Cineform and Display Cards
 

In my first system, assembled a few years back, I use Win XP 32bit, Premiere Pro 2, Aspect, and a Matrox Parhelia APVe. I had two monitors for premiere and a HD TV with a full screen image of the program window. It was heaven. Now it’s time to move on into Win 7 64 bit with Premiere CS5 to keep up with the newer versions of Prospect. The Matrox Parhelia, discontinued, has no drivers for Win 7 64 bit. The ATI Radeon series which would allow video overlay, would give me one monitor and a output for one TV full screen, or Theater Mode as ATI called it. That works OK with Win XP using one of the larger wide screen LCD’s and a HD TV. But, The ATI overlay (Theater Mode) doesn’t seem to be supported with Win 7 64bit on any of the Radeon cards and drivers Iv’e tried. No luck with answers from ATI and after a week of communications with Gigabyte, who said it worked for them, later asked,” Just what is Overlay and Theater Mode?” Now I haven’t tried any of the Nvidia cards, especially the new CUDA series that Adobe recommends for the mercury engine, because from what I’ve read in this forum they don’t have the overlay feature. And CFHD doesn’t utilize the GPU feature on these boards. I’m not quite sure which direction to turn and any feedback would really be appreciated.

I am hoping that Cineform announces soon that they have made a deal with Matrox and offer hardware support for the Matrox MX02 with CS5 in their presets, Current options I believe are the following cards but there may be others that work with CS5 only.

AJA cards
XENA LHe - now known as KONA LHe
XENA LHi - now known as KONA LHi
AJA IO Express (not sure if Cineform support)

Both Kona and IO express devices I believe will not work with a single socket motherboard.
There may be other options also that are made available when CS5 and Neo v5 is released.

The Matrox MX02 (max) looks like the best bang for the buck if you are looking for HD monitoring with some interesting monitor calibration options. Here is a press release from NAB on the matrox cards.

From NAB 2010: Adobe CS5 Mercury Playback and Matrox RT | Motion Media

We are turning I/O support on its head -- the way it should be. I/O vendors will be support CineForm native not the other way around. So it will be an AJA preset that supports CineForm through that card, and hopeful and BlackMagic preset and Matrox preset that does the same. The these new presets will still work with all the features of FirstLight and gain the benefit that are particular to the the I/O card. The CineForm preset will provide desktop and secondary monitor playback through openGL surfaces (graphics cards.) For Mercury acceleration you will select the appropriate NVidia card.

This is great news David. Regarding the mobil MX02, my understanding was it did not support first light output. Are you at liberty to elaberate or say if Matrox have added this support to CS5 drivers?

It is hard for them to stop FirstLight database changes, maybe you mean the FirstLight application can't directly drive the MXO2, that is true (only AJA, BMD and OpenGL support.)

Exactly, FirstLight application can't directly drive the MXO2 - is there any support for this in the pipeline do you know?

That is still a question for Matrox, we want to do it, yet there aren't (yet) hooks for third party support. Clearly this might be coming with the Avid support, we just don't have that yet.

Thanks David, I posted on the Matrox site and shot them another email on this also.

Good to know that Blackmagic support will be integrated into future CineForm developments.

Although disappointed about lack of Premiere timeline monitoring (apart from copying sequences to BM presets), the use of Blackmagic output with First Light has proved to be absolutely indispensible.

Look foward to CineForm, CS5, nVidia & BlackMagic combination!

So if we were to make an investment in a particular card right now, which one would it be? Or should we wait?

Hardware workflow for Pro-Client supervised edits
 

Hello, I have been building and supporting Broadcast NLE’s for many years, and watching Cineform closely. As much as I like the technology the Broadcast market needs hardware support for Real-Time and high quality edit suite monitoring for client. Cineform has not quite filled the bill. We have been an Adobe supporter for many years (after discreet *edit) and many Matrox installations. The broadcast NLE industry has 1 need that is not being met by Adobe – A high quality 10 bit alpha channel compressed codec that is UNIVERSAL! Why is FCP everywhere? PRO-RES.
The hardware “problem”. The hardware systems require that you be in a “Matrox” sequence (as an example, could be AJA or BlackMagic). My clients have been happy enough with the solutions until they edit in a “Adobe native” sequence and then see how much better the system performs and the project is portable. But now they lose the codecs that they like and the broadcast output for client monitoring. The clients want to be able to work with or without hardware freely with “native” performance.
CS5 changes one of our needs, realtime performance. Now we need to address the other parts of the equation and this is where I have questions. I was not part of the beta this time for Adobe.
Question – Can I use AJA,BlackMagic, or Matrox MXO and work with cine form codecs natively and be able to use the Board for capture and playback and STILL work on the same sequence without hardware?? Can I use the basic functions of the board, as in, Hardware Scaling,genlock etc. This question is danced around here but I have not seen a direct answer to this workflow.
Thanks for any light you can shed on this. I would like to convert all of my clients to Cineform if the workflow is right.

Barry,

I have no problem getting overlay in Premiere CS4 using an Nvidia GTX 285. You just need to go into "sequence settings"->"playback settings" and set "external device" to the appropriate monitor. I drive a 30" CRT HDTV this way.

If I bought two cheapo video cards, would I be able to output to two monitors from one card and the video overlay to an output on the second card?

Bring in the heavyweights...
 

Good questions for David Taylor and David Newman! If the workflow is right...the fish bite.

CineForm has never required hardware acceleration, so we aren't starting now. We be a native format in AJA and Matrox projects (maybe BMD) and yet the same sequence can be cut and paste into a CineForm only sequence and a desktop sequence, without issue.