Decklink and colour finesse preview

[Chris Tomberlin]

It can be done, but doesn’t work like you’d think. In the Colour Finesse preferences, set the “secondary preview monitor” to be your NTSC monitor. The trick is that the CF GUI wants to own that output, and so Final Cut or After Effects can’t have it at the same time. So before launching the CF GUI, you have to turn off the external video preview in Final Cut or After Effects. You can turn it back on when you leave the CF interface. In both FCP and AE, there is a keyboard shortcut to turn the video preview off and on. I’ve found that the fastest way to make all this workable is to assign that keybord shortcut to one of the buttons on my wacom pen, and use that to toggle the video preview off before entering the CF GUI, and back on when leaving it.

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures

[Paul Provost]

thanks Chris
it’s so great to see posts that actually help us.
great tip!

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

Many thanks for your very useful information. I haven’t used Color Finesse myself but I’ve tried to use your post to create a support note on our web site. Would you please review the support note Using Color Finesse with DeckLink and let me know if you think it is accurate? Color Finesse works on PC’s too so I have kept the note fairly generic. I would also be happy to credit you in the support note unless you prefer it the way it is.

Thank you for your help.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Adrian Tecson]

Any idea how to get monitoring in PrePro 1.5?:)

[Chris Tomberlin]

Luke,

The tech doc on your site looks mostly right except for “so you must either quit from other video applications which may use the DeckLink output…”. Because Color Finesse is a plug-in, you wouldn’t want to actually quit the program that it is running in, just disable the video preview. The actual keyboard shortcut for AE is Command (mac) or Control (windows) and forward slash on the numeric keyboard. In Final Cut, the video preview toggle is conveniently the same as it is in AE. This makes it easy to assign that keyboard shortcut to the top part of the side switch on a wacom pen (for example) and it work smoothly in both applications. I don’t know about Premier, so someone else will have to figure that one out.

[Luke Maslen] ” I would also be happy to credit you in the support note” Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. If everyone who finds the tip useful could just send a dollar to my PayPal account….. 😉

Chris Tomberlin
OutPost Pictures

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Adrian,

Sure, just install the current DeckLink drivers from our web site and then launch Premiere and create a project using a Blackmagic preset. The preset should automatically select the DeckLink output so you can monitor your video. There is further documentation on page 20 of the DeckLink Windows v4 manual.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Adrian Tecson]

But how do I turn it off so I can preview my AFX project even with the PrePro1.5 app still open? Thanks Luke

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Adrian,

Please refer to the support note Premiere Pro 1.5.1 caveats with DeckLink v5.1.2 and specifically the section entitled Using Premiere Pro and After Effects at the same time.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Richard Squires]

Cheers for the tip.

I use EchoFire too but it doesn’t do very fast previews so I keep switching it off, preferring the Ram preview. I used to have to close down and reopen with EchoFire to do ColorFinesse work. Now I don’t have to!

The really good thing that EchoFire does and what I find invaluable is being able to preview the image with a 16:9 or 14:9 crop to a 4:3 screen. If you’ve never seen this it is a really useful thing. Most 16:9 material still must comply to 4:3 safety zones, so it’s a really useful thing to be able to see exactly what is being cropped.

regards

Richard