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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Great Playback and workflow with CS5 - add AJA or BM?

T

Tyrone Braithwaite

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I'm having great success and stablility with R3D on my system.

CS5 and a fairly low spec NVIDA card is giving me RT on 4K 1/4 Debayer which is output via HDMI on the second head of the same card using PP send to external monitor.

The monitor is a plasma and I've calibrated it close to REC709. Everything is dandy apart from the HDMI output is probably not quite broadcast spec and probably not transparent with the signal. (For instance it doesn't it clips part of the signal below RGB 17 and above RGB 236.) That means it's messsing somewhere!

I'm thinking about moving to SDI out of the system, which means either moving to a very expensive NVIDA SDI card or using an AJA or BM system.
My question is if I move to the AJA and BM - do you lose the benefits of your graphics card acceleration?

In other words would it be worse speed wise to put on of this systems in?

thanks/
 
As long as both of your monitors are calibrated to the sRGB standard, you can expect an accurate preview on both monitors in Premiere Pro.

On the fly, all footage is converted to sRGB so that it's displayed correctly on your monitor.

sRGB and REC.709 also have the same color primaries, so there will be little difference bewteen the two clips even if Premiere Pro wasn't color managing it.
 
adding aja or bm card is only an additional card you put to your system that won't really effect your performance in a negative way. CUDA is directly linked to your nvidia card ONLY, the purpose for an aja or bm card has no effect on cuda, but is for a proper accurate signal out, conversions, deck control, and even codec accelerations. along with a few more dandy features. However keep in mind, an accurate signal may still not equate to accurate monitoring. The limitations of your external monitor is a huge factor too, and certain panels can reach certain color, black, and white levels much better than others, even with all the calibration in the world on a lesser panel will give you inaccurate results. Trust your scopes and waveforms.
 
Thanks guys.

So if I put an AJA card in will the performance not likely be as good as the NVIDIA ouput?

I have no benchmark for what the AJA can do ...

When checking the AJA card spec, only one of the cards listed says it supports RED workflow the Kona 3 I believe - and yet people use the LHi and it doesn't list RED workflow. So how does the card actually interface with the Premiere Pro then and r3D?

cheers.
 
the "output" which i'm assuming is your playback is identical to what you have no. whatever playback is on your timeline, that's how ti's gonna looking coming out of the aja or bm card to a monitor. there is no r3d playback acceleration from aja or bm, nor does it exist in cuda, and mercury playback. The cuda acceleration is when you start doing effects, and your GPU starts handling that for you. Whether you start stacking layers of video for picture in picture, to filters and effects. Being able to playback and preview at higher debayer settings are completely up to the rest of your system specs. CPU, RAM, hard drives. etc.

BM and AJA cards exists as an I/O board for accurate monitoring, deck control, framerate/resolution conversions, and some real time codec acceleration like pro res and dvc pro hd. Along with other stuff like live key, capturing, and so on.
 
Not sure I would immediately agree that performance is the same if you use a capture card or not. There are some threads talking about this very issue on a different forum. The conclusion seems to be that some of the performance by the Mercury Playback Engine is diminished if you have to re-route the output of the GPU back through the system out to the capture card I/O. Here is the question and the answer from AJA"

Hi,

we were just setting up Premiere Pro CS5 under a fully new setup Win7 64bit; trying out XDcam EX footage with the Mercury Engine and it really works fine with native Premiere sequences (can play up to 7 layers XDcam EX 35mbit footage).

So we set up the new Kona drivers version 5.0, creating a sequence, pulling in our set with these 7 layers HD - and it did NOT work at all. We reduced layer by layer and realized that we just can playout a simple dissolve between two HD clips. Even when adding a third layer we get some strange block effects during dissolve and playback stops due to dropped frames...

The performance you're seeing is correct.

The performance you see with Adobe Premiere Pro when no 3rd party hardware is installed is enhanced by the fact that no full resolution, high bit depth video needs to be delivered to a professional device. To realize that performance many different shortcuts can be used in the playback engine processing things at lower resolutions, bit depths, or colorspaces in order to achive higher performance.

When professional quality hardware is involved however, these shortcuts cant be taken when users expect pristine quality for output to their professional devices. The sacrifice is some of the performance. What you get in return is outstanding broadcast quality.

I would be interested in hearing other users experience with a r3d workflow and capture card.
 
if this holds true, this breaks the adobe workflow for a lot of people. People, including myself rely on an I/O card installed for a variety of reasons. not just capture, but a proper SDI signal out to monitor, not just in the NLE, but with AE, and other pieces of software. This may mean editing in PP with an I/O card, you'd have to disable the I/O card and work in PP for the realtime, and render down before you look at your grading. Hopefully they'll get better drivers soon that can bypass this mess. I find it kind of a major oversight to not have the PP drivers optimized for I/O cards and NVIDIA acceleration to work in conjunction.
 
