Blackmagic Intensity Pro, Premier Pro, Cineform Workflow Question
 

Is anyone running Premier Pro with Cineform and using a Blackmagic Intensity for monitoring?

I know that the Blackmagic cards have been discussed, read just about every thread here, but I'm curious to know if anyone is actually using the Intensity Pro card for video out via Component to an HDTV monitor for preview.

I'm also curious to know what workflow is being used, analog capture of HDV source via Component for editing in PPro as an SD Project or full blown HDV.

Again, most important, is this combo working for anyone and what did you have to do to get it to work, then what are you doing for ingest and finally production with preview.

Thanks for the help in advance, sorry for the off-beat question and most important, I'm not using HDMI at all.
Miguel

Miguel,

Unfortunately we do not support the Intensity card for timeline monitoring or playout at this time due to some technical mismatches between the Intensity and CineForm software interfaces. We're hoping Blackmagic will fix that in the future, otherwise we will have to, but in the mean time Intensity is a great card for acquiring uncompressed material into Cineform Intermediate.

Thanks David, so what is the right process for acquisition, I assume you're talking HDMI only right? Since I ingest from a Sony M15U Deck I'm running 1394 into the PC now so the Intensity is basically doing nothing for me now, is there a way to use the Intensity for Component Video ingest that will actually work, I've been unable to get it to work in any manner.

Miguel,

Intensity is HDMI only. Intensity Pro also has component inputs. To capture using Intensity (Pro) into CineForm Intermediate files you use our external utility HD Link. You cannot capture through Intensity (Pro) into CineForm files through the PPro capture interface. For live capture or other very high quality sources this is a great way to bypass tape-based compression.

Clarification
 

David,
Just to clarify:

I CANNOT use Intensity to send video out from a timeline (i.e. Premiere Pro CS3) to an HDMI monitor (i.e. Benq 19" w/HDMI)?

I just received two of these monitors from newegg after seeing them endorsed by this community. So far I have only been able to view captures from my Canon HV20 on the Benq via HDMI-not all that useful compared to monitoring a rendered project. If the answer to my question is yes, I am disappointed: I bought the hardware for this purpose. Thanks for your response.
Ed

Ed, you CANNOT. We're disappointed too, but hope to change this in the not-too-distant future, although no schedule is being presented. HDMI is a very useful physical interface, but the BM and CineForm software interfaces are different which causes this problem.

David,

How about using BM Pro as a way to view the timeline by HDMI with FCS2 with that work? I just purchased a Mac Pro with two DVI video card, BM Pro and want to view by HDMI from the timeline at the time on a HDTV while running dual monitors.

If your display card can support your HDMI monitor, Prospect should be able to display full screen on it as a secordary monitor. (Video Overlay option in Playback Settings) Obviously that means you can only have one screen for the desktop app.

Bummer. Oh well, I needed a twin span setup anyway. :)

Mike I might not have been clear enough in my post. I am running two 24" monitors off the two DVI from the video card and want to run a HDTV off the BM Pro card off HDMI. And view the HDTV will editing on the time line in FCS2.

"I might not have been clear enough in my post." Sorry I was addressing the original question. My Prospect suggestion applies to PPro on PC only.

I am setting up a Mac system with BMD hardware with Cineform codec, so I will be giving that configuration a whirl in the next few days. Anyone from Cineform know if any Hardware output from Mac works in realtime with Cineform files. AJA or BMD, FCS or PPro?

Mike,

With PPro on Windows CineForm "owns" control of special-purpose output cards like HD-SDI (AJA or BM). We don't own the graphics card which is why we don't have a spec for a specific graphics card. This is why we specify certain HD-SDI HW.

In FCP, we don't "own" any of the graphics or special-purpose cards - those are managed by FCP. I will admit that we haven't done a lot of testing with HW cards on Mac yet, so we don't have specific do's and don'ts for you yet.

