Blackmagic Shuttle DNxHD issue

[Jay Bloomfield]

I’m trying to figure out whether it is worth writing a C program using MXFLIB or maybe just using a hex editor to change the three values in a test MXF file and see what happens. Maybe BMD will fix this with the final version of the 2.5 firmware.

[Jay Bloomfield]

I’m trying to figure out whether it is worth writing a C program using MXFLIB or maybe just using a hex editor to change the three values and see what happens. Maybe BMD will fix this with the final version of the 2.5 firmware.

Update: Well, I’m a bit baffled. I manually changed the Black Reference Level to 0, White Reference Level to 1023 and Color Range Levels to 1024 and it made no difference in DaVinci Resolve Lite (Win 7 x64). Both the original and full range file displayed 0-1023. I don’t have Avid MC, so there is no other way that I can look at the BMD Shuttle MXF file. I’m guessing that it must be up to the NLE as to what to do with those settings, if anything. If anyone wants to download DaVinci Resolve Lite (freeware) and see what they get with their MXF files, let me know.

[Jay Bloomfield]

[Evan Burns] ”
Looks like I’m encountering the same problem in CS5.5. Just to be clear, can I fix this with color correction or is the information being clipped in some way?”

How are you importing the DNxHD MXF file to CS5.5? Or is that a DNxHD MOV version? If it’s MXF format, you have to be using an 3rd party importer like MainConcept or Calibrated{Q} and they both have settings that can affect the color range. I tried the demo of the Calibrated {Q} Importer and it worked fine with Premiere Pro CS 5.5.

If it’s DNxHD MOV format, check the settings on both your sequence and your player that you are using for preview. They both have to be set to “maximum bit depth”. I haven’t seen that problem with the MOV wrapper and CS5.5, but I will look again at a few more files.

[Evan Burns]

Hey Jay,

I’m using the DNxHD MOV version. I do have maximum bit depth & render quality checked in the sequence. Is there somewhere else it needs to be enabled as well?

Thanks again for all your hard work, Jay. This problem has been bothering me weeks.

[Jay Bloomfield]

I was confused a bit at first by this too, because most of the presets in PPro are YUV and have max bit depth unchecked. So once I got over that hurdle, I noticed that I had three options for the “player” in the program Preferences menu. The default Adobe player, Blackmagic Design’s player and Cineform’s player.

Player Settings preferences

In the Player Settings pane of the Preferences dialog box, you can select the default player. Premiere Pro uses the player to play media from clips and sequences for the following:
Source Monitor
Program Monitor
the preview area at the top of the Project panel
Trim Monitor
Multi-Camera Monitor
the video transition preview in the Effect Controls panel.
You can choose the default player for your computer, or a third-party plug-in player for Premiere Pro. Third-party players are installed with some capture cards.

If you only have the Adobe player, then that isn’t the problem.

[Evan Burns]

New beta version out for the Hyperdeck – https://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail/?sid=3960&pid=3968&os=mac

Probably doesn’t fix the “studio swing” problem.

[James Hughes]

just had a thought… why don’t they just put the blackmagic codecs on the shuttles???
They work nicely on my MacPro’s.

[Richard Crook]

Kristian, any updates on this? I don’t want to return my shuttle, so if you guys are working to fix the gamma shift then let us know. Many thanks!

[Richard Crook]

Kristian, any updates on this? I don’t want to return my shuttle, so if you guys are working to fix the gamma shift then let us know. Many thanks!

[Jay Bloomfield]

As an aside,I just wanted to update some information. The new version (0.7-rc7) of ffmbc (freeware, with donations accepted):

https://code.google.com/p/ffmbc/

will now read the op-atom DNxHD MXF files from the Hyperdeck series. I tried it out myself and ffmbc does work for rewrapping those files to MOV.

One advantage of recording with a MXF wrapper is that it not only works with Resolve & Avid MC, but when you use ffmbc to do a rewrap to MOV, those files work in AE CS5.5, unlike the native Hyperdeck DNxHD MOV files. You still have to open the audio MXF files separately or use ffmbc to mux the audio and video together.