neo & prospect / parallels

[Kujtim Ereqi]

I am an Premiere Pro user. I have tried Prospect 2K and I really liked the real time engine... Since we are planning to buy some mac pros, I really want to know:

1- Can I have the same real time engine for PP CS3 in mac, through NEO 2K? In other words: would NEO offer me in PP3 Mac, the same benifits that Prospect offers in PP3 windows?

2- If not, can I use Prospect with parallels in mac, so I may continue using premiere in windows (same old way)? I know that this is possible with bootcamp, but I don't like the idea of rebooting.
In the cineform site is stated that:
"Prospect or Neo is installed on a Windows PC, or if you want to use your Mac hardware, Prospect and Neo can be installed when using Bootcamp. Neo is also compatible with Parallels."
Does this mean that Prospect definitely is not compatible with parallels? Would it be in the future?

3- About monitoring. I know that cineform supports aja cards. Xena line for pc and kona line for mac. That's clear. Now if I want to use the PROSPECT 2K in windows with mac hardware (through bootcamp or parallels) which card should I use?

Thanks in advance, and sorry for any mistake

[David Taylor]

Kujtim,

On Mac, Neo with Parallels works fine (as stated). CineForm files work fine in PPro/AE with Neo installed (MacOS), but they don't have the RT acceleration provided by Prospect (Windows). This is because in Prospect we have our own real-time engine that replaces the PPro engine.

We have not tested Prospect within Parallels. I suspect Prospect will work fine, but my bigger question is whether PPro will work acceptably in Parallels. I *don't know* there is a problem, but it is something that will have to be tested. I suspect somebody somewhere has tried this already with or without CineForm. If you test this, please let us know results.

Re monitoring in Bootcamp or Parallels, you'd still use the Xena card from AJA. The Xena card is identical to the Kona card, but is called "Xena" when the Windows drivers are installed. But...I doubt that the Xena card will work in Parallels. Parallels seems to work fine for non-hardware devices. I know, for instance, that Parallels does not support Firewire interfaces. But again Bootcamp will work fine.

[Nathan Quattrini]

what is parrallels? And would it work better than bootcamp with Neo? I`m so confused on how all this works. Does prospect work on bootcamp? How does the whole bootcamp thing work to allow usage of cineform to begin with?

[Mike McCarthy]

Bootcamp makes your Intel Mac a full Windows system. You can use it exactly like a PC system, XP, CS3, Prospect, Xena, etc.

Parallels allows you to run Windows from within OSX, similar to the way VirtualPC works, but it has higher performance since it has direct access to the CPU, and there is not hardware emulation going on the way there was with Virtual PC an G4/G5 Macs.

[Nathan Quattrini]

so i need to buy windows to run on the mac to run your intermediate codec for premiere?

[David Taylor]

If you want to run Prospect HD which is Windows only (and provides the highest performance) then you need to run it underneath Windows on your Intel Mac. That means you have to purchase and install Windows.

[Kujtim Ereqi]

Thanks David for your reply,


It appears that bootcamp is the best aproach. At apple site they are stating that bootcamp for Mac OS 10.4 will expire in December 31, and after that will be supported in Leopard only. Are there compatibily issues between cineform and Leopard?

As about parallels I'll make a try and let you know.

Thanks

[Nathan Quattrini]

-sorry to hijack thread...i`ll start a new one for my questions-

[Kujtim Ereqi]

I was able to install PP3 for windows in my mac pro through parallels. The good thing of parallels is that if you have a vindows version working through bootcamp, parallels will recognize it, and you may open almost all the programs, and of courser exchange files instantly. So when I installed premiere in parallels, it was installed in the boocamp harddisk. I was able to open PP3 for windows through parallels, and I also was also able to install Prospect 2k trial version.

When I began playing with the program, it was not stable when I opened an cineform project. When I wanted to import some files the windows explorer crashed. After several tryings even PP3 crashed. I did not have to time to play too much, so I rebooted the mac through bootcamp to Windows. I downloaded some files from SI2k site, and I was able to play real time a 1080p 24 video file. I was able to play real time 4-5 layers some times [one video + two text layers + PiP (of same video)] . Some times I could add a fifth layer, and it was also real time, but not every time.

In my opinion, real work should be done through bootcamp in PP3 with Prospect 2K, but parallels can be used for cross platform purposes, since it makes easier the process of file sharing. (at the end this is one of the strongest points of cineform).

But I faced a problem. I have an Invidia 7300 GT card. When I enabled overlay surface in cineform playback settings (I did the same inside invidia), I was able to use my second 23'' monitor for monitoring video, but only during scrubbing or when the video was stopped. Whenever I hit play the video dissappeared from the second monitor, and I could see it only inside PP3. What do I need to do?

Thanks and sorry for my language

[Richard Leadbetter]

As I understand it Parallels is not using multi-core processing, whereas VMWare Fusion is - certainly the benchmarks I've seen bear this out. Assuming this is true, CineForm's multi-threading may therefore cause problems for virtual machines, Parallels in particular.