Regarding our codec performance on Mac - we still haven't finished optimizations. We play back at full res without a hitch in QT Player, but FCP doesn't yet play full-res CF files at full frame rate (we have more threading optimizations brewing for Mac). You'll find that the "less than 100%" settings for video sizes in the dropdown box on top of the FCP monitor windows always play CF files in RT, and if this output is sent through a BM card it should work fine. If you encounter some issues (you might) let us know and we can try to help. We'd like to begin promoting this workflow more heavily.

What about for Premiere Pro CS3 on Mac. Decklink released their driver for CS3 on Mac last friday. I have installed them, but have not had time to play yet. Any chance CF files will playback with BMD project settings. I know not on PC, but Mac setup seems VERY different to me as I begin to explore it. BMD allow many standard QT codecs in realtime, but is very limited on PC. Any chance Cineform might be supported in that way?

PPro on Mac will be similar to FCP in the sense that we don't control cards. Our codec works fine in PPro/AE on Mac, but we haven't yet ported our importers/exporters to PPro/AE on Mac. That'll come, but later.

BTW to get back to the original, I did get my new BM Intensity Pro to work, there is a hidden utility that they don't do a good job of documenting in the Windows Control Panel that I needed to reset but once that was done I have the ability to capture via HDLINK provided that I pull the 1394 cable out of my Sony M15U deck.

I can preview from the PPro timeline however only using the BM preset in ProCS3 which means that I then had to have used their interface to capture the footage and in that case it's all uncompressed anyway which chokes my machine.

So experiment was a total bust for 350 bucks, I don't get any performance increase, I don't get preview from the timeline and I'm still a happy Cineform customer, you guys just don't let us down!

Now please, we need realtime preview from the CS3 PPRO timeline, can Cineform find an interface they like, write code for it and give us the ability to do realtime preview with that card.

I've spent way too much money this year on Matrox Parhelia APVe's, FX1500's and not BM Intensity Pro's to find that one worked poorly and the other 2 not at all.

Does anyone have a mega-editing system running in the windows world that does 2 monitors plus real time preview to a 3rd HD monitor that they can recommend, I'm willing to keep spending until I get the right solution.

Miguel

Miguel, we haven't let you down because this was never a feature we advertised. In fact we've made it clear that we don't support the BM cards for output.

With that as preamble, we're exploring whether we might be able to add playout and timeline monitoring support (PPro/Windows) for BM cards - Intensity in particular. No promises and no schedule yet, but we're looking at it....

They do: Its called the AJA Xena card line. Realtime 10bit SDI output from your Premiere timeline.

With the Xena HS, LH, or LHe, you can get dedicated fullscreen playback to SDI or component or (DVI via SDI converter) plus the two monitors on you VGA card for the application UI in spanned or Dualview mode. I have setup a number of systems in this fasion.

In terms of output from the timeline, does the Xena HS work similarly with AspectHD as it does with ProspectHD?

Aspect HD does not support HD-SDI output - you need Prospect HD or Prospect 2K.

Aspect HD supports 1440x1080 which is not an HD-SDI format. HD-SDI spatial resolutions are 1920x1080 or 1280x720. So for 1920x1080 you need Prospect HD or Prospect 2K.

Thanks. So ... does that mean AspectHD could nevertheless export 1280x720 over component to a monitor? That would still be handy.

Not through an HD-SDI card - the drivers are not present in Aspect HD.

Understood. Thanks again.

Xena LH card
 

In case anyone is interested, I have been running Cineform Prospect HD on a dual xeon PC with 2 dedicated editing monitors and a separate HD monitor hooked up to the Xena LH card. The system worked great, BUT I recently upgraded my computer to a quad core PC with no PCI-X slots, so I'm out of luck with my Xena LH card.

