[Tim Kolb]

[Norbert Rudzik] “Problem with Cineform codec for PPro. After uninstall ProspectHD v4 is AJA working.
AJA not working if any Cineform codec is installed (Player, Neo, Prospect).”

CineForm does NOT run under AJA retail drivers…CineForm uses OEM AJA drivers. Installing the retail version (the drivers this thread refers to are the retail drivers) over the top of CineForm and the OEM drivers will cause a mess.

There is an extensive thread on this below.

Check in with CineForm to see what drivers you are supposed to be running, they are probably included in the latest update for your CineForm product.

I would also advise against the manual gutting you’re doing by removing plugins without an uninstall…you’ll just make things less stable.

Uninstall the Xena retail drivers and get the latest CineForm update and install the Xena drivers that come with it.

If you feel you need the retail drivers for some other use, you’ll need to have a dual-boot system (I have one of these). The CineForm side and the AJA retail side. It works fine.

These latest drivers seem to work fine for most…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

The Quadro cards are on the list for compatibility reasons as well as power… I’d advise you to pass on installing a gamer card in a system you’ll be depending on in a professional environment…

As far as configuration, you’ll have the biggest bottleneck at the drives. Just because you can hang 4 GBit FibreChannel on a machine doesn’t mean the drives will be able to ingest it all.

There are very big RAID 6 systems out there that will BURST to 400 MB/s, and claim 300 MB/s sustained. You’ll need in the neighborhood of 260 MB sustained with audio and 3 color channels (you won’t acquire an alpha channel). Keep in mind that many of those specifications for sustained throughput are done when the drive unit is below 50% capacity…many times WAY below. If the thing will just muster 300 MB/s on the first file being written, chances are good that your data rate will drop when it gets full. How much it may drop is a matter of testing each unit, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you could drop below the minimum you need to keep ingesting on any but the most expensive systems.

So…I’d say:

1. Use what’s on the approved component list if you expect tech support as those guys don’t know about every component out there, they know about the components on their approved list…it’s why they made the list in the first place.

2. Spend some serious time looking at the storage end of this scenario. That will be your biggest issue. Most computers are able to pass the bandwidth you’d need for this, but harddrives that can take it all in every day, all day long aren’t as prevalent as the industry may have you believe…and the drive systems that can are typically dual power supply, multifan rigs that would not normally qualify as ‘quiet’. AND storing 4 hours of footage at 10 bit 4:4:4 RGB uncompressed…so your RAID system will need significantly more net capacity than that to allow for data redundancy inside the drive unit, as well as keeping ultimate capacity as far above actual usage as possible to maintain speed.

3. How will you be redundant outside the main drive unit? If you show up as the data wrangler with an acquisition system, how will you protect the data? How large a battery backup (or backups) will you need to keep this beast running in the event of a power hiccup or failure? How will you backup the data? Each hour will be almost a terabyte…that’s a lot of alternative storage. When will you back up? How much data will be at risk (only one copy) at any one time?

RAID 6 will be about the minimum drive configuration you’d want as a single drive failure on a 7 or 14 drive system configured as striped would wipe the entire system…but then you’ll also need to carry hot swap replacement drives for your drive system for the occasion when (not if) one fails. Keep in mind that when one drive fails and the system needs to start restoring to a hot spare, that system’s capabilities to do other things is limited until that process is done…and you want that process to complete before proceeding…

Lots to think about. But I’d move my emphasis from computer to drives…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Jason Harris] “i often wonder how Adobe can continue to call its products PROFESSIONAL when they work so poorly,

yes i suppose if you bought the biggest and baddest hardware you might see SOME diffference, but the sad truth is adobe has been lying to its customers for years,”

Sounds like you’re seriously undergunned in the hardware department then? “Lying” is a strong charge. No question? Just the rant?

Not every tool works for every person of course, but I run CS4 on a beefy 32 bit XP Pro (2 cores) laptop with 2 GB of RAM when I’m traveling. This computer shouldn’t really even run CS4, but I’ve edited several programs on it without issue other than cutting EX1 HD footage on a laptop with an external USB harddrive has some lag in response. No crashing though.

The Media Encoder in CS4 seems fairly efficient…on a machine that is designed for it.

If you want some advice about how to get better results out of Adobe products, ask away.

If that advice in the past has been that you need better hardware to run the software efficiently…then it sounds like you might have chosen to pass on that advice.

If someone bought Avid Media Composer or Apple Final Cut Pro and they had a big-iron computer spec to run the software in an ideal way, people would buy it without question, but when Adobe doesn’t run super fast and stable under heavy processing loads (like encoding) on the minimum runnable system specified on the box, lots of users cry foul. I don’t understand.

Everybody likes having all that software bundled together inexpensively (less than I paid for AE alone 10 years ago), but the expectation is that it should run on a commensurately inexpensive computer platform…and that is simply not the case.

Next time around, when CS5 goes 64 bit only, I’m assuming that things will get even better as they can concentrate on one configuration and leave behind much of the potential for installation on a system that simply isn’t up to the task due to age or under-configuration.

No software is perfect and Adobe has issues to solve without a doubt, but I’ve been running Adobe as my primary post tools since 2000, and it simply needs big hardware to run at it’s best.

So…tell us what your hardware configuration is, along with your project settings…otherwise your comments have no context.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Is your CS4 updated to the latest version?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Before I’d make that call, I’d set up a custom project/sequence setting in PPro with a 640×480 frame size and try to export it to the exact same encoder settings.

Sourcing non-square pixels from a DV PPro timeline to export with a 12% higher pixel count (720×480 vs 640×480) than rendering something from AE with square pixels, and encoding to square pixels is not “…set(ting) everything up in premiere the way it is in AE…”

I’m quite certain the two different framesizes in sources, and then the two different framesizes on the encode targets play a role in the difference you are seeing.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[nicky van der walt] ”
The Y output on all BM cards carry a stable ref signal.”

So there is a BB signal being generated internally in BM cards? You don’t need to feed the board a reference signal?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I think the answers so far are pretty on-point.

You can pick out times in the short history of video production on (what really qualifies as) personal computer workstations, and find periods where the software or hardware aspects of one were superior to the other, but performance-wise, they really are a practical wash as far as I can tell.

I ran Macs only in the 90s and PC with some Mac since about 2000…no good guys or bad guys, just different strengths and limitations.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I’ve seen this with hard drive recorders…as Gary reminded me recently, hard drives and vibrations aren’t particularly compatible…

🙂

It has gotten to the point where most camera people have to make sure they’ve visited the restroom before the show and most anyone in the venue working the show has ear plugs if they don’t have double muff headsets.

In a recent show we did, the low frequency vibrations were so bad that my closeup camera couldn’t get any closeups because even if the camera person attempted a ‘float’ or a lock down, the platform was vibrating so bad that the shot was unusable…

It’s not a stretch to picture a hard drive malfunctioning at the FOH position in this environment.

Being in a truck sometimes feels isolated…but then there are times when that’s a good thing.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Matthew Causon] “My thinking was to use the Io Express to for video output and monitoring, (not between the Ki Pro and computer) the Ki Pro does not do this.”

Well in that case, I’d agree.

Since in the earlier discussion the IO Express was tossed about as an alternative for the acquisition side (between the camera and ingest computer), I was still locked in to that line of thinking.

My bad, I stand corrected…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[David Braswell] “But isn’t it time to shift the focus from achieving the film look to one of achieving the look that best tells the story?”

I couldn’t agree more, but we aren’t an industry of shades of gray…

Most of us are still trained to see film dynamic range and framerate as storytelling…and interlaced video as ‘live’.

…and everyone wants to be a storyteller.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,