Playback And Monitoring - MOTU HD Express User Manual

PLAYBACK AND MONITORING

To play back your Final Cut Pro project and view it
on any monitor or other device connected to the
HD Express's video outputs:
1 Choose View menu> External Video> and make
sure that the All Frames item (command-F12) is
checked.
2 Start playback.
Video decoding and CPU performance during
playback
If you are playing uncompressed HD or SD from
the Final Cut Pro timeline, the uncompressed
video stream goes straight to the HD Express, with
no compression or encoding required along the
way.
When you play back an Apple ProRes 422 Final Cut
Pro sequence, or any other codec, Final Cut Pro
performs real-time transcoding. Given today's
Intel processor speeds, ProRes requires
approximately one Intel CPU core to perform this
task, depending on the ProRes quality mode
(standard or HQ), the speed of the processors, and
other related factors. Your performance will vary,
but generally speaking, ProRes 422 standard
quality playback requires a computer with at least
F I N A L C U T P R O
two Intel core processors; four cores or more are
recommended. ProRes 422 HQ quality requires a
computer with four Intel cores or more.
When you play back a Final Cut Pro timeline with
an HD codec other than ProRes, the situation is
similar to ProRes playback, described above. Final
Cut Pro does the work of transcoding the video
stream, and so the computer's CPU performance
must be good enough to handle the real-time
transcoding. Again, your performance will vary,
depending on the codec you have chosen, core
processor speeds, etc. If you have a four- or eight-
core machine, however, you should be able to play
back just about any video format you wish.
CREATING CAPTURE/PLAYBACK PRESETS
If the capture or playback preset menus don't have
the preset you are looking for, you can create your
own presets.
To create capture presets, go to the Audio/Video
Settings window, click the Capture Presets tab
(Figure 7-2), select an existing HD Express preset
(it doesn't matter which one) and click the
Duplicate button. Modify the settings as desired.
The procedure for creating sequence/playback
presets (in the Sequence Presets tab) is similar.
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