Until Cineform comes out with another monitoring option, I'm stuck with a useless card (which I'm posting shortly for sale on the classifieds) and will have to monitor through the software interface. AJA will not swap out the card for the Xena LHe version (PCI-express slot) since it's about 6 months old. Kinda' sucks after laying out over $1500 on this puppy!

Stuart

Thanks David, Cineform has never let me down, didn't want you guys to think that I meant that. I just want to see a sub-super expensive solution for realtime playback and after investing 400 on an APVe for lack luster results and now 350 for a card that has potential, I just want to get my system working the way my old SD system worked.

I know that you guys are going to make it happen, I'll be along for the ride, just wish it was tomorrow and not a long way off. Thanks again for keeping us in mind and up to date via this forum.

Miguel

Thanks David,

I look foward to the update when I can use my BMD Intensity Pro card to view a HDTV realtime while in FCS2. Then I can use my dual monitors for timeline and menus only.

So Mike I'm reading your page and getting very interested, what is the proper workflow for say an AJA Card to work in a Cineform Prospect or Aspect intermediate, since I've already determined that my machine is just a few clock cycles slow for uncompressed HD captured via component and the BM Intensity.

Installing an AJA, would I still capture 1394 so that I can take advantage of scene detection? It appears that it will capture to Cineform or can I just capture in Cineform via HDLink and would I run a PPro AJA Preset or Cineform preset?

On final output it appears that AJA will output just about anything, If I wanted an SD output in 16:9 suitable for DVD Encoding would the card offer accelerated performance from the timeline, today it's about 50% of realtime in a Cineform environment.

Thanks for your input thus far and nice use of Wordpress on your site BTW, I use it on all my sites.

BTW, I guess that I should mention I'm running a Dell PW380 with an Intel 955EE Processor, 4 G/Ram, 1x 150g boot drive (10k), 2x WD RAID Drives 500G/b each in a Zero array, NVidia 1500 card (PNY), BM Intensity Pro in PCiE 1x, 4x slot is free, and PPro CS3. You're in tune to what I'm trying to do, I have dual 19" LCDs on the 1500 running spanned and just want realtime and true preview to my widescreen monitoring.

Miguel

Thanks, glad you like my site, I just started getting into it a few weeks ago, but it is coming along.

I doubt clock cycles are your limitation for uncompressed capture. It is extremely likely that your storage system can't keep up. 2 Drives will rarely be able to support uncompressed HD. Luckily with Cineform, uncompressed data rates are not required.

With the AJA, you could still capture via firewire, and convert in HDlink. Another option would be to capture over Component (or SDI from a Canon camcorder) directly into Cineform, but I don't know if your CPU would be fast enough to support that. You might want input directly from Cineform about that. I know they recommend Core2Duo architecture, but you have one of the fastest Netburst systems created.

You would definitely want to use Cineform RT mode in your Premiere projects, since your disks won't support the uncompressed files AJA's modes require.

Not sure what you mean by accelerated performance from AJA. As far as I know, all Cineform processing takes place in the main CPU, and AJA is purely an I/O card. Cineform does have some SD presets that I have toyed with, but not very deeply. What did you mean by 50% of realtime in Cineform?

Also, what are you planning to use to monitor with. If you have an LCD that is less than 1920x1200, you may want to consider AJA's SDI convertor over the Blackmagic one, since I believe it supports scaling the DVI resolution. A 23-24" LCD is valuable though for pixel accurate monitoring.

Not sure what you mean by accelerated performance from AJA. As far as I know, all Cineform processing takes place in the main CPU, and AJA is purely an I/O card. Cineform does have some SD presets that I have toyed with, but not very deeply. What did you mean by 50% of realtime in Cineform?


<ML> What I mean is export from the timeline for an HDV project, seems that the final output is about 50% of realtime so for a 20 minute project the export may be 40 to 50 minutes to get the final AVI. I was thinking that the AJA card has some acceleration in it but I guess not.