CS5 Cuda

CS5 Cuda

We were quite dissapointed, at first, to experience no Cuda acceleration out of our AJA Kona 3 or LHi. We called AJA and they confirmed that Cuda is for PC monitor only. There are many presets in Premeir Pro for Red. 4k 29.97, 24, 23.98, 1080 in 29.97, 24, 23.98, 720 in 59.94, etc. There are similar presets for DVC Pro HD, and other formats. All of these will give you Cuda acceleration from your Nvidia Cuda card. You can playback Red and other formats at resolutions and in more layers than with out Cuda. But you will get no monitoring output from AJA. To get AJA output you must select an AJA preset. 1080, 29.98, 24, 23.98. 720, 59.94, 24, 23.98 plus SD presets. To get AJA monitoring you have to be playing back a one layer file. Which means you have to render out that Cuda project to a single layer then import it into a matching AJA project so you can see it on your broadcast monitor, get external scopes and dub to VTR. We have 50 inch plasmas in each edit suite and have calibrated both the SDI/HDMI inputs for AJA, and DVI input for PC so we can switch the monitor back and forth as we work. One bright spot is when using After Effects CS5 you get AJA output, also when using Color Finesse 3 you get AJA output, and when you use CineForm First Light you get AJA output. We have learned to deal with this limitation by switching back and forth between PC input on the Plasma and the SDI/HDMI input. Sure we would love full Cuda out of the AJA but that is not going to happen anytime soon. But even still, Cuda is awsome and has enabled us to move about 50% of our projects from After Effects to Premeire Pro saving us lots of post time.
 
Yes, this is Adobes specific approach to acceleration. As long as you have a CUDA-capable timeline, there's no output to an I/O-card. If you use an AJA, BM or Matrox enabled timeline, there's a specific format for the timeline and no full CUDA any more. Matrox claims they replace some of the CUDA acceleration with the Max option in the MXO2 line, but in my tests it was less than stellar.
But I think there's something at the horizon, at least for proper monitoring (but not play-out): the HP Dreamcolor can be hardware calibrated and does 10 bit. Even now it works with all timelines with progressive footage in RGB, but in 8 bit only. As soon as Adobe decides to play out 10 bit via supported NVidia cards, it will be an excellent monitoring solution. This will probably happen on PCs only, since Apple's drivers don't support it.

For more background on the Dreamcolor, see Allan Tépper's articles at Provideocoalition.
 
I agree the best workflow at the moment is to "cut" in a Adobe timeline while monitoring the GPU output then move your sequence into a BM/AJA/Matrox timeline to finish. This seems to work well for Progressive HD projects.
 
We have CUDA rendering enabled on our Black Magic Multibridge Pro 2 card. I output Rec.709 footage over HD-SDI all time time, and it's fully accelerated.

I've been color grading 5d mark II footage and playing it back real time over my Black-Magic card. maybe AJA doesn't have their ducks in order right now.
 
Yep. Just like Matrox…
 
Hi Alexander,

If you have a moment to test the theory of diminished MPE performance that would be great. Maybe you could set up a Adobe / Canon DSLR sequence and see how many layers you can play back without dropping frames and then create a Blackmagic sequence and try the same sequence.

It would be great to see the result of this test. I am very curious as to what percentage if any is the MPE diminished.

Thanks
Ray
 
Any updates on this guys?? Here's what i need to do;

-Create a DVC Pro 50 or Red 2K project in CS5
-View the output of this CUDA real-time project on a broadcast CRT in HD

I don't want to use the AJA or BM Premiere presets. Is there any NVidia Card that has an SDI output that can do this for me, keeping the benefits of CUDA??

TIA, Simon
 
What pixel aspect does the SDI output on the NVidia give you? 1920x1080? Other standard TV formats?
 
This topic always comes up at some point. With CS5 their is really no need to add any extra piece of equipment for critical evaluation. You just need to have a monitor correctly calibrated for your Displayport or HDMI out. Here is a great article on the subject: http://goo.gl/CS3nF

Bottom Line: "
For many years, editors and readers of my articles have been asking me: “Why can’t I just connect my critical video evaluation monitor directly to an extra output of my computer?” If you have been reading this and my other articles, you know why that has not been possible up until now, and you will also have read why Apple even warned us at NAB 2005 and in support article TA27705. However, if you have been reading points 1 through 4 above, you may be saying that you have already disqualified those points.

I was happily surprised to hear that —for the first time in Adobe Premiere’s history— version CS5 now handles realtime YUV to RGB colorspace conversion 100% on its own, and that Adobe guarantees the accuracy of this realtime conversion with all transitions and modes that use 32-bit floating-point, which fortunately covers all seven of Premiere CS5’s color correctors!" Allan Tépper
 
Allan Tépper is right, it works for us!
 
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