Atem 2 M/E and TripleHead2Go

[Joel Caron]

Hey Joel

I know that the Blackmagic HDMI – SDI converter will not work from my own experience. Like you said, because of the frame rate. The TH2GO is kind of dumb when it comes to EDIDs downstream of the converter.

Another alternative would be to get a router with DVI Extenders and use the router to make the switch.

I think you will have to get some Matrox MXOs or Convert DVIs to get the TH2GO into the ATEM.

Joel Caron

[Brian Hubbard]

Joel, did you ever come up with a solution to convert the Triple Head 2 Go outputs to HD-SDI? Our church is looking to do the same thing and aren’t having much luck just yet.

[Joel Smith]

Brian,

Yes, we ended up finding a solution that came close to our budget. Had I known what we needed during the budget process, I would have allowed more for the DVI to SDI conversion.

I initially budgeted $350 per output to convert the DVI TripleHead2Go to HD-SDI, assuming the Blackmagic DVI to HD-SDI converter would work. The problem is the TripleHead2Go does not use a standard broadcast refresh rate. We needed 59.94 for the ATEM to see it at 720p. Therefore, you need a DVI to SDI scaler that reclocks the signal, too.

I found 2 used Gefen DVI to HD-SDI Pro Scalers on eBay for $450 total. I used one for 2 channels of the TripleHead. I also found 1 Gefen DVI to HD-SDI Plus Scaler on eBay for under $700. I used that for the 3rd channel of the TripleHead and use the 2nd Pro Scaler as a backup.

Overall, they’ve worked great. It holds a solid picture and the ATEM never seems to have an issue with it. That said, you still have to baby them in some ways. When we lose power (very rarely), the converters will forget settings or just refuse to work for a little while. It’s only gone down on us once in the last 8 months. Hence the backup.

If you have room in the budget, I highly recommend checking out the Matrox DVI converters instead of Gefen. I’ve heard better things about them. Hope this helps, have fun!

[Brian Hubbard]

Thanks so much for the reply. I knew this could be an issue when we got to this point but just didn’t know as I had read a few conflicting reports in different forums. I think we are going to bite the bullett and get the Matrox DVI converters. We found some on Ebay and might go that route. We are going to be running these into the Black magic Video Hub and then to the output devices.

[Peter Kim]

Brian,

I think I’m very similar situation like you. We recently upgraded our church video system with ATEM2. With that, we also bought Triplehead2go along with propresenter software. When we were trying to connect output of triplehead2go with BlackMagicdesign video hub through DVI extender, it just didn’t work. Later, we found out this setup won’t work. I’ve been trying to find a solution for this last several months…

So, have you purchased Matrox DVI converter? It looks like I might have to follow this route. Let me know how this works out for you.

Thanks.

Peter

[Brian Hubbard]

Peter, we actually recently just finished up getting everything connected. We still have a few terminations to complete and somethings to wrap up hopefully all before Easter. So this is what we did. DVI out of the MacPro to a Matrox Triple Head2Go. Each output of the TH2G is ran into a Matrox DVI Convert and converted to HD-SDI. We run that into the Black Magic Video Hub and then out to our projectors. Our projectors don’t have SDI input on them so we converted the SDI signal to a HDMI signal using the BlackMagic SDI-HDMI mini converter. You have to be sure to set the projectors to the HDTV setting as the auto can’t negotiate the protocol because of the converstion. Everything so far is working great. I will be posting a full write with a diagram when everything is complete.

[Peter Kim]

Thanks for your reply Brian,I have two questions though.

One, when your video comes out of Matrox DVI Converter, what format are you using? Is it 720p or 1080i?
Two, did you have to buy two Matrox DVI Converters for each DVI out of TH2Go?

Thanks for you help.

Peter

[Brian Hubbard]

Peter, I believe we doing 1080i out but I would have to double check that. And yes you have to have a Matrox DVI Convert box per output of the TH2G. We are using all 3 outputs of the TH2G so we had to have 3 of the Matrox DVI Convert boxes. They are kind of pricey but that was the only way we could get everything to work.

[Peter Kim]

Thanks again for your reply. Man, that would be little pricey for us to buy after spending pretty good amount of money already.
Do you record your Sunday worship? I’m using BMG Hyperdeck on SSD harddrive. We’ve been having an issue with importing files using Adobe Premiere. Honestly, I’m very new to this whole system. still learning as we go. lots of googling… 🙂 Thanks.

[Brian Hubbard]

I hear ya man. I am very new to all of this too. I have read so many manuals and googled so many articles it is insane. We do record our services right now but we are only recording to a DVD recorder using the S-video out of the Datavideo SE-900 switcher. This project that we have been working on is really been about getting the underlying infrastructure cleaned up and moving our standard wiring from S-video to SDI. We are looking to start recording to and SSD or hard drive in the near future but havne’t decided which route we want to go with it yet. Here is the diagram of how we have everything layed out. let me know if you have any other questions.