View Full Version : Cineform workstations and hardware suggestions


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Harish Kumar
December 10th, 2004, 05:10 AM
Thanks David,

Are there any SDI cards available that can transfer data from firewire of the camera to SDI in the card into the computer ? and then after Aspect HD edits the video then again transfer from SDI to another SDI of a HD machine or Digi Beta for master. Can you please guide if there are such options available. Thanks.... I am in the process of buying all in one shot , the fx1 and Aspect HD with premiere pro 1.5...since the price has gone down now. I am just concerned what will happen to the final output after edit. My aim is that output should be able to project on the theatre screen .

Thanks

David Newman
December 10th, 2004, 11:03 AM
It sounds like you need Prospect HD, which implements HD-SDI I/O and is 10bit not 8bit, so it is better suited (and proven) for film work. Aspect HD is fine for all your HDV work, but the HD-SDI output would be a secondary step (by exporting your timeline to another workstation that will do the HD-SDI export.)

David Cherniack
December 23rd, 2004, 01:58 PM
>>Aspect HD is fine for all your HDV work, but the HD-SDI output would be a secondary step (by exporting your timeline to another workstation that will do the HD-SDI export.<<

David,

Wouldn't it be posible just to install a cheap HD-SDI I/O card like the BM in the same machine, render out to their codec assuming the PPro pixel aspect ratio thing gets solved in their next release), create a new PPro BM project, and export it out to whatever HD deck you can beg borrow or steal?

David

David Newman
December 23rd, 2004, 02:03 PM
Yes David, that would work find. A workaround for HDSDI exports from Aspect HD projects -- I see no issue with that.

David Cherniack
December 23rd, 2004, 02:06 PM
So when can we expect to see the PAR problem corrected :)

David Newman
December 23rd, 2004, 02:15 PM
Only Adobe can answer that question without getting me in trouble. :)

David Cherniack
December 23rd, 2004, 02:26 PM
Spoken like a true developer, at least in a public forum :)

I would only add that if I was a user (I'm on discreet edit for my SD productions), it couldn't be soon enough. Adobe has to understand that if they ever want to play in the professional marketplace , they can't just issue releases once a year. NLE's are complicated little beasts - much more complicated than anything else in Adobe's stable - and frequent small feature upgrades and bug fixes are essential when people's livings are at stake. I just don't know whether their corporate culture can disgest this.

Gabor Lacza
May 14th, 2005, 08:25 AM
Is this setup will work with the Matrox card ??
2 regular 19 inch LCD for editing and a Dell 2405fpw monitor for monitoring ???
Can these monitors can be connected and setup for this ???
Please help before I order.
I use Aspect HD + Premire Pro 1.5.1 with the Z1.
Thanks

David Newman
May 14th, 2005, 10:24 AM
This is support to work based on the Maxtrox docs, yet I haven't tried it.

Gabor Lacza
May 14th, 2005, 10:27 AM
Are you guys have any plans to try such a setup???

Graham Morton
May 23rd, 2005, 11:36 PM
I have an APVe feeding 2 19" LCDs with a the very same Dell as a monitor and it looks great! I had bought all this stuff and had misread the ATI X800 cards info and bought that first thinking tis faster and... blah blah blah. get the matrox, download all the latest drivers and updates for your bios, install, and edit with sweet beautiful results. The only miner gripe I have is that every once in a while the video has a little jaggedness in the lower left of the frame on the Dell display. I really think the APVe is a steal myself though I haven't tried it on any video games as of yet. Let me know if you have any questions Gabor.

Gabor Lacza
June 8th, 2005, 01:17 PM
I am rethinking my idea with the dell monitor...I hear a lot of not so good reviews about it...I think I will rather use a 22 inch CRT computer monitor !!! But how do you connect them to the card since they do not have component input????
Gabor

Jeff Baker
June 9th, 2005, 06:38 PM
Have you noticed any delay after hitting the play button from your NLE timeline for the output to the external monitor? I am wondering about Premiere specifically.

