Re: NVIDIA unveils $1800 Quadro FX 4800 card for Apple's Mac Pro

The SDI out from the NVIDIA 5600 is not as good as the AJA hardware for true broadcast. That is why Autodesk and other companies do NOT use the 5600 SDI to monitor for Smoke and Flame. To put it simply the NVIDIA is a card that does the math to make it fit within broadcast standards if needed but the AJA cards are real broadcast cards.

The Scratch doesn't need a Broadcast card because a lot of what Scratch does is Monitoring related and not DI or broadcast related. Not to say their isn't any overlap, but Autodesk Smoke uses software to maximize the NVIDIA card to render and preview, but uses an AJA card to dump that media to Tape etc.. Autodesk is NVIDIA to render/display and AJA to export.

Scratch is mostly a color grader and when it comes to DI it is very very limited, so it doesn't need a true broadcast card within its system.

If Apple does optimize Final Cut Studio to take advantage of the NVIDIA. It will be better than Scratch, because it will use the NVIDIA to preview/render and an AJA card to dump to tape etc. Some re-writes of FCS to unify Color and Final Cut, it could be better than scratch and more inline with SMOKE and Pablo.