Nope.
Fredo
Hello,
As Fredo said, no. The Blackmagic cards are in one sense pretty simple. It would be nice to have a Blackmagic card with dedicated DnxHD/ProRes/whatever decoding but it’s still your cpu doing the decoding.
VideoSlave on a separate computer works pretty well…
Hugh
So I understand that correctly. Sonnet makes external cases that you connect to your Mac with Thunderbolt.
Into those cases you can add PCI cards. And it’s like you’d plug them into your computer and work normally as they would in a cheesgrater Mac or a PC tower case, where you plug the card directly into the motherboard. It’s like an external motherboard where you plug cards into, and connect to via Thunderbolt?
Hello,
Your summary is correct.
We use a LOT of the Sonnet chassis with pcie cards, they work very well and are substantially quieter than the Magma chassis. Their cooling system is designed to accommodate cards like the Red Rocket; audio cards need an order of magnitude less cooling than that so we modify them for lower fan noise, remote power switching, internal madi e/o/e converters, etc.
Here’s a link to the thunderbolt page -
http://sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/index.html
Almost every DAW we use, Nuendo and ProTools, has one. We’ve tested extensively.
Apple’s decision to abandon slot-based computers has been the subject of much discussion, Sonnet and others do a nice job working with Apple to make sure the products perform well. With the variety of operators’ skill levels (slim to none) and the number of deployed systems we can’t afford to go the hackintosh route.
Hugh
Lol, I’ve always been here but my projects were (and currently still are) so “simple” that I’ve never thought of needing this. Now that I’m investing some money of past projects into a new, bigger studio, I’d like to also get a TV as external and bigger movie display. So I’m looking around. I’m slowly, slowly growing into this world with the help of you guys 
Yes. Sad. But apparently, slot based computers are coming back. Let’s wait and see, I think Apple realized their huge mistake and are returning to expandable boxes next year. Anyway, for somebody with only a laptop, an external box for PCI cards is the right solution. Thanks!
Hello,
And another thing since you’re trying to get into the video world if you don’t mind wandering off into the weeds…
Many advise audio post folks to not receive H264 files from your vidiots or at least convert to something else if you do. Many vidiots are not able to generate anything except what they know meaning you pick up the slack so having a dedicated video playback machine can be useful for chase playback or standalone video conversion. And sometimes you just want to quickly play back the H264 without conversion.
Your cheesegrater does not have dedicated H264 decoding hardware on the graphics card so the cpu will have to decode the H264 files itself which could be a concern on large audio projects. Certain Mac Mini and MacBookPro models do have dedicated H264 decoding hardware on the graphics card. Generally speaking the better Mac Minis and MBP models released 2009 and later have H264 hardware accelerated decoding as long as the playback software uses an Apple API called VDADecoder. To the best of my knowledge this has not been deprecated yet. It does not properly support interlaced H264 last time I checked due to the way progressive vs. interlaced is defined in the H264 standard. That may have changed by now and I may be wrong, always a possibility.
According to Videolan, Video Slave supports hardware accelerated H264 using VDADecoder as of v2.1.0. VideoSlave with MTC over network (built into the OS) works nicely as a video chase machine. You mention you have a laptop - you can give it a try using the laptop as a slave to your cheesegrater.
This may be too much information at this time in which case carry on.
Hugh
Hi, perhaps just back up a little? Many of the suggestions here appear oriented around video production (i.e. ingesting, editing & producing video on an NLE), whereas your original enquiry appears to be about producing audio-to-picture in a DAW. Completely different thing in my experience on both DAWs & NLEs, the former having very reasonable & easily achievable demands.
First point. You don’t mention which Mac, but most will be able to drive two displays, nor do they need to be NLE reference level, 4k, Rec 709 or otherwise. It would appear you simply want to want the video on the second screen & I’ve been doing that with audio post for donkey’s years on DAWs like Pro Tools, Cubase, Nuendo, Logic, DP9, whatever. Say an iMac with an inexpensive second display? That will be fine. In Nuendo, make Workspaces to suit.
Second point. Yes, H264 video files place undue demands on your computer & you will not get good playback from this codec. That’s .MP4 or .MOV containers usually & the underlying problem is the highly compressed consumer codec they present in H264. The answer is to simply convert the .MOV /.MP4 into a format that the DAW (or NLE) can playback easily & in the case of a Mac that would usually be ProRes. Somewhat contradictory, a ProRes .MOV is much larger than a H264 .MOV, however this will run very smoothly and without any fuss in most DAWs.
There are a number of relatively inexpensive 3rd party utilities that will do various conversion and batch duties, including from H264 to Prores, e.g.: Edit Ready EditReady Drag & drop & convert.
So: add a generic display to an iMac, convert your MOV or MP4 to ProRes, load up into Nuendo and be happy.
Delivery of final sound track embedded in the video, another story …
Looks like he’s looking for three, not two monitors.
1 - Nuendo project window (“timeline”)
2 - Nuendo mixer
3 - video
I have this problem too. I have a Pro Res 4444 file like Steinberg recommends, but I discovered that the frame rate fluctuates between 19 and 24 fps, which I think is the reason it doesn’t look smooth. It behaves this way in Quicktime and in Cubase, so I don’t think it is SB’s fault. QT takes a whopping 15% CPU just to play back this Pro Res file. This is just one of the numerous problems with QT on windows and why it’s discontinued, obv for good reason! I hope the new video engine solves this. Has anyone had better luck with other codecs on windows? Avid DNxHD?
I’m sure Fredo has made some very good points regarding video. I would search his posting history if I were you.