Does anyone have experience using the Xena card with anything?
Does it do pretty much the same things as the Matrox RT.X2? I have never seen them compared. But if cost forced you to choose between the two, and you were running both Avid Liquid and the Adobe CS3 Production suite on your system, which card would take preference?

Stephen

That's definitely a question for Stephen Noe or someone over on the Avid forums. I would pick the card based on which editing software you use the most, not the other way around.

Cheers,

The nice thing about the Xena card is that it does now work with Liquid and Premiere Pro and many graphics programs such as After Effects and Photoshop.

The Matrox card work with Premiere only as well as some graphics programs. If you want to use Liquid then the Matrox card is a no go.

The matrox card does add a lot of realtime features to Premiere Pro which is nice. It really does enhance the limited realtime of the program.

Liquid however already has a lot of the realtime features of the Matrox card built into the software. The Matrox card likes to use the gpu for effects while Liquid itself will use the gpu for realtime effects.

The Xena card is pretty much just a in/out card. It doesn't really add any realtime features to any program. For Premiere this means there is not a whole lot of realtime except for what the program itself can handle on your system. Liquid on the other hand already has a lot of great realtime features and by adding the Xena card most stuff done in Liquid is realtime out of the card.

With that said you do have to be carefull with Chrome XE. Even though the software is exactly the same you will need to buy an updated version of the Liquid software with the Xena card drivers and the hardware dongle. You cannot at this point just add the card to your current version of Liquid.

Thank you Thomas, this is helpful. I already had it in mind to move to Liquid Chrome Xe from Liquid PRO if the Xena would do what I need, but I'm finding that the upgrade is about a lot more than software. I did not know about the dongle, but I do know that the only computer systems Avid will certify for this new app are the XW8200 and XW8400 workstations from Hewlett Packard. The support for non-certified systems will largely go begging, so that is a hidden cost in going to Chrome Xe that is not talked about much. The push for an HP workstation is kind of cooling my Avid enthusiasm.

As far as getting the upgrade goes, I know that in Europe people presently using Liquid 7.2 PRO will be able to upgrade to Chrome Xe for a reduced price on the software. I don't know whether or not this will happen in the US. I was aware that the Xena card is purchased separately, but I didn't know that the dongle was required. Does it have to be purchased separately from the software or the card, or is it automatically bundled with one of them? Or do you get it in a custom bundle?

Given the various hardware constraints, from what you are saying it sounds like I am going to have to choose between Adobe and Avid Liquid and not just between the cards. So it comes dow to what will work for me. At the moment I do not have gear that shoots native HD (I'm shooting HDV and analog SD). However, I have an analog camera shooting at 720 lines res that I would like to capture directly into the computer. At the AJA site I got the impression that the Xena would let me do that: "These 12-bit analog inputs and outputs, in addition to 10-bit digital I/O's, ensure that XENA LH can interface with almost any Single Link digital or analog HD or SD video format you throw at it." The Xena has BNC input terminals, like the video out on the camera, so I thought the Xena might be able to handle a direct analog feed from the camera. But maybe I'm reading more into that sentence than it's saying.

Do you think I would be able to send an analog signal through the Xena card, which would digitize it and store it on the hard drive? Or could it work in conjunction with something like DV rack? How about through the RT.X2? If the Xena couldn't do that, or if the RT.X2 could do it just as well as the Xena, then the edge would go to the RT.X2.

Any thoughts?