SGI: Video

I've done quite a bit of video capture with my 250MHz R10k O2 using cross-platform MJPEG compression. I then transfer the resulting Quicktime movie files to my PC for editing in Premiere and final output.

One thing that was always a problem was the playback frame rate on the PC. For some reason, directly playing the resulting video on my PC resulted in frame rate anomalies. I always had to output the Quicktime video to uncompressed still images and import them into Premiere as an image sequence, and then the frame rate would be correct. This does not appear to be a CPU speed issue or anything of the sort; there just seems to be some problem with the way the SGI encodes video for cross-platform purposes.

So bear in mind that you may need to perform this time-consuming step to get video looking "right" on the PC, unless this problem has been fixed by a patch or workaround that I don't know about.

kramlq wrote: An RM5200 @ 300MHz is about on a par with a R10k at 195MHz, so don't go "downgrading" your R10k 250MHz. I have a RM7000 at 350MHz, and while there are no official performance figures for O2, I think real world tests show it to be close to an R12000 270MHz ...

Mine is a rm7000 @ 350 also but I swear it's faster than the 300 mhz r12 it replaced. Maybe the disk makes that much difference ?

hamei wrote:

kramlq wrote: An RM5200 @ 300MHz is about on a par with a R10k at 195MHz, so don't go "downgrading" your R10k 250MHz. I have a RM7000 at 350MHz, and while there are no official performance figures for O2, I think real world tests show it to be close to an R12000 270MHz ...

Mine is a rm7000 @ 350 also but I swear it's faster than the 300 mhz r12 it replaced. Maybe the disk makes that much difference ?

By real world tests I just mean me using the machine, and what I felt it compared with in the R10k/R12k O2 range. Obviously it is affected by things like disk rpm, cache size and utilisation, and how much floating point is being used. I actually had an an R10k 250MHz and R12k 300MHz as well, and to me, the RM7000 350MHz seemed to rank between the two. In the end, I kept only the RM7000, as I felt the speed advantage of the R12k 300MHz wasn't really enough to justify keeping it in addition to the RM7k.

Taking price, performance and upgrade hassle into account, I definately think an R10k user should upgrade to R12k 300MHz or 400MHz rather than an RM7000 @ 350MHz. Unless you need an O2 with two disks, or a stable O2 machine to run Linux/MIPS.

ajerimez wrote: I've done quite a bit of video capture with my 250MHz R10k O2 using cross-platform MJPEG compression.

Are you using a third party compression plug in or something? Premier will only alow me to use jpeg compression. Or are you just using the built in media tools to capture?

Yes, I just use the capture tools that come with IRIX, and the Cross-Platform Quicktime settings. I've never actually used Premiere on IRIX to do anything useful, in no small part because it doesn't include any modern codecs. So the captured video gets immediately shuffled across the network to my PeeCee, where it gets output to a targa sequence (to get around the timing problem), reassembled in Premiere, and compressed with whatever codec seems appropriate.

This whole process is cumbersome and eats up a good deal of disk space, so I've only used it for short clips. Capturing an entire feature film, or even a TV show, will require a better way of doing things. Better methodologies obviously exist, but I just haven't bothered to figure one out, since I don't do this on a regular basis.

ajerimez wrote: Yes, I just use the capture tools that come with IRIX, and the Cross-Platform Quicktime settings. I've never actually used Premiere on IRIX to do anything useful, in no small part because it doesn't include any modern codecs. So the captured video gets immediately shuffled across the network to my PeeCee, where it gets output to a targa sequence (to get around the timing problem), reassembled in Premiere, and compressed with whatever codec seems appropriate.

This whole process is cumbersome and eats up a good deal of disk space, so I've only used it for short clips. Capturing an entire feature film, or even a TV show, will require a better way of doing things. Better methodologies obviously exist, but I just haven't bothered to figure one out, since I don't do this on a regular basis.

I've used ffmpeg and/or mplayer quite happily either on Irix or Linux for all sorts of cross conversion tasks. I used to use my O2 at work quite happily for all sorts of recording and playback tasks.

Now I use a work provided Premiere Pro machine with much less satisfaction. Despite the O2 being picking about un-genlocked sources, Premiere Pro with the firewire converter box I'm using is way pickier.

Back to your workflow, you could either edit on the O2, then either convert on the O2, or transfer to a Mac, Linux, or Windows machine to transcode, or you can capture on the O2, transfer, convert using a ffmpeg derived program and edit on the other platform. ffmpeg should enable you to convert correctly without the mentioned timing problem.

Hi all !
What about Smoke ? and forget oldies like premiere 5.
It's able to solve all your problems for ever

fvador59 wrote: What about Smoke ? and forget oldies like premiere 5.
It's able to solve all your problems for ever

nice style but a totally different game...

fvador59 wrote: Hi all !
What about Smoke ? and forget oldies like premiere 5.
It's able to solve all your problems for ever

Sure, except that Smoke doesn't run on the O2.

And I've yet to see an affordable license for Smoke (by which I mean hardware with smoke included that is selling for an affordable amount). Cheapest I think I've ever seen was $10k, and that was quite a few versions old, which may or may not be a big deal.

Who's talking about O2 ?
Guy 's got an Octane.......and make editing on his O2 with oldies.
$10K ???
But i agree, it's for a different game.