DeckLink HD Extreme component capture a bit fuzzy

[David Roth weiss]

Dan,

What exactly are you capturing from the Xbox? If it graphics off the Xbox you may be essentially cutting the resolution in half by interlacing. Try to capture progresive and see if that helps.

DRW

[Kristian Lam]

Hi Dan,

What settings are you using in Final Cut Pro to capture? If you’re capturing to a compressed codec, does it make a difference if you use an uncompressed codec?

regards

Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design

[Dandixon]

We’re capturing footage from the Xbox 360 video game we’re developing.

I believe that we are already capturing progressive… We’re capturing at 1280x720p.

Thanks,

Dan

[Dandixon]

I don’t use Final Cut Pro. I use the Blackmagic Deck Control applet set to capture at 720p 59.94Hz 8 bit. We’re on a windows machine using the latest drivers.

Compression doesn’t matter (we’re capturing everything uncompressed anyway). Even the video signal that passes through the card and back out to the monitor looks noticeably worse than if the Xbox 360 is plugged directly into the monitor/HD TV.

Thanks,

Dan

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Dan,

Does the same fuzziness occur if you capture at 1080i59.94 using the DeckLink HD Extreme?

Every bit of analog equipment you enter in to a workflow will add some analog noise to the picture and that is simply the nature of analog video. In other words, I would expect that connecting the Xbox directly to the HDTV monitor would result in a sharper image compared with analog output from the Xbox to the analog input of the DeckLink card and then analog out from the DeckLink card to the analog input of the HDTV monitor.

Having said that, I would still expect it to look very good and I don’t know if you are seeing minimal fuzziness or something more drastic. I’m not sure how much detail is output from the Xbox but would you please try a 10-bit capture from the Xbox and then play out the 10-bit material to your HDTV monitor and see if the quality is better and less fuzzy?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Dandixon]

Luke thanks for the help…

It really wouldn’t matter if it worked at 1080i because our game will only support 720p. Even so I switched the Xbox 360 to 1080i, but couldn’t get it to work.

If you plug the Xbox directly into the TV it looks great. If you run it through the card (using component cables) it looks noticeably fuzzy. Is this normal or expected that running the signal through the card would noticebly degrade the quality of the signal?

Thanks again,

Dan