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Broadcast monitoring quality
Here’s a gotcha. Make sure you have set your playback preference to best quality rather than best performance. If not, even rendered effects will be displayed on broadcast out at a lower resolution, in spite of “both fields” being toggled on. This is using a BMD Decklink card.
– Oliver
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5 Replies
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It’s not much of a gotcha. It’s a little softer to offer better performance. Good to remember though. It’s not much softer. A good balance. I usually keep things on High Quality though and turn off all the silly dropped frame warnings. Just like in legacy. Both fields is another separate performance setting that is only related to interlaced material obviously. I keep it on as well. All this is unrelated to the blackmagic. It’s controlling what it’s giving the BM card.
How’s your BM monitoring going? My Intensity Extreme has been flawless with 10.0.4 and the 9.2 drivers. The 9.5 drivers give me pure static all the time. Others seem to have the issue as well.
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[Bret Williams] “It’s a little softer to offer better performance. Good to remember though. It’s not much softer. A good balance”
Hmm… I understand what you are saying, but considering everything is optimized and rendered, there should be no degradation at all. This would not be the case with FCP7 or Avid. Although I suppose it’s equivalent to yellow/green versus green/green with MC’s timeline quality settings. If you put a graphic up, it looks aliased like it’s single field. The bottom line is that you couldn’t use it to output on-the-fly to a tape if you wanted to, unless you make sure to set the prefs to High Quality. No big deal, but something to be careful about. I, too, tend to run with “better performance” and generally avoid rendering while I go, because FCP X render management is poor.
[Bret Williams] “How’s your BM monitoring going? My Intensity Extreme has been flawless with 10.0.4 and the 9.2 drivers.”
Seems to be fine. I’m on the latest drivers that were up last week. Not sure which version number, though.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Oliver that would be 9.5.
Installed yesterday, tested both Premiere Pro CS6 and FCPX.
Then today none of them works 🙁
Re-installed again.
Crossing fingers. -
Not true. If you set the playback quality in FCP 7 to medium or low you’ll get just that. It has nothing to do with rendering. It’s softening or sub sampling the data/image so that you can get better performance out of the drive (for playback) AND the processor for RT. Two related but different things.
You could be using uncompressed media that your drive can’t even play back fully rendered. This would be a good time to turn on better performance. Or maybe it can only play back one stream of uncompressed and you’re working on a multilayered effect and need to see it in real time. Another good time.
In FCP 7 you could also adjust the frame rate. Playing back every other frame. And you could choose dynamic, so that it would supposedly lessen the quality only if it needed to. Perhaps that was the setting you usually had it set on. I found it was too conservative and softened images that weren’t needed.
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[Bret Williams] “Not true. If you set the playback quality in FCP 7 to medium or low you’ll get just that. “
Sort of. If you set FCP 7 to Dynamic, then rendered media is displayed at full quality.
[Bret Williams] “You could be using uncompressed media that your drive can’t even play back fully rendered”
It was ProRes LT on a FibreChannel drive.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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