Tim, its very nice to have you on my side :)

Now I have several questions for you:

1) Can you give me the link to that AdobeTV video of you editing ProRes? I really want to get the Aja Ki Pro, but it records to Pro Res and I thought there would be issues editing 10bit ProRes HQ on a PC.

2) Do you know if Cineform can transcode Pro Res.

3) For Tim and anyone else with DisplayPort video cards: with my Quadro FX 3800 connected to my Eizo CG243W via DP (on my HP Z800), the Eizo says there is no connection while booting up but DVI works. Can the DisplayPort be used as the only connection or must it be used for the 2nd monitor?

4) How well does your Kona card work with Premiere CS5? What sort of issues are there? I have a matrox Mini that I tried with CS4 but there were too many issues and problems, such as a 3-5 second delay when switching from source to program/timeline and vice versa.

...I can't tell you how much I am attempting to not take sides...

Adobe TV video:

Digital Video CS4 - Production Premium CS4: Creating an event DVD | Adobe TV


I know that ProRes is called at 10 bits with the AJA card installed. I haven't gotten an answer I'm confident in regarding PPro CS5 by itself yet, but I'd be surprised if they're calling for 8 bit. The stuff I was editing in CS4 a year and a half ago looked pretty damn good if it was 10 bit ProRes decoding at 8...

I do not know if CineForm will process ProRes...but if you have a Kona card, attaching the KiPro like a mastering deck will give you a master output ProRes file if you need to round trip to a colleague on FCP.

I still like CineForm the best as its just so efficient and the color correction and adjustments in First Light in the decode engine are features that are unique. However, ProRes is definitely a format most of us can't ignore if we wish to interact with other post facilities, so it's helpful to have a plan for that too.

I know that Premiere Pro will have some delays depending on the speed of your harddrives and CPU power as PPro needs to "cache up" before it sets off, and how fast you can get ahead of the decode depends on how fast the data can reach the CPU, and then how fast the CPU can process it.

old me... I was thinking of DVCproHD in terms of direct tape capture :) or feeding some flavor of HD into your capture card to DV100. if you made a QT DV100, you're fine. I started working that way when HD became part of my life.

of course now everyone thinks of P2 / MXF... yes that requires re-wrapping with FCP.

as for Prem Pro, MediaCore handles a number of common QT codecs so the adobe apps don't need to use QT when working with the files. this dramatically improves I/O with these formats including off the top of my head :

uncompressed 8/10 bit
DV25
DV50
DV100
photojpeg
animation
Mpeg2
h.264

basically the most common codec's you'll need to deal with. I"m pretty sure I left one or two out. Since apple controls ProRes and doesn't publish a spec ( or maybe they do, please correct me if I'm wrong ! )
we are stuck. however, adobe has done some work to improve ProRes handling in their apps, so I often use FCP to capture HDV->ProRes, then edit in PP.

Edius runs in realtime better than anything I've ever seen...on any platform.

I have no issue editing ProRes on my Windows PPro systems...you used to have to separately download the decoder for it, but I think it's included now...or it seems to be in QT Pro anyway. That app is just too damn handy to go without to save 30 bucks...

You'll find that currently both Edius and PP handle various camera-codec/formats with much greater ease and speed than FCP does.

And it's a cryin' shame that there's no native OS X version of Edius; I have v5.5 and it's absolutely the fastest, easiest, "it just works" NLE - even faster than M100 - that I've used to date. That may change as I'm about to review Avid v.5 but from what I've heard Avid has also gotten a huge core-codec handling revamp and promises to be a speed-demon as well.

My hope is that Apple will allow FCP's next version to get away from all this transcoding into ProRes nonsense and just give it the drag-n-drop functionality that the other NLE's enjoy.

And to anyone who hans't tried it, Edius is one of the most under-rated, least marketed and fastest NLE on the planet. It's a good thing Grass Valley took it over from Canopus but it's still relatively an unknown in the indie market. Ask the Mac-NLE community about it and more than half will say they've never heard of it.

Soon I'll have a head-to-head comparo of PP CS5, Edius 5.5, & Avid v.5, not for the "which is better" endless debate but more of a "what's new" update to all these venerable packages. I'm still waiting for my Avid copy to show up to start the review process.

(Ain't it interesting that Avid, PP and Edius are *all* on version "5"? Coincidence or sneaky marketing ploy? Hmm...)

If I may ask, exactly what professions are some of you folks involved in? I only ask because it seems like this thread has a good collection of professionals, and Im interested.