AJA seems very non-specific about this. You'd think that if their cards and drivers were working in concert with Premiere Pro's GPU acceleration, they'd be making a bigger deal out of it.

From their news release, AJA Provides Enhanced Support of Adobe CS5.5 for Mac and Windows:

The software updates, AJA Windows Software 5.5 and AJA Mac Plugins for Adobe 9.0.1 bring added support for Adobe CS5.5 and dramatically improve AJA software performance with the Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5.

They say "Mercury Playback Engine," but that's not necessarily indicative of the GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine. MPE is on, all the time, whether you have a CUDA GPU or not, so this makes me think that this is just clever marketing that is taking advantage of the confusion surrounding what MPE actually is. I'd be curious to see some real results, myself; I'm interested in AJA hardware, too.

I don't know about the Kona card but you can definitely use more than one video card with PP5, unless they changed it with 5.5. I got rid of my BM card and just went with a second video card. Might not be a solution for you but it works great here.

It's in the FAQs here:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/744683

Good Luck,

C

Yep, if you are still dealing with tape machines then that is an issue. I dumped all of my tape machines except for one little firewire machine, when I went to HD.  Best!
C

Jim Simon:

"Premiere Pro is looooong overdue for a proper monitoring solution,

one  that does not depend on closing or extending desktops,

one that does not  depend on third party codecs at all,

one that works with just about any  graphics card that has the appropriate port."

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3622807#3622807

Hi All,

To be clear here, an AJA KONA or Io Express card WILL work in conjunction with Adobe approved nVidia 'CUDA' cards, and the GPU acceleration provided by the Mercury Engine.

When using an AJA card for monitoring, mastering, or other playout, the AJA cards do require that you use an AJA preset.  However, those presets allow the Mercury Engine, including GPU acceleration, to do its thing on most file types.  There are some uncompressed 10-bit RGB file types that AJA has additional support for, which, will not see the same GPU benefit, but for 99% of Premiere Pro users, their nVidia and AJA cards can work together.

The confusion is created to some degree by the fact that the AJA plugins for CS 5 did have some additional limitations which limited the performance bonus realized by the GPU acceleration when working in an AJA seqeuence in Premiere Pro.  However, with CS 5.5, the performance bonus is greatly increased.  While it is difficult to make a blanket statement like "4 RT streams" or "4 simultaneous RT effects" due to the number of potential variables that affect the performance of both the AJA plugins, and Premiere Pro, I can say with high confidence that those of you who use both an AJA video I/O card along with an approved nVidia graphics card, will see a great performance bonus relative to using the 'software only' version of Mercury Engine.

I can say, that on my own test system here, I run both Windows 7 and Mac OS using bootcamp on an older MacPro (2008, v3.1) with 8 cores and 8GB of RAM, and a Quadro FX 4800.  On both operating systems I see similar results.  I reliably see 3 RT streams, and sometimes more, with several different effects, running 1080i29.97 ProRes, DVCProHD, and uncompressed footage at full resolution out of a KONA LHi, and KONA 3G.

I have seen up to 6 streams with 6 effects run in real-time on this system, but that is generally with thin raster footage, at 24 or 25 fps.  I certainly wont make the claim that you will always get this performance.

For those of you with more memory, newer systems, and newer nVidia cards, fast storage, lower resolutions, lower framerates, are likely to see better performance than this.

Thad Huston

AJA

...the AJA cards do require that you use an AJA preset.

Can a project that uses the AJA sequence presets be accessed
using a system that is not equipped with the AJA KONA card,
or will I end up with sequences that can only be accessed using
an identically configured AJA system?

Thanks for the reply.
Three questions:

If I avoided AJA specific media codecs and plugins,
a project with an AJA sequence could be opened and edited
on any system with the same version of CS installed without
any hiccups?

What performance or function would be sacrificed by
not using an AJA specific media codec?

Can an alternate capture codec be specified on ingest,
or will captured media need to be transcoded for compatibility
with a system that does not have AJA codecs installed?