I’ve never used the Matrox products for editing so I can’t comment on them one way or the other. I’ve only use AJA products for the past 5 years or so and they’ve been rock solid so that’s why we continue to use them. We’ve never had issues with AJA output with FCP. There are a few minor issues with Premiere Pro that cause some sluggishness with a few formats with the AJA at the moment that are being addressed.

As for the industry making perfect products, they all support FCP, Premiere and Avid now with each of them requiring completely different plug-ins / drivers, etc… Sometimes it works well off the bat and other times it takes a few cycles for the products to work correctly.

MacPro 3,1, Processor 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 20 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM, NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 1536 MB, Mercury Pro Elite 4 disc Raid 0 capable of 225 MB/sec transfer. Some of this stuff was bought specifically for using Premier.

My question is about the slots in my MacPro. I am using the two fastest slots for the video card and a Estata card to connect with the Mercury Pro Raid.

The remaining slots are occupied by the Matrox stuff….the compress HD card and Matrox Mini 02. These are slower slots as I understand it.

Would the Kona card work in one of these? What is the likelihood of perfection ? I can’t understand why it is so difficult for the industry to provide us with trouble free output from Premier/FCP without hiccups, dropped frames and timelines that seem to go out of synch. FCP seems better with this than Premier but still drops frames.

Most of my editing is from Canon 5D MkIIs and 60D multi cams. I also record separate audio and match everything up with Pluraleyes. This program works great, except that in Premier, the tracks comes back with a different sequence setting than what it started out with! I think this has something to do with Matrox, not Premier.

The Kona card is expensive, but if it works it would be worth it.

Generally when you see the AJA Kona show up as the error, it’s actually an out of memory error for the Mac itself but the AJA was the last thing in the chain before the machine died so you see that show up as the error. Most of the time it has nothing to do with the actual crash, it just happens to be the last thing the Mac saw before it died so it throws that up as the culprit of the error.

In regards to the redraw/update issue you’re seeing relating to adjusting curves, AJA and Adobe are aware of the issue and are working diligently on providing a fix. Not sure the exact timeline, but I’ll try to find out and respond when I hear more.

As Walter mentioned, you can provide AJA (as well as Adobe) with any bugs you come across.

All the best,

-peter

Question: I just upgraded from 6x to FCP7 and moved to Snow Leopard. In the process I upgraded Adobe After Effects to CS 5.5. (I’m very slow to upgrade!)

Will the process that you describe above allow me to see the output of AE on my outboard monitor? Is there a way to do that?

Question 2:I’m now having occasional crashes of FCP and it references the Kona Board without giving any detail? Have you run into that?

Yeah, scrolling the mouse up and down will make it scroll the timeline right to left. Something to get used to, though I don’t use a mouse hardly at all, we use Wacom Tablets for all our work. The one thing I do love is finally a timeline that moves along with the playhead again. Haven’t seen that since my Media 100 days. Yeah, I know Avid has had that all along too, but I forgot how nice it is to have the timeline auto advance while playing.

Strange, but it worked just as it should.
It still does some funny things.
When I adjust in curves on a clip, my monitor updates in half a second, and then it returns to the source image?
Then I need to click again in the timeæine, to see the changes.

Another thing that I noticed is the way my mouse is scrolling.
I am so used to scroll up/down to se all the tracks in my timeline, and right/left to go – yeah Right/Left in the timeline.
This is not working in Premiere… Everything else, I have set up as it was in FCP, so it works like I’m used to.

I think I’ll be happy with the system, once I get to know all the features, and get replacememts for the loved FCP plugins. I’ll be following you on this blog.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

System Preferences > Sound I have the output set to AJA Kona

What’s wrong with my system.
Final Cut Runs smoothly as always.

Specs:
MacPro 2010 vers.
Snow Leopard MAC OSX 10.6.8
Kona LHi driver 9.0.3
Aja Quicktime plugin 9.0.1

The problem Avid faces right now is the lack of complete support for all third party peripherals used by Final Cut Pro. So if you have an FCP based facility, you will have to be ready to change a lot of third party hardware unless Avid continues to open up. We know that AJA Kona support is coming because they hinted at it during NAB 2011 and more or less confirmed it during a recent Twitter exchange. But what about the third party storage? In our case we run the Small Tree Ethernet SAN solution and we’re not sure how the Avid is going to talk to that. We’ll know shortly because we’re installing an Avid evaluation copy this weekend for testing.

But right now, Adobe basically drops straight into the FCP infrastructure and workflow with the least amount of interruption. At least that’s what I’m finding so far.