• Blackmagic Design

  Problems with Decklink HD Extreme on Mac Pro – is this normal?

  Posted by Bill Davis on October 26, 2006 at 2:42 pm

  A fewe months back we purchased a Mac Pro and the new Decklink HD Extreme card to get us through a busy fall season, and we’re experiencing some very strange issues. In no particular order:

  1) Playback to the external NTSC monitor (via component analog) is randomly out of sync with the audio. If I set an in and out point and play in-to-out it’s fine.

  2) The Video Desktop feature does not work. No matter how I configure the System Pref I cannot get the NTSC out to display the Mac desktop. What’s strange is that when the feature is on I can drag my mouse pointer off the edge of the monitor where the display should be, but the monitor is just black. When in FCP, it outputs video just fine, except for the sync issue and…

  3) The output to the external NTSC randomly glitches and the audio to the mixer crackles. This sometimes happens when I first hit play, and sometimes not.

  4) Edit to Tape is always late by a frame. I’ve adjusted the playback offset in the deck control preferences one frame in either direction, and it’s either off by one frame or two.

  The system is otherwise relatively stable- very few crashes or unexpected quits. We are running Mac OS X 10.4.7 (Intel), FCP 5.1.1, and Decklink 5.7.2, although these problems were present with the previous version of the Decklink driver. We’ve trashed FCP preferences, rebuilt permissions, and created new user accounts.

  Does this sound familiar to anyone, or do I possibly have a bad card? To my knowledge the system was set up to Blackmagic specs, but I’d have to crawl around under the desk to verify which slot the card is connected in.

  Thanks in advance-
  Bill

  Bill Davis replied 19 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Luke Maslen

  October 27, 2006 at 2:26 am

  Hi Bill,

  When you first install a DeckLink HD Extreme card in a Mac, Mac OS X defaults to the highest resolution available. That means the DeckLink desktop is outputting at 1920 x 1080 which is why you can’t see it on your NTSC monitor. It also explains why your NTSC projects in Final Cut Pro happily display on the same NTSC monitor. To resolve this issue:
• 

  Bill Davis

  October 27, 2006 at 1:27 pm

  Awesome. Thank you! We can’t go to 5.1.2 just yet, but I’m looking forward to the improvements you describe.

  Bill

  Bill Davis
  Interface Media Group
  Washington, DC
  http://www.interfacevideo.com

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up