Graham Morton
June 9th, 2005, 09:12 PM
not any real noticable delay

Derek Serra
June 10th, 2005, 12:42 PM
Graham, are you using PP1.51 straight, or with the AspectHD plugin?

Gabor Lacza
June 24th, 2005, 10:28 AM
Can I use a 22 inch CRT computer monitor !!! But how do you connect them to the card since they do not have component input???? Any help here is appreciated....
As a second note can you connect an SD broadcast monitor ??? Will Premiere or aspect HD will downconver real time when you editing HDV to SD for preview ???
Anyway if my first option is a yes then I dont need the second one.
Thanks

Radek Svoboda
June 25th, 2005, 10:21 PM
http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/6240series.htm

HD can be replaced with 7200 RPM one.

Can be external 1600x1200 monitor added for editing FX/Z1?

I would use Vegas 6. What else would need for efficient editing?

Radek

Steve Crisdale
June 26th, 2005, 01:37 AM
http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/6240series.htm

HD can be replaced with 7200 RPM one.

Can be external 1600x1200 monitor added for editing FX/Z1?

I would use Vegas 6. What else would need for efficient editing?

Radek

Can't see whether it has IEEE-1394 connectivity...

You could probably get a PCMCIA Firewire card: but it's nicer if it comes built in...

BTW, watching HDV on a 15.4" screen is gonna seem mighty small even if (and possibly because of) it has a WS aspect. Be about the same viewing size as watching 16:9 on a 17" 4:3 aspect monitor.

Laptop/notebooks like this are only gonna get cheaper, but the important things to make the final purchase decision over, are whether there's truly enough high-rezz screen real-estate, enough hard disk space (that's fast enough... though this is less of a concern as it was) and enough connectivity options. Then you gotta decide whether you want battery time over performance. I'd suspect the AMD mobile chip would be about as power hungry as my P-IV laptop is, but it'd be worth knowing for sure...

Jeff Baker
September 28th, 2005, 04:55 PM
I'm starting into the upgrade process for a pci-express system and I am seeing a lot of cards that indicate HDTV-Out capable in the marketing. How do they differ from the PNY 540 card (other than the breakout box)?

If for instance, I would like a 256mb or 512mb model? For instance Leadtek makes a $50 256mb card with hdtv out capability or any dual DVI card with HDTV capable output?

What is approved for Aspect HD if any and what do I need to look out for?

David Newman
September 28th, 2005, 05:22 PM
If you MediaPlayer can output to the HD component output of the graphics card, then Aspect HD will work with it. So any card will work. The amount of RAM (256 vs 512) is not all that relevant to Aspect HD.

Jeff Baker
September 28th, 2005, 06:25 PM
Sorry for the simple HD questions, but I'm from the the DV world where none of these issues came up... Now if I used a dual DVI HD resolution capable card with a scaler how would that work? When does one use a scaler normally?

How would I use a video scaler in conjunction with a video card such as this one:

Startech.com VID2DVIDTV Component/Composite/S-Video
Code: DH-VID2DVIDTV
$185.00pad

Convert between resolutions and video formats with StarTech.com s VID2DVIDTV, a Composite/ S-Video/YCbCr/RGB component to DVI scaler.
CONNECTORS- (1) DVI-D Dual Link Female
(1) S-Video Female
(4) RCA Female
FORMATS - Input : Composite, S-Video, YCbCr component or RGB
interlaced.
SIGNAL LEVELS- Input : Video @ 1V p-p, 75 ohm
Y @ 1 V p-p, 75 ohm
Color @ 0.7V p-p, 75 ohm
YCbCr
RGBH
RESOLUTION - Output PC (RGBHV): Progressive Scan
VGA 640 x 480 @ 60/72/75/85 Hz
SVGA 800 x 600 @ 60/72/75/85 Hz
XGA 1024 x 768 @ 60/70/75/85 Hz
WXGA 1280 x 768 @ 60 Hz
SXGA 1280 x 1024 @ 60/75 Hz
Output HDTV (YPbPr, RGBHV): Progressive Scan
1080i 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz
720p 1280 x 720 @ 60 Hz
576p 720 x 576 @ 50 Hz
480p 720 x 480 @ 60 Hz

David Newman
September 28th, 2005, 07:11 PM
The card does it all, I have never worried about that stuff. We use a standard overlay surface, when you play out HD you get HD, the card will automatically scale if necessary (such as outputing a 1920 image to a 1280 display.)

