[Tim Kolb]

It sounds like your login credentials may have been a casualty of the crash. Do you have other software that has become uncooperative?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

The first recommendation I’d have is to double your RAM…at least, for CS5/5.5. You’ll benefit from that a LOT.

Second, Premiere Pro looks for the “first” display card in the system for CUDA support. I suspect if the Q4000 isn’t what the system sees as “primary”, PPro won’t find it. Keep in mind that part of the advantage to CUDA isn’t JUST the fact that the display card helps crunch the numbers…it’s that the frame is now on the display card and it moves to the display…a very short hop.

If you could utilize a Quadro card as you say (not in line with your displays), you’d be shipping rendered frames back through your system to get it to the display through your ATI card (if that were even possible). You would certainly hobble the efficiency of that process.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

I’m not really sure why an IT guy would decide to intentionally NOT buy a CUDA capable card for CS5…what a waste.

I have very little experience with BlackMagic stuff so I’m not sure how their drivers are working with Cs5/5.5.

You may want to contact their tech support and ask about updates or specific conflicts, including display card drivers.

(But as Todd said, the display card drivers are the first order of business…)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Agreed. Chris is right, and while it is a larger investment, The jumps between CS3 and CS5.5 were substantial for all of Production Premium.

It may be worth considering a complete move…it might result in less headaches down the road.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

ProRes encode capability is only available inside FCP. You can write Mr. Jobs a nice thank you note if you’d like, but his intention to use ProRes to sell FCP worked out pretty well for Apple…

Also, keep in mind that FCP “rewraps” several formats and the decoder for those is also tied to FCP only. I think if you have rewrapped DVCProHD for instance, PPro may be able to read it as long as FCP is installed on the same machine, but since I’m not a Mac user primarily, I’d rather have someone else confirm that…I know that you can render out of AE to ProRes when FCP is installed (or at least you used to be able to…) so I suspect that PPro will read these other formats as long as FCP and therefore the codecs are installed.

Calibrated software makes several products that handle these codecs for the non-FCP owner as well. Also, AJA’s drivers will handle several of the FCP-centric codecs so if you have an AJA card, you may be good to go.

I do know that FCP’s rewrapped HDV files are a particular hangup sometimes…

However, ProRes can be read by anyone with QuickTime these days, I have an Adobe TV segment where I edit and author using ProRes source media…using my Windows XP laptop. You can’t export or render to ProRes on a non-Mac, or on a Mac without FCP. That alone may be the reason for a lot of FCPX sales…people paying 300 USD for ProRes…

So…I guess I’d use FCP as your conversion tool to ProRes…then the XML of the edit projects from FCP will not probably bring in unused clips automatically, so you’ll want those clips organized well enough so you can go back and bring the unused material into the PPro project.

Does that make sense?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

A couple things…

First…very few third party vendors had much luck with CS4…you’ll recall that the software changed over from having one set of video settings for the -project- to having video/audio settings for each -sequence-… This completely broke every third party software or hardware product that used the hooks to the project and Adobe did not get the developer info out early enough in the cycle and frankly most third party vendors struggled with it until it came time to move on to CS5 development lest they be behind in their efforts with that release… This ended up being the case for many of the third party vendors, and unfortunately CS4 was a pretty good release otherwise so all the egg appeared to the users to be on the third party vendor’s faces unfairly.

Second…yes, AJA is definitely an Apple-centric company in many product lines…the KiPro line which captures ProRes being a clear example.

…at NAB once again in the AJA booth, we had two of us who were Premiere Pro/Windows guys on one station in the booth running all the CineForm and 3D content, and nearly all the other stations were Macs with FCP…other than that behemoth out in front running four full HD SDI outputs to tile and create a 4K image on that monster Sony LCD on the main aisle…that was Adobe running as FCP7 can’t handle 4K. FCPX can handle 4K, but with no RED support, I doubt we’ll see a lot of FCPX users Log and Capturing to 4K ProRes files…

I think that AJA is likely quite focused on where they’ll be placing their efforts in the future and I suspect that PPro as well as Avid figure in quite heavily.

AJA is a company that makes seriously solid hardware and has had historically excellent support. I’m not saying that they’re perfect as their targets are always moving, but they are definitely motivated to keep the reputation of their products consistent.

In the current environment I think that Matrox’s success with the MX02 line and BlackMagic’s early implementation of Thunderbolt will continue to motivate them to take care of their customers.

On CUDA and AJA…for the CUDA contribution the the Media Encoder, you should see no real change. Keep in mind that part of what makes the Mercury Playback Engine (which is present regardless of CUDA augmentation) so efficient is the ability to drop resolution while editing on any format.

(CineForm has this specific to their codec and Premiere Pro used to have something called “draft” mode, but nothing as well-executed as Mercury seems to be).

Half resolution is decoding/displaying a quarter of the pixel count…and when you calculate an effect, you get an advantage from only having to process a quarter of the pixels (or even less if you set the resolution lower). CUDA acceleration on top of that makes for a very responsive editing experience.

When you are using an SDI output card, you’re typically sending out video full res, so there is four times the work to be done on the frame decode…and then also on any effect you’re processing…then the frame (as I said before) has to be “back shipped” from the display card GPU to the CPU/PCIe buss to go out the SDI card, so you’re decoding more data, sending more data out to the CUDA engine, then you’re using bandwidth in that same pipe to pull the full frame back to the CPU whereas with a non-SDI sequence, you be processing the frames and squirting them out the DVI port into the ether…

It’s not that you have to choose one or the other…they’re simply designed for different purposes.

Chris’s advice was as solid as it gets for the most time-effective way to go about this at this point in time. Edit on a sequence that doesn’t use the AJA card and nest the sequence or copy/paste it into an AJA sequence when you need to master out…that gives you the best of both worlds. If you have an SDI monitor for a client monitor, that may not be possible, or you may consider giving the client a panel that can take a DVI or DisplayPort drop.

Does that help clarify the situation?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Well…then where are these files that PPro is creating if you can’t find any files?

Did you look at the file path that Vincent specified?

If you can’t find the files, how is it that you can remove them to detect if PPro is writing new files?

I’m still unclear on this…the situation doesn’t make sense without a bit more detail.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

“The cluster…”?

If the clip was in PPro and you did the CC there…you can output the BluRay and the SD MPEG2 file from Media Encoder…or you can author a BluRay DVD and simply use the same assets for an SD DVD and let Encore do the appropriate compression for each from one master clip with the same chapter markers…

Adobe is the one that has had this workflow in hand for some time…I think that your workflow would be far less of a problem if you could just do the cc and the chapter markers in PPro and author using one source asset.

I realize that being accustomed to FCP’s operation makes switching over a pain, but I think you’d find the workflow to be a time-saver.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Any time you can get the same plugin on both sides of the transaction, it should help.

If it’s all just 3 way CC, why wouldn’t one take the timeline with the final edits…transfer the XML to PPro…do the CC there? Would that solve the problem?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

Actually…you’ve got it partly right.

First, the Kona 3 isn’t a graphics card…it’s video I/O. I run two Quadros (four displays) and a Kona LHi with CS5.5.

The CUDA effects support runs on the NVIDIA card…which feeds a display via DVI, DisplayPort…whatever.

The Kona cards interact with the computer through the PCIe buss…which plugs into the CPU.

I don’t think it’s that CUDA stops working…it’s that CUDA is fastest when the process doesn’t have to take the assembled frame and suck it back from the display card to the CPU and the n spit it out to the I/O card.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor