evansmalley - "Not to mention the dreaded interlacing blocky edges! I think you have a great point, mr. fiendish... I would so love to see MXF/AVI take over QuickTime! I see QuickTime edges on all kinds of stuff- can't believe more purists aren't up in arms!"

Incidentally, there is a particularly ludicrious option in quicktime player that was only pointed out to me recently. In Edit, Player Preferences there is a "Use high quality video setting when available" checkbox. Make sure this is checked. DV QTs can often look as you describe if it isn't. The option also exists for individual movs in the movie properties dialog. It's a really great option that one. Idiots.

Telegram!:

For some reason, I cannot both Capture via HD-SDI and simultaneously monitor (or record) the letterboxed, SD downconverted signal coming out of the same SD-SDI cable that feeds my SD-SDI monitor perfectly when I'm playing back the 1080i timeline.

This limitation was introduced late in the Beta process for some reason. Early beta builds could play back with the simultaneous down covert. Don't know why they changed a good thing...Brian might though.

BLKDOG:

Telegram!:

For some reason, I cannot both Capture via HD-SDI and simultaneously monitor (or record) the letterboxed, SD downconverted signal coming out of the same SD-SDI cable that feeds my SD-SDI monitor perfectly when I'm playing back the 1080i timeline.

This limitation was introduced late in the Beta process for some reason. Early beta builds could play back with the simultaneous down covert. Don't know why they changed a good thing...Brian might though.

EDIT: If this feature could be turned off in beta, then perhaps it could be turned back on ?

No...no. IT shows up in the record monitor and an HD monitor, just not in an SD downconvert.

fiendish:

I confirmed this by mistake recently by installing OSX on my PC

How'd you do that?

long story. all part of the shadowy world of hackintoshing.

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?s=b563603b83e24736d10c35e3753c4893&

evansmalley:

let's get up a pro-Avid, anti-QuickTime vigilante rabble

I have a pitchfork and some serious explosions in the FX files

It is not necessary to defend QT. I don't get why people get upset that QT can't play certain files in RT. First, QT is a general purpose media player so one should expect that it has certain limitations. Second, Avid should be able to play DNxHD better. It is their own format.

That being said, Brian Williams is right. QT just needs to be updated to take advantage of multi core systems and newer GPU features. With the announcement of Snow Leopard, I'm sure Apple is working hard to update FCP and QT's engine to take advantage of these new technologies.

Dom Q. Silverio:

I'm sure Apple is working hard to update FCP and QT's engine to take advantage of these new technologies.

...I hope we in PC Avid land will see the trickle down from the QT Apple update.

Don't hold your breath!

jwrl:

Don't hold your breath!

For this reason I love my P2 ingest It can't be beaton...

Well perhaps Brian could confirm this but it seems QT is already multithreaded on the mac, in which case perhaps they don't intend to port it to PC.

BLKDOG:

Telegram!:

For some reason, I cannot both Capture via HD-SDI and simultaneously monitor (or record) the letterboxed, SD downconverted signal coming out of the same SD-SDI cable that feeds my SD-SDI monitor perfectly when I'm playing back the 1080i timeline.

This limitation was introduced late in the Beta process for some reason. Early beta builds could play back with the simultaneous down covert. Don't know why they changed a good thing...Brian might though.

Thanks for clearing that up, BLKDOG- I'm glad I have one less thing to think about.

Fiendish,

There is a good chance that parts of QT is multithreaded on the PC, too.  But it's more of an old-school style of multithreading, which worked fine in the days of 2 cores, maybe 4.

old-school multithreading involves looking for parts of your code that you can parallelize and then run those in multiple threads.  Normally that's done on an algorythm level (for example, processing a filter which creates a blur).

But normally, those parts are followed by parts that can't be parallelized.  This is called forking and joining.  Think about a single lane highway that suddenly becomes 8 lanes (forking) for short bits of time and then merges back down to one lane (joining).  If those lanes were cores on a CPU a good part of the time your cores are waiting around for more work to do.  Also, quite often, the join has to wait until all parts of the fork have completed.

We've been focused on multicore and multidomain (CPU vs GPU) scalability for over 2 years now.

Instead of parallelizing an alogorythm, we parallelize a pipeline.  Our video player is constantly do its best to process multiple frames at once.  This means that while one frame may be less busy at one of those join points, we have several other frames that are waiting to get work done.

So back to QuickTime... what we can't do is ask QuickTime to decompress multiple frames at once.  We have to ask for each frame in a serial manner.

I am not saying there is isn't more that we can do to improve performance.  We will certainly continue to look to improve performance where we can, it's a matter of time and prioritization.

Thanks Brian, you've made that very clear. Does AVI work in the same way? would there be anything to gained by implementing Avid Codecs within an AVI wrapper?