Live HD/HDV Monitoring

[Rick Pearson]

I'm looking to construct a new edit system. I was looking at a dual 2.7 G5 mac with 2 gigs of RAM, a Tascam FW-1884 audio control surface, and a projector and screen for playback and monitoring. The last components are where I seem to find a snag in the mac arena. There doesn't seem to be any way of monitoring the HD/HDV signal from the mac to an external monitor.

I've read that the only way to preview your work on an outside client monitor is to "play to tape", but this would be slow, tedious, and annoying to set your in and out points for new timeline areas each time you wish to view them on a monitor. Is there anyway to get the signal to the monitor in a live fashion?

I've read about Kona, and Decklink cards. Do these do anything to the effect of solving my problem? I really would like to make all my purchases here this week and know that I will be able to work both in today's DV world and tomorrow's HD/HDV world.

[Paul St. Denis]

The last couple of days I have been using a Viewsonic N1700 HDTV LCD
as a "monitoring" solution, we have dual DVI out from a new g5, one goes to a Dell LCD computer monitor , the other is to the Viewsonic set to be the playback device. My argument is that now that you can set up a home system which is all digital, you don't need a conventional out to analog monitor.

[Ben De Rydt]

Originally Posted by Rick Pearson

I've read about Kona, and Decklink cards. Do these do anything to the effect of solving my problem?

Yes. They will give you realtime playback over HD-SDI of Analogue Component, depending on the card.

[Kevin Shaw]

Rick: as I've mentioned in other posts, if you're not committed to working on the Mac platform you should take a look at the Canopus NX hardware/software combo (see link below). The complete package plus a decent dual-Xeon computer to run it on will cost you about $4000 or so, and will give you better real-time HDV performance than any other currently shipping solution. This won't be the right option for everyone, but it's definitely worth a look before you make your final decision:

http://www.canopus.us/US/products/ED...NX_for_HDV.asp

The Edius software is a little funky but is quite good at working with a variety of video formats on the same timeline, and Canopus has indicated they'll offer a real-time HD output encoder for the NX board once HD DVD formats have been finalized. They've also announced plans to offer support for the Panasonic P2 cameras, so you'd be covered for that plus any other standard SD or HD format. (Get Edius SP if you need HD-SDI inputs.) Good stuff...

[Dan Farzad]

The complete package plus a decent dual-Xeon computer to run it on will cost you about $4000 or so, and will give you better real-time HDV performance than any other currently shipping solution. This won't be the right option for everyone, but it's definitely worth a look before you make your final decision:

why are u suggesting dual xeons as oppose to dual core or AMD 64? over all do u have any experience for systems that wont run canapos i'm refering regual DV editing and graphic design thing of this sort

[Kevin Shaw]

Dan: the current versions of the Edius NX and SP cards require a 64-bit PCI-X slot, which is mainly found on workstation motherboards such as listed at the following URL: http://www.canopus.us/US/products/ED...SNX_Compat.asp .

Dual core and 64-bit processing are interesting trends, but sometimes "tried and true" solutions are the best ones for some applications.

For more information about what hardware works or doesn't work with Canopus products, see the user forums here: http://forum.canopus.com/ .

[Steve Crisdale]

Rick,
If there's any way for you to have a second monitor (i.e. a dual head graphics card) you can use VLC as not only a preview application, but also as a recording application using the 'stream to file' mode.

Note that you won't be able to monitor (except via the camera LCD) whilst recording to disk... or I haven't found how to do so just yet, but that's a minor hick-up compared to being able to stream m2t to disk rather than tape.

There's also a 2 second or so time lag using VLC as a monitoring app, but that's already been noted as an FX1/Z1 Firewire connection quality.

[Paul St. Denis]

Right now capture via VLC is available on Windows and Linux, not OS X

[Kaku Ito]

Originally Posted by Rick Pearson

I've read about Kona, and Decklink cards. Do these do anything to the effect of solving my problem? I really would like to make all my purchases here this week and know that I will be able to work both in today's DV world and tomorrow's HD/HDV world.

I've been testing Kona 2 with Final Cut Pro 5 and HDV files and they are working very will. The HD analog component out works well and even its down-converson (even with Letter-box output) feature works well so you can use old NTSC monitor to see how it looks on a regular TV.

You can use digital desktop feature on FCP5 (I use that to send output to my HD projector) via direct connection of video card, but it does not play interlace.

So, with my Power Mac G5 Dual 2.5Ghz, FCP5, Huge Media Vault Raid drive, Kona 2, NTSC monitor, MOTU Digital Performer, MOTU 896HD and HDR-FX1 or HDR-HC1 combination is working great for me.
My staff at CreativeSuite tested FCP5 with Decklink HD and HDV, but the beta versin of the software did not work, well. At this point, Kona 2 seems to be working better (Aja seems to get direct and friendly help from Apple), but Decklink HD has ability to support OTHER QuickTime compatilbe application like MOTU Digital Performer, which allows you to playback HD clips within Digital Performer using Decklink hardware and codec.

I also have to mention if you are planning to use Kona 2 or Decklink HD with HDV, don't update your OS to 10.4.1, keep it at 10.4 because it has some incompatibility issue that FCP5 won't recognize the video input for HDV.

[Kaku Ito]

Now Tiger 10.4.2, FCP 5.0.2, QuickTime 7.0.1 and Kona 2 1.1.2 combination is working fine with HDR-FX1 and HDR-HC1.