Canapus & CPU load

How much difference does a Canopus make (if any) to CPU load and performance with LE & a 002 Factory?

Good question: I use all of that, but haven't got the faintest idea. Maybe it does not use any CPU at all, since it's a FW-device, just like a camera or harddrive?!

I did some unscientific tests on CPU usage with various QT's. My test consisted of running an empty session with the same movie converted from an Uncompressed animation and reading the ProTools usage in Activity Monitor. Here's what I found. DV, whether through the Canopus or direct playback had the lowest CPU usage - the Canopus was 1 or 2% lower - probably due to the fact that it decodes in the box. Playback was about 26-28% on the monitor Motion JPEG (Apple's and Miro's) were next with values of about 31-33% at DV data rates (25Mb/s). Lower data rates reduced the CPU usage accordingly MPEG4 and Sorenson required the most CPU at around 38 to 40% on the monitor even at lower data rates. My test system was a Quad 2.5 G5 with 2GB, running PT7.1 with OS 10.4.6. I'm assuming those numbers represent only 1 CPU as the CPU Meter in PT was not moving in any case. So the answer is it has some impact, but it's minimal on faster machines.

So other than the ability to capture video from tape, is there any real advantage to using a Canopus over just letting PT and the CPU handle the video?

you mean other that spiting the picture out a monitor or 3?

Well as I recall on slower machines (my old dual 450 for example) the CPU difference was way more noticiable. The other advantage with the Canopus is that as of PT7 the "High Quality" setting for DV in Quicktime is ignored, so the video looks rather lo-res if your playing it out to a screen. The big disadvantage is of course the sync issues which Richard Fairbanks has discussed so well in this forum. I actually seldom use DV anymore except for the odd corporate, preferring MotionJPEG. As well if you don't have the ability in your machine to output to an external screen, you may have problems. We use the Apple DVI to S-Video adaptor on a second video card to work around this.

I bought an extra FW-PCI card, set the QT-offset to 18qfr and have had no trouble since on my G5 dual 2,3