DeckLink 5.1 Macintosh drivers released – 720p down conversion & 720p to 1080i cross conversion

[Sean Oneil]

This is great! I’ve needed this feature for a while now.

Sean

[Aaron Neitz]

Awesome. 720P to NTSC downconversion!!! Looks a little pixeled in letterbox, but it beautiful in anamorphic!

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for your feedback and we’ll check out the letterbox down conversion on Monday.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Tunaking]

Can someone try taking 720P 23.98 DVCPRO HD and cross converting to 1080P 23.98?

That would be useful. Just because it’s not officially mentioned doesn’t mean it won’t work (it just might not have been tried).

Thanks. Knowing the answer would make my buy choice easy.

A.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi TK,

I’ll see if we can test this tomorrow. In theory it could work however part of it comes down to how FCP will handle the conversion. We know that we can cross-convert many more formats than are listed in the DeckLink Readme file. However FCP does not always handle it gracefully without some manual help so we have only mentioned the formats that work without manual intervention.

Out of interest, what would be the source of 720p/23.98?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Oyvind Stiauren]

TK: Can someone try taking 720P 23.98 DVCPRO HD and cross converting to 1080P 23.98?

I’ve tested what you ask for (and a couple of other things as well), and this is what I found out.

720@23.98 -> 1080
There is in theory two ways of upconverting this video. One would be using an 1080@23.98p output and the other 1080@59.97i video output with a 3:2 pulldown added.
I can only get the decklink card to do 1080@59.97i, and not with a 3:2 pulldown, witch makes the video looks very jerky.
I can not find any way to set the output to 1080@23.98. The uprezing looks fine.

720@59.97 and 720@29.97 (Varicam) -> 1080
Upconverts to 1080@59.97. Both the motion and uprezing looks nice.

Luke, i’ve also been trying to downconvert 720@23.98 to NTSC, but it seems also here that the correct 3:2 pulldown is not added. The result is of course a jerky video. Am I doing something wrong, or is this simply not a feature yet?
If it’s not possible with the current version of the Decklink driver (v5.1), I hope you will be able to add this in the near future. It’s would be very usefull for all the people ouut there working with the Varicam.

—
Oyvind Stiauren
Simplemente SA de CV, Mexico

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Kristian tested cross converting 720P 23.98 DVCPRO HD to 1080P 23.98 and it worked fine 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi TK,

We tested cross conversion with a 720p/23.98 Varicam easy setup to output from one Mac and used a 1080i/59.94 easy setup to capture on another Mac and that worked fine (on a G5/2.7 GHz DP), even though it is not officially supported.

In the readme file, it states that the new drivers support “HD cross conversion from 720p/59.94 and 720p/60 to 1080i rates, on playback, with all DeckLink HD cards.” So the source must be 720p and the destination must be 1080i.

We only officially support 720p/59.94 and 720p/60 to 1080i rates because this works well in FCP without manual intervention. Many other rates also work but FCP sometimes needs some manual coaxing and so we don’t claim to support any rate.

HD 720p/59.94 to NTSC down conversion is what we’ve implemented at this time and that’s what we’ve documented in the DeckLink 5.1 Readme file and (as of yesterday) in the support note Down conversion with DeckLink cards.

In other words we don’t officially support 720p/23.98 to NTSC but it might be possible in an update and I’ll request that as it seems like a good idea.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Tangier Clarke]

Luke this is great news, nut I have some questions after installing the driver.

Here is my config: G5 Dual 2/4 GB RAM/ 250 x2 Internal SATAs/ 3.5 TB Xserve RAID (connected via apple fibre channel card in slot 3)/ ATI Radeon 9600 XT/ ATI Radeon 9200/ Blackmagic Decklink Extreme(Slot 4, PCI-X) /Tiger (MacOS 10.4.2)/ Final Cut Studio/ Apple 23″ HD Cinema Display(connected to Radeon 9600XT)/ Apple 17″ Cinema Display(connected to Radeon 9200)/ Sony 50″ Wega DLP (Connected to Radeon 9600XT)

– Does the 5.1 software downconvert DVCPRO HD to NTSC in real time?

– Is the hardware based HD up/down conversion feature greyed out because I don’t have an HD card or because my fibre channel card is in slot 3? (there is a mention about having an HD card in slot 4 (PCI-X) and apple fibre channel card in slot 3 in the Blackmagic READ ME file

– With the DL Extreme and 5.1 is it at all possible to downconvert DVCPRO HD to NTSC during playback in real time?