• Blackmagic Design

  720p 29.97 question with Blackmagic Card

  Posted by Eric Conley on November 26, 2012 at 8:24 pm

  We are in the process of switching from FCP to Premiere Pro, and need to upgrade our video cards. Currently we have 3 edit systems with AJA KONA LHe cards (not supported by PPRO 6), 1 AJA KONA 3G, and 1 Blackmagic Intensity Pro.
  We would like to purchase 3-Blackmagic DeckLink Studio cards to replace our LHe cards. We currently master all of our sequences in 720p ProRes 29.97. The KONA 3G, allows us to force the monitor to playback at 720p 59.94, but the Blackmagic card is not allowing us to playback to our monitor a 29.97 sequence. We are hoping that the Intensity Pro is just a cheaper card and doesn’t have the ability, but the DeckLink Studio card will allow us to select our playback similar to the AJA card.
  Can you force the playback of the Blackmagic card? If so, where do I find that option? We really don’t want to use 59.94 and double the size of our projects.

  Thanks
  Eric

  MacPro-Dual Quad Core 3GHz
  16GB Ram
  Radeon HD5770
  10.7.5 OS

  Jeff Kosmicki replied 12 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Jeff Kosmicki

  December 12, 2012 at 6:46 pm

  No, for some reason they will not “activate” this feature. It used to work in CS5.5 and earlier, but when Adobe changed they way third-party I/O cards work with Premiere (starting with CS6), Blackmagic cards lost the ability to output 720p 23.976 and 29.976. I told Blackmagic support about it on several occasions, they said they would look into it but never really did anything. Honestly, I’m not real sure they understand the problem.
  If you have any solutions, please let me know.
• 

  Mel Matsuoka

  January 4, 2014 at 3:38 am

  So it’s a year later, and this 720p monitoring issue is still not resolved?!?

  Does Blackmagic Design simply not care?

  I’m not crazy about 720p as a working format, but the reality is that many of my clients need me to work in 720p, because of their vast archives of DVCPro/P2 footage. I don’t know how to explain to my clients that I can’t play their 720p projects out to my 58″ display, even though it’s 2014 and my 7-year old AJA Kona3 boards can do this effortlessly.
• 

  Jeff Kosmicki

  January 6, 2014 at 5:31 pm

  Mel, I agree. Obviously Blackmagic simply doesn’t care. Not only can your 7 year old Kona 3 do it, my current Decklink Studio card COULD do it before Adobe Transmit, that’s when BM cards lost the feature. Transmit is great and it fixed a lot of stability problems I had with my BM cards, but BM needs to update their drivers with, what I am sure is simple, code changes to bring back the functionality.

  Jeff Kosmicki
  toyraygun.net

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