Geoff Murillo
October 9th, 2005, 04:20 PM
Hi David,

What is the minimum required speed for Athlon 64 processors to run Cineform Aspect?

At the Cineform site you have listed minimum requirements for single HT Pentiums, but not for single Athlon 64 processors -- Does this mean that any Athlon 64 is capable of running Aspect and allowing realtime performance with 3 to 4 HD streams?

-Geoff Murillo

David Newman
October 9th, 2005, 04:39 PM
Not quite. All Alton 64 processors will work, yet the performance will very with different memory and CPU speeds. The faster units will have 3-4 HD streams. Unfortunately we don't have good data on the single proc AMD parts (we have only one at the office), as most of our workstations have the very fast dual AMD Opterons.

Glenn Thomas
December 7th, 2005, 05:15 AM
Quick question here. I was wondering if I hooked a LaCie Firewire 800 PCMCIA interface into my Dell 3.06ghz HT Inspiron 5150 notebook, and then connected a LaCie 1TB BiggerDisk Extreme to that via Firewire 800, if there would be much increase in editing performance? In Vegas 5 that is, with maybe a bit of colour correction used. Or would the CPU speed be more of an issue? I'll be buying a copy of Connect HD once my HC1 is back from Sony.

Glenn

David Newman
December 7th, 2005, 11:04 AM
Disk speed is not the biggest bottleneck with your system, for a laptop it is good to have 7200RPM drive in the system, or the data on a standard FireWire drive. For a 3.06Mhz system you are likely running a 533MHz memory bus (most systems are 800Mhz now,) which is the biggest bottleneck -- unfortunately that can't be upgraded. Memory speed is more important than CPU or disk speed. That said Connect HD will still speed up capture about 3X, plus many other features. Vegas preview is very scalable allowing significant performance on a wide range of systems.

Glenn Thomas
December 7th, 2005, 03:59 PM
Hi David, thanks for the reply. The internal drive is 7200rpm, but I'm looking at using an external drive anyway. Maybe the LaCie I mentioned, which I believe has at least 80mb/s sustained if connected via Firewire 800. So a faster drive like that would probably enable more tracks to be streamed, but not if the memory is still only 533mhz? I'll be monitoring at half resolution in Vegas (720x540). Not using any external monitoring.

David Newman
December 7th, 2005, 04:29 PM
Yes, the slower memory will limit the number of video streams that can be decoded before the drive speed will be an issue.

Don Donatello
December 8th, 2005, 12:25 AM
i'd check the speed of the firewire 800 as microsoft preaty much knocked it out with XP SP2(knock it down to s100 -should be s800) - they then did a fix but that just got it back to firewire 400.
from my test even using unibrain 1394b driver doesn't equal XP SP1 1394b speeds ...

Glenn Thomas
December 9th, 2005, 04:29 AM
Ah yes, I remember reading about SP2 reducing the speed. Maybe I'll just wait until I get a better computer. Actually, I saw a Boxx laptop at a media show yesterday that was quite impressive. More of a workstation with 2x drives in a Raid 0 configuration, a proper CPU (not Centrino), 1920x1200 17" display etc. Expensive, but no more than a good laptop would cost 5 years ago.

Randy Donato
January 22nd, 2006, 09:41 PM
Since Premiere 2.0 offers built in support for the card in both SD and HD what will Cineform do with the Aspect plugin to take advantage of that, if anything? Will it still be limited to Prospect or will you turn it on for Aspect but in 8 bit? Sure would be a shame to get all the benefits of the card using .m2t but not get it using Aspect. Given that the new Canon H1 is 8bit HD-SDI wouldn't that make a nice fit?....not to mention it will beat the heck out of using a video card for monitoring.

