HD out FW

[mikevarela]

Hi,

Mac user here. As such I've enjoyed sending video out the FW port. Wondering if anyone knows if apple / digi plan on supporting an HD feed out either 400 or 800. It seems like the market is headed in this direction already ( MOTU and others supporting capture and playback on FW bus).

Is this just a dream, or are there any plans out there???

[AVGuru1]

If I understand your question....

For standard def, this has been covered many, many times on the forum. If you are referring to HD only, HD cannot possibly fit through a firewire 400 or 800 port. Not enough bandwidth.

HDV, DVCPro100, DNxHD, ProRes, etc are all pseudo HD - that is, highly compressed. Data rate wise, they can fot through the pipe. They require a signifigant amount of horsepower to chomp through. In order to retain as much CPU and RAM power for the audio tracks and plugins, video support has been left to 3rd party video devices...VirtualVTR, Pyxis. After all, whats more important? Audio latency in an audio program...or the video?

That being said, using a second video card has yielded some positive results, albeit in an unsupported fashion.

Digi does have Video Satellite and the HD satelite (forthcoming) which will ease the concept of HD playback in sync, however, its niche based.

I think it's inevitable it will happen - however, most likely in a DNxHD flavor, as the box on the other end of the firewire cable has to be a Digi approved device.

However, digi currently only has 1 device that is firewire based and does HD - The Adrenaline, which is now a dying product. So, whats' left?

I suspect support for the DX line may be on the horizon, but thats a pricey add on and certainly not firewire.

[mikevarela]

yeah, I've read most of the posts about the issue, and the DX does look promising, although your right, it's expensive.

Question is though, were in a codec world and HD is never really HD. it's always a variant in some form, be it hdv, dvcprohd, dnx, pro res... they're all compression techniques... so how can vendors like MOTU and AJA handle HD on the firewire bus without pci installs? and why can't we have the same bells and whistles

[AVGuru1]

Well, the IO HD handles ProRes 422 and 422HQ for anything above SD -it can handle uncompressed HD ( < 30MB/Sec) no problem). While this is a great advancement, Apple is fiercely protective of ProRes, and right now only a few devices (read: other than software) can decode/encode it in real time.

(Although, there is some good news, Apple just released a decoder on windows last week)

I believe the MOTU Device (V4HD) operates using ProRes as it's HD compression scheme as well.

You're probably gonna be waiting for an answer for a while, I doubt Digi will answer on "rumors"

[Petevsi]

Hi All
just on a quick off topic, if you have a PCI HDSDI card (and fast storage) try capturing the same video, in HD uncompressed and ProRes 442HQ and compare them. It is scary what Apple class as an except-able loss. We have 3 FCP systems but never capture HD using ProRes (unless the client insists), it uses more space and faster raids for uncompressed, but we couldn't live with the what the ProRes codec does to the image. DNx is way less harmful (not perfect mind :) ) in my opinion.
Pete