor told me that his students just don’t “…get the A/B editing thing on the timeline…” Premiere 6.5 was the last version to have this feature…PPro v1 replaced it in 2003 with an edit timeline that functions in a completely visually familiar way for FCP and Avid editors.

It’s like criticizing Apple for the lousy performance and engineering quality of the G4s we bought back when Premiere 6.5 ran in OSX months before FCP did…that time is long past and those remarks are simply not an adequate description of the current Mac product line, which is fantastic.

It’s been -8 years- since I’ve seen a “NOT RENDERED” frame show up when I place a clip that isn’t native to the timeline in a sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro…EIGHT years…my colleagues with FCP need to rewrap or transcode or render…today.

Importing graphics into FCP is a process that would drive most PPro users insane… Not nearly as flexible and fast as PPro.

Audio capabilities inside PPro on the timeline are simply superior to FCP. I can switch my PPro timeline from the minimum increment being a video frame to the minimum increment in the audio tracks being one audio sample. I do this if I have a digital ‘pop’ artifact, it can even be in the middle of a spoken word. I go in and simply cut out the 3-5 samples of the artifact and I replace it with nothing as it’s so fast we can’t even detect a gap. Switch back to video incremented timeline…move on.

When I have to “customize” a music track and recut it to match my edited program length, I can drop into audio increments and beat-match music at any point I care to…on the timeline in PPro. The audio portion of the timeline in PPro was designed by a couple of smart guys who worked with DigiDesign on ProTools prior to Avid taking over. It’s implemented pretty well.

As far as your assertion of “no HD” codec option for PPro… Again, have you ever used PPro? How many HD codec options do you require?

I could edit XDcam EX, XDcamHD, and P2 DVCProHD without transcoding or rewrapping -IN PPro CS3- 2 versions back. No copied media, the stuff just got transferred to a local drive and away you go.

I could cut RED RAW in it’s native form, with access to it’s decode and debayer settings right in PPro CS4…again…no transcode, no rewrap…AND access to the very settings that would be the reason why you’d shoot motion RAW in the first place…during the edit process.

In CS5, you now have native settings for AVC-Intra (100 and 50 Mbit), AVCHD, Canon XF, Digital SLR (ever take footage from a Canon 5D MkII and slap it down on the timeline and just start cutting?), XDcamHD 422, and DVCPro50 (SD)…

I use CineForm for an intermediate codec, but I’ve cut in most of PPro’s native modes when it was appropriate. It works pretty well for me. CineForm also has what will likely become one of, if not -the- standard workflow for editing stereoscopic material…

Both eyes in one file with direct control of the two eyes and their spatial and framing relationship in real time in First Light. Not to mention that First Light does primary color correction on any CineForm material and stores the correction in metadata so the original file is unchanged, yet every app that touches it sees those changes.

Windows and Mac, metadata that stores color look up tables…can you see why ProRes may not be seen as the one true path to intermediate codec salvation by those of us who have used some other options and compared them?

The CineForm line of codecs is cross platform by the way…they’re also available as QT on FCP, and CineForm is the most elegant stereoscopy solution there too. Add a Kona card to either Windows or Mac and you have RT editing of stereoscopic (“3D”) material output to a stereoscopic display in RT on PPro…OR FCP…on Mac…or Windows…QT or AVI wrapper.

If Apple wanted to make ProRes a universal intermediate codec standard, I suspect they’d have had the marketing muscle to get that done some time ago, as it is a very solid, high quality video codec…I’m at a loss as to why they didn’t, frankly.

So…I guess, yes… PPro on Windows doesn’t encode out to ProRes.

While I would welcome that capability any time Apple was benevolent enough to bestow it upon us, I think Windows-based PPro users will probably be able to muddle through…

…somehow.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Actually, “YUV” never existed as such…it was a scaling method used in an intermediate step when encoding composite NTSC.

Color difference encoding is actually notated “Y’PbPr” for analog and “Y’CbCr” for digital these days.

The “Y'” is the black and white signal and the accent indicates that their is a gamma curve (as opposed to a power curve) instead of a linear relationship in the gray scale.

Originally in the USA, this system allowed black and white television owners to stay in the game as their sets just didn’t read the other part of the signal…where the color is.

Most people assume that “Pb/Cb” and “Pr/Cr” correlate to red and blue…not the case.

Think of these two values as longitude and latitude. We aren’t finding our way around the globe…but around the vectorscope. Some vectorscopes will actually label the horizontal axis and vertical axis. the vectorscope in PPro uses the old Betacam component nomenclature of “R-Y” and “B-Y”.

The “Y'” signal contains the luma value for each pixel…so the only values that are left are hue and saturation. The vectorscope shows hue by the positions around the “clock face” and saturation by distance from the center. Any color the system can produce is available at some point of “longitude” and “latitude” on the vectorscope…which is indicated by the values on the two axes…”B-Y/Pb/Cb” or “R-Y/Pr/Cr” and where they would then metaphorically intersect. It’s not an additive system like RGB.

The color difference signals take VERY little space to encode, whereas with RGB, each color channel is equal and needs a complete raster. Not to mention that basic RGB actually has a few shades from typical television palettes that it can’t reproduce…just as color difference methods used within the established video standard has some difficulty with reproducing some shades of RGB.

So…RGB won’t be taking over anytime soon, and I think anyone with less than the latest, most massive computer coupled to cavernous amounts of harddrive storage should be thankful for that.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Well…it does that also.

I dunno if I’ve seen the “holy bit bazooka Batman!” speed increase in that way like I’ve seen it in timeline preview. That end of things is also a bit format-dependent I believe…

All these qualifiers can really rain on a guy’s parade, I realize, but the fact that it IS a beneficial system add-on remains. the nice thing is that one of these boards is not required and the software will run very respectably relative to your configuration in software mode as well.

I think the idea may be to try the software and decide if you think you need the graphics card. I’ve not used CS5 without a Q4800, so I don’t know what the comparison really is…but I have seen some pretty experienced users pipe up and mention that they are surprised by what they’re getting even in software mode.

So, it’s always about the ROI…for me, it’s great as I like the immediate feedback while editing. The encoding advantage is good, but not as important to me personally.

Everyone’s situation is different of course…

So…just a little more gray for you to sort through. 🙂

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,