Basic In & Out Query – Windows

[Yves De muyter]

I sold a setup like this. No real problems. I chose a setup with SCSI disks(on and an older wx8000) and a DeckLink Extreme for the analog audio. You can use the “BMD Deck control” application for input/output. Make sure you use a BMD codec in AE & 3D Studio Max.

-Yves

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Troy,

The DeckLink drivers include a utility named Blackmagic Deck Control. It is a very basic capture and playback application. You can use it to set an In and Out point or alternatively you can use Capture Now. Blackmagic Deck Control will capture in 8 and 10 bit uncompressed QuickTime formats. You can also capture in the compressed PhotoJPEG format but I would advise against that on the grounds that it won’t be compatible with many non-QuickTime applications.

While we offer AVI capture and playback support in Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas, Blackmagic Deck Control is one of our older utilities and only supports QuickTime movies at this time. When we get a chance, we would like to update it to also support AVI movies. However After Effects and Photoshop will be fine with QuickTime movies.

The LaCie Big Disk Extreme is perfectly fast enough for capture and playback of 10-bit NTSC movies using a FireWire 800 connection. Having said that, there seems to be some great variance in FireWire 800 speeds on different computers and this solution will only work well if your FireWire 800 connection is working well. The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, installed by the DeckLink drivers, will provide a helpful indication of disk speed. You need 30 fps for NTSC and I would recommend you aim for a benchmark of 60 fps for both read and write speeds on the Big Disk Extreme. This will allow for fluctuations in disk speed and the inevitable slow down which occurs as disks fill up.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Troy]

Thanx for the info Luke.

Quicktime is fine, it’s pretty much what I work with currently anyway. Also, I work in PAL, so 25fps is what I’m aiming at.

I guess my concern is that I hear the BM is fantastic on the Mac, but not quite up to scratch on the Windows platform – please correct me if I am wrong (I hope I am!). Some of the issues that have come up in my discussions are dropped frames, problems with fields and a general lack of confidence when running in Windows – again tell me I’m wrong! Basically, I just want to get short slabs of SD footage in & out, and the BM seems like such a great option.

My system will be a HP XW8200, Dual 3.2GHz Xeon’s, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA FX3400, 160GB SATA HDD + the LaCie 500GB.

Thanx again for your time,
Troy

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Troy,

The DeckLink Windows driver support is really very good now. We started off on Mac OS X and so the Mac drivers were more tried and tested than the Windows drivers for some while. However we were always aiming for feature parity and stability of both Mac and Windows drivers. There will always be differences between the two platforms but the drivers now provide a very similar experience on both platforms.

In regards to dropped frames, uncompressed video is demanding and many PC users have only been used to DV in the past and tried to avoid having to upgrade their PC’s and disk arrays to match our recommendations as we always specified high end machines. However you really cannot compromise with uncompressed video and so we inevitably hear from people with dropped frames whose systems just are not fast enough. The good news is that we recently added a couple of Dual Core systems to our Windows minimum system requirements. These machines are quite inexpensive and yet are perfectly adequate for standard definition uncompressed video and you can use up to 4 SATA disks internally to form a disk arrray which has a fast benchmark of around 260 MB/sec! So now there is really no reason why price should be an issue with these machines as they are great value for money and perfect for editing standard defintion video on Windows XP.

In regards to problems with fields, the only thing of which I can think is that they were referring to PAL DV field issues.PAL DV field issues. That’s an issue for both Mac and Windows as the PAL DV standard is messed up and you can find information about that in the Premiere Pro caveats technical note. Indeed this note will let you know about any of the odd things you might bump in to with Premiere.

Having said that, there is no DV easy setup in Blackmagic Deck Control so you should not encounter any field issues in PAL. I would like to see some new features added to Blackmagic Deck Control but it has the basic features that you have specified and is a mature utility which just works.

The HP XW8200 is also a great machine and we use it here for SD and HD video. Obviously it costs more than the Dual Core machines but if you are going to work with a DeckLink HD series card, then it is a very good choice and is on our list of supported systems.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Yves De muyter]

Luke,

While looking at this:
>Also, you can play out the PAL DV sequence to tape with
> DeckLink, and then recapture to uncompressed, and it will
> be OK. We set the fields correctly when playing a PAL DV
> clip out to the SDI output.

Could it be that the field swap is set twice on Premiere PRO output ? Because what is described in this article, is not true for Adobe Premiere.

-Yves (Silently waiting for 5.2 to resolve this issue)

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Yves,

I don’t have a direct answer to your question but Matt has more information on this and previously made the comment that he wants to improve the PAL DV behavior in Premiere Pro in the next update. Matt will be back next week and will be looking in to it then so an update should not be far away.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Troy]

Thanx for the info guys – all sounds good… Troy

[Shane Chadder]

Hi Luke

This is not just a pal problem with DV fields. I just bought a decklink plus card and installed it with Windows 5.1. If I import an existing NTSC DV clip the fields appear reversed i.e. any motion “ghosts” on the screen. Reverse fields does not do anything. Deinterlace makes the problem less noticable.

The board is otherwise great, but it isn’t ready for prime time like this.

Is the problem fixed on Mac? Is the board able to mix DV and uncompressed realtime on Mac?

Thanks

[Shane Chadder]

I want to clarify this is when I bring a DV clip into an 8bit uncompressed blackmagic job that something gets screwed up.

If I use a DV blackmagic job the fields are fine…but then I am rendering in DV and not uncompressed.

Thanks

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Shane,

Thanks for this extra detail which sounds important in replicating the problem. I’ve asked our engineers to check this out and come back either with information or a fix as appropriate. We should have some news next week.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design