Video "On-board" or "Satellite"

[Kuba Pietrzak]

I've been working with setups, which had "outsourced" video playback for almost 10 years. There was VVTR/AuroraFuse setup in PAL times, than I moved to Video Satellite setup (BM Extreme HD) which works perfectly and playbacks HD video without any problems, even if ProTools session is fully loaded with trakcs, routing and plug-ins (both DSP and Native).

Finally I am going to upgrade HD to HDX and I would like to ask a question:

How is it ?

What are your experiences with HDX and BM video on the same Mac? Are there any problems, if you have let's say 120 tracks 5.1 mix session with strong automation, large plugs amount, lots of routing and printing mixes and stems on the same machine along with HD video playback? Is video playback somehow "affected" by such a big session? Dropped frames? Start errors? Overall systems responsiveness?

Or if you have really fast editing/spotting session, so you need to be really quick and be sure with video playback, if e.g. you edit ADR takes to have perfect sync.

Perhaps, it would be better to stay withing PT|HDX and VLSE, so both machines would work independently with much better results?

What is your opinions/experiences about it?

Kind regards,
Kuba

[emf1138]

I just finished a 1 hour animated special, 5.1 for TV. All mixed ITB on an HDX1 with a BM Intensity Pro driving pic within the same session. Session was approx. 240 tracks with all DSP plugs and the card was ALMOST maxed out. Switched between a low-res quicktime and a 720p HD pic (both Apple ProRes LT). Session ran great. Every once-in-a-great-while picture would hang for about a 1/2 sec, as if PT was doing an auto-save in the background. Though to be fair, this has ALWAYS happened to me whether it's HD pic or low-res QT. Also, happened on my old HD5 system. If I DID have the option, I'd prefer to have Vid Sat.

[thierryd]

I'm often working with Video Satellite and would eventually like to have one powerful PT system that plays all video and audio tracks (HDX2 with BM card comes to mind). Working within one system is just quicker than juggling different Satellite systems. Only until now PT wasn't powerful enough to handle all the tracks in bigger 5.1 projects.
I'm not on PT11 yet, but I'm quite interested to see reactions here to the OP's question.
The one thing I like about having a Video Satellite, is that it never stalls picture during PT save operations on the audio system. It would be great if Avid could program PT so that video would never stall during save operations.

Greetings,

Thierry

[Brent_Sydney]

I ran a hd3 rig and video satellite rig for 2 years, then swapped to native for mixing and hd2 plus decklink as a satellite stem recorder and video playback rig.
Good systems, but every time I needed to do a simple job it was just time consuming to put video on the second system.
Im now on a hdx1 with a decklink and its smooth sailing and quicker and easier to get to work.
Satellite makes sense for locking up stem recorders in the biggest rooms but for less than 500 voices Id prefer to operate a hdx 1 or 2 with a decklink and pt11.

[Frank Kruse]

I've been running QT in the same timeline for years (actually since the ancient Miro DC30 days). DNxHD36 1080P 24fps works great even in fully maxed out sessions and 8 reels in the timeline and a BM card.

Even in the big theater on an almost fully maxed out HDX3 (600+ tracks) picture ran fine.

Under 11 sync is very stable and lightyears better than 10. I get 4qf sync-offset under 11 and there's little to no jitter (according to my Syncheck playback is around +- a few milliseconds. Way below the 10ms figure. Under 10 I get 15qf and the usual +-1 frame start error due to the QT-engine. 11 uses the AVID video-engine.

Couldn't imagine running QT on satellite with the constant picture recuts today. Just too much work to maintain two systems.

Only downside currently is the lag-bug when selecting and nudging but AVID said it will be fixed in the next update.

Frank.

[thierryd]

Hi Frank,

does the picture still stall during auto or manual save in PT11?

Another reason wanting to avoid satellite for me is that multi-mode on the D-Control is just too much hassle and as said having to maintain picture changes etc. on multiple systems takes too much time.

Greetings,

Thierry

[Meads]

I used to work with video and audio in one session all the time, but I found that depending on the codec PT tends to get a bit laggy sometimes. Since I do not want to convert the video files that are being delivered all the time I decided to go with a VSLE-system. It works just fine that way but it's not as convenient, like you guys already said.
It however is some workload off the main machine, and that's definitely not a bad thing.

[paulo m]

Working with PT 11 (HDX1) and BM Studio. Although PT11 should handle all video that MComposer can ingest and play, that´s not the case sometimes, which I believe is due to bugs in 11.02.

Sometimes PT11 won´t play a QT movie(it shows orange in the timeline and I get an error msg about missing codecs).

Then I close the session, open it with PT10 and it reads it perfectly. Closing PT10 and reopening PT 11 and all is fine. Maybe it´s a problem with co-instalation, don´t know.

All in all and although I don´t usually run that many tracks, I prefer to run PT11 with video in the box as it´s more practical. I have to say that all video files are being streamed from an Isis server as well as the audio, so I can´t really advise when everything is run from the same box, so to speak. It may pose problems to the CPU or not, depending on the host machine.

[Postman]

Is anyone running PT11 with MojoDX?

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by thierryd

Hi Frank,

does the picture still stall during auto or manual save in PT11?

Yes. In large session PT graphics generally stalls when you save. However it will never autosave during a play-pass only after you stopped, AFAIK.

Frank.