Premiere or Canopus for HD & HDV??

ripupthehwy

ripupthehwy

Well-known member
Hello, I'm currently trying out Edius 4.0. I am a current user of Premiere Pro 2.
I'm considering making the switch but before I purchase:
Which do most users here think is best for editing HD & especially HDV?

True, Canopus has much more realtime capability v.s. Premiere in SD on my Pent. D 3.4 Ghz system with 2 gig ram. But what about when I go to HD or HDV? I downloaded the sample clips canopus has available to test HD & HDV. Honestly, It doesn't seem anymore faster or realtime in Canopus than it does in Premiere. Add lots of dissolves or more than one layer of HD video and BOTH NLE's require rendering. Only one stream of HDV at 720/24p played without needing rendering in Canopus, but add lots of audio, dissolves and stuff, even with one layer you have to render parts of it. I hope that when I upgrade to the Extreme Core 2 Duo processor that will improve. Yes?

Now I know that Matrox has this nifty hardware for Premiere (RT.X2) that is supposed to give alot more realtime HDV functionality Plus DV & Analog Component Ins & Outs. Way cool.

Has ANYONE here had any experience with the Matrox RT.X2 vs. Canopus? I'd like to buy the Canopus but if the Matrox RT.X2 gives more gusto then maybe I should hold out until I can come up with the extra $1200 needed for it.

What about the Add on hardware Canopus sells(NX, DVX)? I was told (by a Canopus salesman) it doesn't add any speed or realtime functionality, just More inputs/outputs.

Sorry for the LOOOOONG post here guys.

ripupthehwy
 
When building a system for HDV or DVCProHD there's a lot more to consider than the NLE. Using PPro2 on a similar system to yours I get three to five realtime streams of HD. Obviously depending on the effect or transition I may have to render occassionaly but most of the time if do it renders quickly.

Here's how I do it: I use AspectHD to convert all flavors of 25Mb HDV (or DVCProHD) to a digital intermediate. In order to accomodate the additional bandwidth I use a SATA RAID which gives me fast enough I/O for a solid three R/T streams.

So far all of my output has been back to tape or HDDVD. I have an FX540 graphics card that gives me a component HD out to a 42" plasma as a reference monitor.

I love Canopus products, I used the DVRexRTPro for SD but when I wanted to edit HD I realized that I had to re-evaluate my entire workflow. I work a lot with other broadcast graphic designers and they all use AE, Photoshop and Illustrator so integration with these products was important for me. Although PPro2 might be considered more of a prosumer NLE than FCP or Avid, PPro is integrated so well with all of the other products that my co-workers use that the chioce to use PPro was an easy one.

Canopus develops a great product but ever since they started developing Edius their relationship with Adobe has declined. Now that Adobe owns Macromedia and Serious Magic I'm sure they will integrate that functionality into the production suite and will have superior operability from web to HD.

I have not tried any other digital intermediate products but for me, AspectHD has certainly extended the useability of PPro to HD very effectively. I have tried editing HDV natively with PPro2 but find it very slow and difficult. If you haven't evaluated AspectHD I'd recommend it. If your a stand-alone producer who doesn't work with other producers or only with producers who also use Edius then Canopus might be the right way to go.

Matrox RTX2 might be a good solution, it would enable you to take advantage of Adobe's integration but I'm not sure the extra performance is worth the exxtra costs. I couldn't return my Matrox RT100 fast enough in favor of my DVRexRTPro but maybe they've improved.
 
tell me more about the RAID setup

tell me more about the RAID setup

thanks for that input!!!

Reading your response makes me think alot of my sluggishness with trying to edit hdv is in the hard drive configuration. I need to do a RAID set up.....right? I have 2 250 gig SATA drives in my system, should I RAID 0 them together? is that difficult to do?
Thanks

ripupthehwy
 
Im also using PP2 with Cineform Prospect HD and loving it! I shot my film in 24p HD with the M2 adapter and really love that Prospect HD flips it for me.
 
ripupthehwy said:
thanks for that input!!!

Reading your response makes me think alot of my sluggishness with trying to edit hdv is in the hard drive configuration. I need to do a RAID set up.....right? I have 2 250 gig SATA drives in my system, should I RAID 0 them together? is that difficult to do?
Thanks

ripupthehwy
Click to expand...
RAID 0 is pretty straight forward and easy to do, however I'd suggest re-evaluating your entire workflow as you make the transition to HD. It sounds like a pain in the ass but not that many reasons come along that provide such a great opportunity to do that.

I first divided my workflows into three main categories, capture, post-production and distribution. There was a time when they were all the same so a single nle suite of tools could accomplish it all.

But for most of my HD projects I use multiple formats, film, HD, HDV, SD, scans, etc., and I needed a way to work with all these formats in the same way with the same tool set. That's when I decided to go with a digital intermediate for post production - convert all of these different formats into one file format that was efficient and easy to work with across multiple applications. When I started just about the only chioce was AspectHD, now I believe there are more choices but still believe AspectHD is the right one for me.

Once you make the decision to work this way all of your technical specs start to fall into place. For example, I use SoftImage XSI for 3D which has certain OpenGL requirements and AspectHD at the time was only certified with two graphics cards, one of which - the FX540 also worked with XSI, so the decision was made for me and it works great.

Looking at the requirements of all the applications you use in a typical HD production will help determine the right way to integrate them. That sounds like a no-brainer but I have a couple of freinds who like to use Paint Shop Pro (yuck) so to bring any elements into my workflow they must first be rendered into a format that PPro, AE7 or Photoshop can use, that's so eighties.

Converting 25Mb HDV to 100Mb intermediate codec required RAID level performance, I evaluated external FW800 RAIDs and found them to be a bit tempramental and ended up choosing a SATA RAID from G-Tech, again works great.

The cool thing is that you can do this on paper first and check with all of the venders hardware and software applications to cross reference the compatability. Its not as difficult as it sounds but can get complex pretty quickly. I then tried asking questions about certain solutions on forums like this one, you need to be very careful. A large percentage of the advice you get is from people who have never actually done any of this, they're just passing along what they've heard and most of their recomendations are useless. First hand knowledge is critical.

The final peice of the puzzle is distribution, when all you needed was an SD master that could be recorded to betaSP or authered to an SD-DVD life was simple. But today you need to not only consider those but HD-DVD, a ton of various formats for the web and potentially wireless podcasts etc.. You need to make sure that whatever workflow you choose will work with any format for digital dissemenation.

So for me, thinking of each of these three categories as seperate workflows and then figuring out how to integrate them, helps determine the best way to migrate to HD.

Sorry for being so long winded, hope this helps.
 
If someone was considering going the Premiere Pro/Axio solution, all I can say is -- wow. Got an extended demo at Broadcast India and those Matrox guys look to have really, really done something here. Now I'm not saying that someone should spend $5,000 on a board set necessarily, but if you really wanted to use Premiere with the HVX, and you wanted hardware acceleration, the Axio system looks great. It does just about everything EDIUS does for P2 integration, and even goes a few steps beyond. For example, Axio integrates with Windows Explorer so when you go to explore a directory and you choose "details", it can show the file name and date and whatever, but it'll also add columns for the metadata you choose -- so right in Windows Explorer it'll show the scene number and take number and user clip name and all that stuff. Very neat.
 
If the engineers at Matrox can get the Axio right it would seem to me that they would have a much better relationship with Adobe versus the relationship between Canopus and Adobe.

And if it gets a "wow" from Barry I'm sure it's a nice solution. I think the performance of high end media computers is getting so good that I'm trending away from hardware acceleration in favor of software solutions.
 
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