Re: Xena and Cineform Questions

Hi Jeron,

The Xena LH is able to playback HDV MPEG2 data in Premiere Pro 2.0. The 1440x1080 HDV video is scaled to 1920x1080 in hardware on the Xena board. The LH also has some realtime color effecte(brightness/contrast, gamma/gain/offset, etc.) that are enabled in hardware on the board as well.

For your HDV projects, you could still just capture the HDV MPEG2 data via FireWire and monitor the video out of the Xena LH board thru Analog Component HD and HD-SDI. For certains video modes, the Xena LH board has a built-in hardware downconverter so you can even down-convert the HD video to SD on the fly(i.e 1920x1080i 29.97 to 720x486i29.97). You could also capture the HDV data thru the Xena LH via Analog Component HD to uncompressed video, but capturing uncompressed might get the quality only a little better - you'd have to judge what looks better for yourself - the HDV Camera/deck doing the conversion from HDV MPEG2 to Uncompressed YUV 4:2:2 or the software in PPro2 doing the conversion from HDV MPEG2 to Uncompressed YUV 4:2:2.

For your SD projects, you could capture the Analog Component HD video coming from your HDV Camera/Deck thru the Xena LH's Analog Component Input and just have the Xena LH downconvert it(hardware downconversion) to SD video. The Xena LH only captures to uncompressed files so you would not be working with any compressed footage in this workflow scenario.

I would suggest putting the LH on your Dual Xeon system since AJA recommends having a system with two physical processors.

Dezmond