Aurora's Igniter X within Final Cut Pro - Review

Post, Dec, 2003 by Jason Cacioppo

Unless you've been posting on the moon for the last four years, you've heard of an application called Apple Final Cut Pro. This one application has done what none before it had successfully achieved--truly challenging Avid's monopoly on professional editing tools.

If you only plan on editing DV resolution footage of your nephew's birthday to put up on the family Web site, then all you need is a zippy Mac and some hard drive space. If on the other hand you want to build a truly powerful editing system capable of editing low-resolution approval video all the way up to 10-bit uncompressed D-I, then you need more than just a friendly iMac.

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A fully functional Final Cut Pro editing system requires a license of Final Cut Pro; a fast Mac; Fibre Channel, SCSI or other high-speed storage; and a video card. The main contenders in this arena include AJA's Kona cards, Black Magic Designs' Decklink, Aurora's Igniter X and Pinnacle's CineWave. For this review I tested the Aurora Igniter X running on an Apple G4 Dual I GHz Final Cut Pro system with an Apple Xserve RAID.

THE NITTY GRITTY

Aurora loaned me their fullest featured Igniter X system. There was no printed manual but the PDF included on the installer disc had plenty of information and lots of big, colorful pictures to help me connect it all and understand the possibilities.

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One of the Igniter X's greatest strengths is its collection of input and output connections. You get D-I in and out, component and composite analog video, stereo AES audio in and out, as well as balanced analog stereo audio IO, S-Video and genlock. Another unique connection is the timecode IO, which stems from Igniter's heritage as a video card used by Pro Tools users to run Virtual VTR software from Gallery. All these connections are made by way of a PCI card in the computer and an external, rack-mountable break-out box tethered to the computer. The connections listed above are part of the Pro IO configuration. For less cash, one can choose only analog connections. In my studio we try to keep it in the D-I world as much as possible.

FEATURES

The Igniter brings a number of able features to the editing process. There is a set of realtime effects the Igniter supports when using the Aurora codecs, both uncompressed and compressed, as well as Apple's Motion-JPEG codec. The most notable are realtime overlays and dissolves, realtime color correction and realtime masks. As the Mac becomes more powerful, the CPU will handle more of these chores itself. At a NYC demo, Apple showed a G5 playing six channels of uncompressed 10-bit video with four separate color corrections, all being done by the dual 2GHz CPUs. But until we all have the special trade-show only version of FCP, not having to render your color corrections, etc. is definitely a plus.

Another great feature of the Igniter X is its onboard, hardware JPEG compressor. I was impressed with quality-to-size ratio of the material I captured. Even at IMB per second or less, the footage looked good and contained both fields. The M-JPEG compressor functions from a ratio of 1.5:1 all the way down to 50:1.

REAL-WORLD TEST

To truly test the card out, I used it on a real-world project--a 1-800-CALL-ATT spot. The material arrived from a film transfer on a Digi Beta. I captured all the material as M-JPEG and edited the spot. I was pleased with the quality of the footage and the responsiveness of my system.

As I do on most projects, I used Adobe After Effects to create animated type and affect a few post clean-ups. The Igniter performed very well with After Effects, showing full resolution previews at 29.97fps with very little tearing. In no way did it slow down user operations in the application. Much of this is due to Adobe's implementation of Apple's QuickTime output components, but I have had varied results with different output cards. The Igniter's performance previewing through the external video was as good as the Decklink and Kona SD cards, which we presently use for After Effects preview.

When the spot was approved we went to a telecine session and re-transferred our selected scenes to a Digi Beta. I re-captured the selected pulls as uncompressed 10-bit D-I and was again pleased with the image quality. I did have some difficulty with playback though, which is always the crucial test of any uncompressed editing system. I am using an Apple Xserve RAID as my main SAN component. The Igniter would occasionally insert black frames into the video stream.

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[Editor's Note:Aurora does not recommend using the XServe RAID with their product. They have certified the ATTO Fibre Channel 3300 card with a Diamond array. "This performs flawlessly in all of the Power Mac G4s and G5s we have tested," notes Aurora co-founder Tim McMahon.]

The Igniter has a system preference pane, which allows you to configure many aspects of the card from system timing and level controls to a default time-out screen that comes up on the output after a pre-defined period of time.