Will the nvidia sdi capture card work out of the box?

Hardware
1

Hey malcolm,

have you heard about nvidia’s SDI capture card
nvidia.com/object/product_qu … re_us.html

Do you think it will work in touch right out of the box?

2

No I don’t think it would work right out of the box. I haven’t looked into what API calls I need to implement to interface with that type of card, but I’m sure I’d have to do something.

3

bummer, direct video upload to PU memory sounds yummy. thx for the info

4

Support for the SDI capture and SDI output cards has been added. It’s available in the Pro version of TouchDesigner.

5

wow. great news. 077 or 088?

6

This will be in 077

7

hmm, this only works on XP? nvidia does not mention support for win7. Can you confirm that it only works on XP?

There’s not much info on nvidia’s site. Did the sdk come with some kind of manual, faq, …?
Basically I wonder if the sdi capture can be routed or mirrored to different GPUs in the system, what the latency is, …

thx

8

It works on windows 7, I’ve actually only tested it on 7, not on XP.

It routes to different GPUs using GPU affinity. I don’t think it can be mirrored though, only one app can bind the card at a time. Not sure what the interaction is with stuff like SLI Mosaic though.

9

Is GPU affinity now available on windows 7?

Also is the latency much lower using the Nvidia SDI capture card?

10

GPU affinity continues to be elusive, it’s possibly working in the 270/275 series of drivers, but those drives are broken for other reasons (they crash Touch when rendering geometry), so once we have drivers where that is fixed I can test again. I was just told last week the bug was fixed in the drivers, so hopefully we’ll see a new release working with Quadros soon.

11

so is there a physical cable going from the capture card to one of the quadros? or is everything done via affinity and via PCI express?

12

its via pci express

13

Im a bit iggerant about this product. Does it only take in composite video or can it bring in digital video as well? seems a waste to have it already interlaced. Makes me also wish more fervently for something like Syphon for windows. Maybe Derivative could propose their shared memory model as a potential standard to other realtime video-crunching software makers?
although, Syphon uses GPU memory doesn’t it?
Rod.

14

It brings in video in the SDI format using BNC-type cabling. SDI stands for serial digital interface, so it’s all digital.
The solution is mainly for people working in broadcast TV projects or other professional video projects. It’s not intended for application-interoperability or anything like that, although I guess it could be used for that.

15

I’ve just received some information form Nvidia regarding the SDI capture card. I asked them about latency and they gave me this answer;

If I were just using TOP’s (to capture and process the signal) would the data be copied to the CPU before processing?

thanks
Keith

16

No it’s not copied to the CPU, I’m using the SDI SDK they provide and I tell them to put the data directly into a texture on the GPU.

17

Awsome!!! This means we can capture video from another machine in actual realtime! (no more directx capture with 150 ms latency) Now we just need Asio audio drivers. Any word on that?

18

hmm, i always thought there’s a direct wire connection from the sdi capture to the gpu to avoid latency. If it’s going via PCI-express, doesn’t that mean it goes to/via the CPU land? Anyway, if that the intended use, I’m sure it’s super fast. Just a bummer the data can’t be mirrored to multiple GPUs

19

Yes, I thought it would be direct wire also. The SDI Output is direct wire (via the DVI port and a small internal wire). Input isn’t though.

20

We are looking into supporting Core Audio Windows API (Vista and Win7) for audio. Do you know if any of your audio devices support this?