David Newman
January 23rd, 2006, 05:20 PM
Currently Premiere Pro only has support for the Xena HS, not the new LH series cards, but your point is still an interesting one that are considering (certainly for timeline monitoring.) For capture and HD-SDI mastering we have the Prospect HD line.

Randy Donato
January 23rd, 2006, 11:31 PM
Currently Premiere Pro only has support for the Xena HS, not the new LH series cards, but your point is still an interesting one that are considering (certainly for timeline monitoring.) For capture and HD-SDI mastering we have the Prospect HD line. You are right and I missed that(take a look at the LH page and it talks about Premiere 2 but sends you to the HS page) and the HS is 10 bit only(LH is 8/10)....hmmm I think Adobe needs to clean up their ad/info since it can be read that with HDV you get monitor out...which with HS is a no go. Tying into either card is good and not hard I wouldn't think but don't know about licensing...do multibridge while you are at it.

Chris M. Watson
April 7th, 2006, 03:19 PM
Found this on the web and wanted to figure out the best economical solution to going to an external HD monitor working with Cineform....

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1221027&CatId=1562

I know there's two cards in the $200-$300 range recommended by Cineform but I was curious if there were less expensive cards that would work as well. Can't help it, I'm thrifty :)

Chris Watson
Watson Videography
www.dynamovideo.com

Gary Harper
June 25th, 2006, 11:57 AM
What have been the experiences of using External Hard Drives for storage? Types, Mfgr., etc. Who uses a raid configuration, and what is the configuration?
How about SATA,,, Is it necessary for archive storage? Is a single drive OK? Firewire or USB 2.0? Any other methods of storage besids Tape or Ext. Hard Drives being used? Any new storage/backup possibilities in the near future?
Thanks,
Gary

Don Donatello
June 25th, 2006, 12:15 PM
i've been buying 400 gig ATA drives (seagates on sale 114 - 159) .. install then in either 2 or 4 bay external 1394a/b/USB2 cases ... both 2/4 bay allow raid 0 but i just run them as single drives ... also have several 250gig externals 1394/usb ... tried tape a few years ago -tooooo slooooooo and to hard/time consuming to look for just certain files.

Richard Leadbetter
June 25th, 2006, 12:50 PM
I archive to 7200rpm ATA drives (not SATA) in USB 2.0 enclosures. I find that they are plenty fast enough - so much so I can play 720p/60 files at very high quality setting with no dropped frames.

I can even capture to them too at the same rates if I want to, not that I would recommend it.

Rather than go the SATA/RAID route you would most likely be better off simply archiving twice to different drives.

In terms of manufacturers, Maxtor are really hitting a bad patch at the moment so I'd avoid them like the plague.

Christopher Glaeser
June 25th, 2006, 02:03 PM
What have been the experiences of using External Hard Drives for storage? Types, Mfgr., etc. Who uses a raid configuration, and what is the configuration?

I use six internal drives (1 10,000 rpm for the OS, 1 large disk for data, 4 SATA RAID 0 for video) and for external I've used USB but now prefer ethernet NAS (Buffalo Terastation configured as RAID 5). The internal RAID 0 has excellent performance, and it's a bit easier to access the NAS RAID 5 from all the computers on the LAN; the four drive RAID 5 is a reasonable tradeoff of speed, size, and reliability.

Best,
Christopher

James Huenergardt
June 27th, 2006, 10:05 PM
Hi,

I currently have a eVGA 7800GT connected to my Dell 24" LCD and a Dell 19" LCD.

I recently purchased a Toshiba 20" widescreen that will take HDV 1080i/720p via Component or VGA, and I'm wanting to output from Premiere Pro to that TV.

I know I need another video card, but I was wondering if that was possible to use my computer in that configuration?

Thanks,

Jim

Ryan Maes
June 27th, 2006, 10:51 PM
I have a sony laptop wich is a couple years old. pentium 2.4, 512 ram, ati mobility radeon 7500c video card.

My question is, will I be able to use cineform connect hd with vegas on my laptop to edit HVX200 footage? Or will it not work.

I really don't want to buy another computer if I don't have to.

