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Blackmagic or Canopus?
What would be the advantage of BMD DeckLink HD Pro 4:2:2 over the Canopus Edius NX for HDV?
Most of our work is animation and special effects with some video editing. Our main need is for monitoring and need to be able to show clients how it will look in a show. Our current solution, Storm2 with Edius3 and PPro, just doesn’t work so well anymore.
Our computers seem capable, so that’s not a concern … Boxx 8200 series with dual 3.2 Xeon, striped Sata drives (600gig), 2 gigs RAM.
Thoughts? Advantages of each video card?
Thanks a bunch
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3 Replies
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Hi,
DeckLink cards are 10-bit uncompressed SDI video capture cards for maximum video quality. Using Premiere Pro 1.5.1 and any DeckLink HD series card, you can capture your HDV content from a camera using an inexpensive FireWire 400 card. Premiere Pro will automatically transcode the HDV material to an 8 or 10-bit uncompressed timeline for use with the DeckLink card. Uncompressed video requires a disk array with capacity and speed (8 SATA disks is advisable) but will enable you to apply effects, transitions and text without any generational degradation of image quality which occurs with compressed codecs. HDV is a very useful format but it is tightly compressed and will certainly suffer from generational loss if you apply renders and effects to it. You can also monitor the transcoded video as you work on it and then output to a deck such as a HDCAM or D5 via HD-SDI.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Thanks Luke.
I assume the Decklink cards also help substantially with video acceleration and realtime monitoring/output capablilites? Can I output live from Photoshop After Effects and Lightwave?
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Hi,
In regards to Photoshop, we used to suggest that DeckLink users just drag the Photoshop window over on to the broadcast monitor and make it go full screen. Unfortunately the Windows version of Photoshop continued to display a title bar at the top of the monitor and this was undesirable. So instead we now include Blackmagic import and export plugs to Photoshop. You can grab a frame of video from the deck straight in to Photoshop work on it and then export to your broadcast monitor and/or to the deck. This is nice as you don’t have to worry about codecs and Photoshop just uses the video data straight from the deck.
We’ve got RAM Preview with After Effects and you can monitor that live. The RAM Preview function of After Effects does not always run in real time due to the nature of RAM Preview. Generally once you have previewed some video, it will probably display it is real time if you play it again but this is dependant upon several factors including how much RAM you have installed. You can definitely work on your video in After Effects and immediately preview it on the broadcast monitor but I wouldn’t suggest outputting to deck from After Effects as the preview is just that and you really should render the material and output with an NLE if you are going to output to deck.
I don’t think Lightwave has any direct way of outputting via SDI to DeckLink cards. The DeckLink drivers include a utility named FrameLink which enables you to mount an AVI movie as if it were a disk of DPX frames. So what you could do is create an empty FrameLink volume and then output a sequence of DPX files from Lightwave to the FrameLink volume. You should then be able to output the resulting AVI movie to your broadcast monitor and/or deck using an NLE such as Premiere Pro or Vegas. You could even use After Effects to output the video via RAM Preview.
An alternative would be to drag the Lightwave window over on to the DeckLink desktop but I think this would be particularly slow but you might still want to test it on your system.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design
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