Capturing uncompressed HD

[John Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Serge Victorovich

With XenaHD you can capture also to CFHD.
http://www.cineform.com/products/ProspectHD.htm

Very interesting Serge - when I emailed them, Gerry said they weren't supporting compressed codecs yet on the Xena, but they definitely had plans to. That was only 2 days ago.

So is that hardware support on the XenaHD or are you relying onthe processor converting the uncompressed AVI to ProspectHD "on the fly"?

[David Newman]

Prospect HD does all the compression in software, in real-time, no hardware acceleration is required on the Xena card.

[John Mitchell]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Prospect HD does all the compression in software, in real-time, no hardware acceleration is required on the Xena card.

Thanks David - what kind of processing power / memory do you need to achieve this (with a safety margin)?

Does ProspectHD take any advantage of your graphics card ie is the graphics card important?

[David Newman]

Graphics card is not very important, any recent card will work fine. The system specs for Prospect HD are listing here : http://www.cineform.com/products/ProspectHDConfig.htm , but generally a dual proc Opteron system with 2GB is fine. It all depends I what you want to do.

[Ken Hodson]

What kind of spec's needed if you were to capture with AspectHD? Same?

[Alex Bowles]

Originally Posted by David Newman

No, the component signal is a full 1280x720 4:2:2 sampled at 10-bit, plenty of chroma resolution to pull a great key.

That is truly excellent information. It seems like such an obvious marketing point, I can't figure out why JVC doesn't mention it on their site.

Originally Posted by David Newman

See indiefilmlive.blogspot.com for discussion regarding an effect heavy feature that is using the HD100.

And this is a great link. I've just bought an HD-100, so I've VERY interested in seeing just how far it can be pushed. It looks like these guys are already doing it. Cheers.

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Ken Hodson

What kind of spec's needed if you were to capture with AspectHD? Same?

No, Aspect HD can get away with much cheaper PCs (although fast ones are still nice.) We say the minmum PC is around 2.8 P4, yet we have customers using 1.7GHz P-M laptops and still getting real-time with Aspect HD.

[Serge Victorovich]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Prospect HD does all the compression in software, in real-time, no hardware acceleration is required on the Xena card.

Originally Posted by Ken Hodson

What kind of spec's needed if you were to capture with AspectHD? Same?

Originally Posted by David Newman

No, Aspect HD can get away with much cheaper PCs (although fast ones are still nice.) We say the minmum PC is around 2.8 P4, yet we have customers using 1.7GHz P-M laptops and still getting real-time with Aspect HD.

David, you talking about real-time transcodingfrom mpeg2/ts to Aspect HD through firewire on 1.7GHz P-M laptop or capture through component(JVC) or HDSDI (Canon)? What is device with component/hdsdi for laptop exist?

[John Mitchell]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Graphics card is not very important, any recent card will work fine. The system specs for Prospect HD are listing here : http://www.cineform.com/products/ProspectHDConfig.htm , but generally a dual proc Opteron system with 2GB is fine. It all depends I what you want to do.

Phew - that's not going to work for me - I want to build something lightweight and portable. Hardware support on a card like XenaHD would make it viable.

[David Newman]

John,

As the XenaHD card or Xena HS requires PCI-X you will not be able to build anything truely portable, as these cards require a work-station class motherboard. The soon to be available Xena LHe will work on PCI-e bus, so that will allow desktop class PCs to be used (and maybe shuttle class), when that card is out we may change our system requirements, although you will still need the fastest Dual Core CPU for real-time compression 10bit compression at 60p (note: if you only intend 10-bit at 720p24 then most P4 class CPU can do it.)

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Serge Victorovich

David, you talking about real-time transcodingfrom mpeg2/ts to Aspect HD through firewire on 1.7GHz P-M laptop or capture through component(JVC) or HDSDI (Canon)? What is device with component/hdsdi for laptop exist?

No, I was talking real-time playback on a laptop. For that low-end laptop you would still have transcoding delays, although for 720p24 it will be surprizingly fast.

Fortunately a component/HD-SDI input to a laptop doens't exist yet. When it does, CineForm is will be able to do some amazing RT captures. So please keep an eye out for the hardware that can do this.

[Ken Hodson]

Hi David. Yes I was asking about using AspectHD in the same vein as ProspectHD was being discussed. Component/SDI capture. So what are the specs needed for say Xena LHe capture to AspectHD. I would be quite happy capturing 8bit 4:2:2 (AspectHD) vs. the 10bit 4:2:2 (ProspectHD) for the time being. Being I own ApectHD and don't plan on a dual Opteron anytime soon, what do I need?
What would it take 480p60 from my HD10 vs. 720p60 HD100 (future cam)?

[David Newman]

Aspect HD doesn't currently support live capture from anything but FireWire. Capture from a Xena card is Prospect HD feature.

[Ken Hodson]

Wanna fix it ? ;>)

[John Mitchell]

Originally Posted by David Newman

John,

As the XenaHD card or Xena HS requires PCI-X you will not be able to build anything truely portable, as these cards require a work-station class motherboard. The soon to be available Xena LHe will work on PCI-e bus, so that will allow desktop class PCs to be used (and maybe shuttle class), when that card is out we may change our system requirements, although you will still need the fastest Dual Core CPU for real-time compression 10bit compression at 60p (note: if you only intend 10-bit at 720p24 then most P4 class CPU can do it.)

There's already shuttle boards that support 2 PCI-e slots and the LHe is already advertised on AJA website - I didn't realise it hadn't been released yet.

My point was that seeking hardware support from a card like the Xena would negate the need for a really fast dual proc machine. Technically or commercially that may not be possible (I'm guessing they may support DVCProHD as they do this already for their Mac based Kona cards) but I thought it was a reasonable idea.