David Newman
June 27th, 2006, 10:55 PM
You could be in luck. Generally people use the HXV200 in 720p24 or 25 (with over/under-cranking for effects as needed.) 720p24/25 is particularly easy that many under-spec'd PCs will work fine. I suggest down the CineForm trial, and test the performance on your PC for yourself.

Nick Outram
June 28th, 2006, 09:56 AM
Ryan,

Looking at your specs, your memory could probably do with an upgrade to 1Gig. This will give any app. plenty of room to play in.

Also, laptops have slow hard disks: 4200rpm is the norm. I have purchased an external eSATA unit and put 2 x 250Gbyte 7200rpm SATA disks in RAID 0 array into it (500Gigs). Currently I am accessing this via USB2 interface but eventually when motherboards and laptops support it will be able to use that interface. All my Media now goes on this portable unit so I have decoupled my media from my PC with a very fast interface.

Another thing to try are Gearshift from VASST (uses smaller rendered temporay files in place of the larger .avis)


Nick.

John McGinley
July 16th, 2006, 01:28 AM
I can't seem to nail down the specifics on this card, some list it as a PCI card, some a PCI-x.

Does anyone know if this card will do HD on a regular PCI motherboard?

I'm starting to believe I'll have to upgrade to a system with PCIe, but if I can put that off for a bit that would be great.

David Taylor
July 16th, 2006, 08:40 AM
John, I just went to the AJA site and noticed they are not good about identifying the bus requirements for their cards. But the Xena-HS requires a 64-bit PCI-X slot. PCI-X is generally available on workstation-class PCs, but not all, so you'll have to check your machine. If you don't have a 64-bit PCI-X slot then you can use the Xena-LHe which works in a 16-bit (I think) PCIe slot. That card is more expensive than the -HS because it includes component HD I/O in addition to HD-SDI.

If you also purchase Prospect HD we can supply either card, and we have bundle pricing for both the -HS and -LH(e) family.

John McGinley
July 16th, 2006, 11:31 PM
yeah, looks like I'm going to have to upgrade my system to go either route. No PCIe or PCI-x

Funny? It was fast enough a year ago :-)

Moore's law sucks.

David Taylor
July 16th, 2006, 11:40 PM
Yeah but it wasn't too long ago that the entry price point for HD post work was $100K!

John McGinley
July 16th, 2006, 11:49 PM
Your words offer little comfort to my credit card. :-)

David Ziegelheim
August 1st, 2006, 11:03 PM
1. Is there a credit for the ingest if you previously purchased PropectHD edit?

2. When do you select the Xena LHe over the Xena HS?

3. Which is the correct card to use with the HD100/200/250, HVX200, XL-H1 and new Canon A1?

4. When, if ever, is a RAID configuration needed? Are modern 300GB 7200rpm (or if necessary 10k) disks fast enough?

5. Is a single Core 2 processor sufficient? If only a single disk and processor are necessary, could injest be done with a $1500 PC?

Thanks,

David

David Newman
August 1st, 2006, 11:34 PM
1. Yes. Your upgrade charge is the current difference between Ingest and Edit products.

2. LHE is PCI-e and HS is PCI-X, so often the choice is made for you. If you have an older PCI-X-only workstation there is also the LH (no e). The LH or LHe cards have analog I/O, which is worth the extra expense for most users.

3. All work fine. However for any of the non-HDSDI cameras the LH/LHe cards allow you to do direct analog capture, and bypass the camera's own compressed. For the HD100 that will also get you 60p slowmotion.

4. Sure it is fast enough for most applications, however for those extreme multi-stream moments the RAID can come in handy. That said I recently upgraded two 120GB drives in RAID-0 with a single 320GB SATA drive, and it is keeping up.

5. If you are talking Conroe base Core 2 Duo then YES! Those machines blaze. We have tested a 2.66GHz dual core Conroe (Dell 390) and it could handle everything we could throw at it.

Trevor Allin
August 5th, 2006, 03:52 PM
Hi

Anyone know if you would need a raid with Prospect HD when capturing HD-SDI from a Canon HL H1?

Thanks again

Trevor