does this make sense?
 

Hello everyone

Lately I started working as a freelance editor for a company that owns an Edius NX for HDV workstation. The original material is shot and captured in HDV 50i 1080 but the final mastering goes on a standard 4.7 GB DVD. What I found lately is that when working in Edius 4.24 and the project settings are HDV 60 Hz 1080i with Canopus HQ Codec, when applying a video filter and/or a title or maybe a mask, rendering is constant if I want to see the result in realtime. To be more accurate, rendering is absolutely invalid, 'cause even after it the system fails to playback the timeline in realtime and I get the message "Playback stopped" (and we're talking about a double dual-core pc with 2 Gbs of RAM).

What's absolutely weird is that when swithching project settings to NX SD-E2 PAL DV 50i 16:9 rather than HDV 1080i 60 Hz (same Codec: Canopus HQ), the system plays almost anything in realtime, titles, filters, masks etc! I can't help but wonder how that makes sense, since the properties of the video tracks on the timeline remain the same? (right click - video info: 1440x1080 pixels!!!) I exported the same 1 minute video using both above settings on two different m2p files and burned them on 2 DVDs but I saw absolutely no difference between them! The most impressive thing is that render time is almost 1/4 less when using NX SD-E2 PAL settings! Can anyone explain the above? Is it just my idea or there is no difference in picture quality, and with less troubles?

Thanks in advance

Themis

"Playback stopped" in EDIUS can mean - either (1), the Hard-disk is too slow to stream the video data to the CPU, or (2) the PCI bus is too busy (can't handle the i/o load of the NX card and/or Hard-disk.

Are you using PCI-64 or PCI-Express on your motherboard? Where did you plug the NX card into? PCI-32 (hopefully not), PCI-64 slot? And what kind of hard-disk are you using? SATA individual, SCSI or EIDE? Any RAID (software/hardware)?

The fact your system works fine for SD but not for HD indicates to me that the problem is load related. Not CPU, but I/O.

Lastly - go to Canopus website and check your motherboard - if it is listed there as not suitable for NX editing, well - that's your source of the problem.

You are using a PAL camera, and is it not "HDV 1080i 60 Hz" an NTSC template? when you switch the template to PAL DV 50i 16:9, it works because you are working with a tenplate that coresponds to the recorded PAL format.

I have taught this for the last two years. I always edit my HD projects in SD 16:9 because for some reason Edius has a VERY easy time down converting.

If you are going to DVD just edit the whole project in the SD settings and life is much easier :)


Mike

If your project is designated for SD (Normal DVD), why would anybody capture it in HD in the first place? Why not set HVX202 to capture in SD instead (use DV, or DVCPRO 25 or DVCPRO 50 if you like). Then you save lots of space on the P2 card - can record longer material.