DV capture via sdi, which card.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Yes, the $295 DeckLink card would do this in a G4 or G5 and can also do many other things. It has a spare SDI monitoring port on it. If you wanted to monitor via an analog CRT monitor, then you might consider the $595 DeckLink Pro which is basically the same as the DeckLink but has a few extras including analog video monitoring output.

One question I would have for you is why you would want to capture to DV via SDI. If you are wanting to use DV as an offline mode for editing, then that makes perfect sense. However if you already have DV material on tape, then you might as well just capture that via Firewire to avoid decompression and recompression cycles which lead to loss of quality. If you then wanted to output to Digibeta, you could use the DeckLink card in DV bridge mode to output your DV material from a Blackmagic DV timeline as uncompressed SDI ready for the Digibeta.

You can happily run DV off one disk and even an iPod will do this although I would usually suggest a faster disk such as a standard SATA disk that comes with a G5. Ideally it would be preferable to capture to a seperate disk to the startup disk but, if desperate, you could use the same disk and it should be OK.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Hawkfinn]

Thanks so much. I am trying to make a DV quicktime file of reels for a music editor at work. We use DVcam DSR80 which doesn’t have firewire. As for my home use I would definitely get the higher model. Thanks a lot. Great cards.
Alvin

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Alvin,

Your deck has component analog video inputs and outputs and might also have an SDI option. If your deck does have SDI in and out, then you should use that as it is digital and will give you the best quality. This is not to be confused with the QSDI ports which you might find on the deck as this is a compressed digital format which we can’t use as DeckLink cards expect uncompressed video from the deck.