Also, what are you planning to use to monitor with. If you have an LCD that is less than 1920x1200, you may want to consider AJA's SDI convertor over the Blackmagic one, since I believe it supports scaling the DVI resolution. A 23-24" LCD is valuable though for pixel accurate monitoring.

<ML> The monitor that I'm looking at is a new JVC JV-DT-V24L1DU, I just saw it demoed at my local supply house and wow, it's worth the investment plus with the SDI capability the XENA will likely marry up to it nicely.

I don't think the AJA will have any effect on export performance. I agree that Cineform exports take longer than they logically should, but I have not had a chance to try their encoder on an 8 core Xeon system yet, which should help. (My system can capture/encode in realtime, and playback in realtime, so why do exports take OVER 2x as long to render from CF to CF.)

That monitor should work well, directly out of the Xena LHe SDI out.

Thanks for starting this thread, Miguel. I was considering the exact same workflow you're talking about but was also disappointed to learn that Aspect HD isn't compatible with BM output. The second it is, I'll be paying for Aspect HD.

I know this is the Cineform forum, but I feel like I should add a few points here about working without AHD and WITH BM. First, you can use Intensity to monitor a native HDV project; you don't have to capture thought Intensity's HDMI input to do it. You can set up a project in CS3 using the BM presets and then switch your capture mode in that project from Decklink to HDV. Even though you're capturing and working with MPEG2, you still get realtime HDMI monitoring out through Intensity.

Also, while I am very interested in what Aspect HD can do for my workflow, I have to say I haven't encountered the infamous glitches with HDV editing that populate so many forum discussions. I'm running CS3 on a Core2 Duo and editing native HDV, but other than long project load times for larger projects, I haven't had any significant problems...so far.

Stu,

The biggest difference I noticed, other than the realtime effects, was the the project load time with aspect, literally dropped from 10-15 minutes(!!!) down to about 1 minute. This is on similar projects, different episodes of the same show. :) That and if I remember right, no conforming/indexing times. Might have just been one or the other on that, tho, but a significant improvement on building the project file for large projects, shaved about half a day of building project files off my time. :)

Carl

It is a speed up we don't often consider, but it is true that CineForm allows for much more complex projects (smaller memory footprint) with faster audio conform times.

In my experience, Cineform files always require conforming on import, while HDV files do not. HDV files on the otherhand, require indexing, which is a much longer process, so Cineform saves time in that regard. Adobe has eliminated the need for conforming audio in most native settings, but both Cineform and Matrox files still always require conforming on my systems. Hopefully that step can be eliminated sometime in the near future.

Mike, thanks for clearing up those terms.

Aye, I couldn't remember whether it was indexing, conforming, or both. I just remembered it being *much* faster. :)

Carl

Bumping!
 

I'm in a similar position. I just can't justify buying in yet because of the lack of monitoring (with the BM card)... but it's now a new year... maybe a hint of a solution?

I have to admit I'm spoiled with the live monitoring I now have in PPro & AE (with the BM card).
I do love the file size difference and the Cineform stuff cuts easily, but with the Aspect HD trial... I get distorted video in AE... but that's for another thread.

Just wondering when some hint of some compatibility might be raising it's shiny head? I think a lot of us on the sidelines would jump on Cineform as a solution if this doorway was opened up. I know I would be.

The "hint" is that we're actively working on integrating Blackmagic cards into the CineForm playback engine. That's a more definitive response than earlier in this thread. I don't have schedule yet - we'll keep you updated.

Also note that currently only our Prospect HD family supports HD-SDI cards for monitoring. We're considering some product lineup changes and we'll let you know if Aspect HD becomes compatible with HD-SDI (or HDMI) monitoring.

I too eagerly await support for the Intensity cards.

I was so glad you guys added the monitoring window on capture. Is the plan to also allow for fullscreen monitoring through the hdmi on capture as well as supporting timeline monitoring?

Tick Tick Tick... and time marches on! (Any news?)