Garbled video using Digital Cinema Desktop Preview

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

I’m not 100% sure about this but it is my belief that the Digital Cinema Desktop Preview is designed to work with Apple’s compressed codecs but not with uncompressed material. I don’t want to mislead you so hopefully someone else can jump in here and correct me if I’m wrong. I think that the Digital Cinema Desktop Preview will work OK with DV or DVCPRO HD material and maybe some other compressed formats too.

Presumably you already have a LCD display capable of displaying 1920 x 1080 pixels for use with the Digital Cinema Desktop Preview. If that is the case, you might consider the HDLink as it will take the HD-SDI output of your DeckLink card and convert it to DVI-D so you can use it with a supported LCD display such as an Apple Cinema HD 23″ display. My guess is that is the display you already have and so all you would need to add is the HDLink. This is an inexpensive way of performing digital HD monitoring and the results will be much higher quality that using the Digital Cinema Desktop Preview mode.

Alternatively if you have an SD monitor, and you are working in HD and a NTSC or PAL frame rate, you could just enable hardware down conversion in the DeckLink PrefPane. This will continue to output HD to your deck but will also output SD on the spare SDI monitoring port as well as on the analog outputs. So you can monitor your HD material via a SD monitor and this won’t cost you anything.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[David Mallin]

Ok, I guess that makes sense.
The Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24″ LCD went back to $779, so I just ordered one of those. I will try it with component analog and see how it looks. I’ll grab a HDlink if it is unacceptable.

Thanks
David

[Tributemedia]

I’ve been having the same garbled video problem (green lines … all screwed up) trying to export a DVCPRO HD 720p sequence to an uncompressed 8 bit 720p file. Sometimes it works … sometimes it doesn’t. What could be causing this? Something with the uncompressed codec?

I’m at a loss …

Erik

[Anonymous Friend]

How did you get that price on the Dell 2405FPW? I just went to Dell’s site and it’s $1019.15.

[David Mallin]

Use coupon code 69$8KC79D53S2H. It’s valid for another couple of days, or until 1500 people redeem the offer.
Props to barefeats for posting it.

David

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

That’s an excellent display at an attractive price. Please let me know how that goes and even component analog HD monitoring should provide excellent results.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Here are a couple of useful web pages regarding HDLink versus the Digital Cinema Desktop. They are a little old now but the information is still relevant.

[David Mallin]

Well.. it’s not going so well at this time.. (a few hours after getting the Dell monitor)

I have the analog component outputs from the Decklink card going into BNC to RCA plugs, and then I’m using a component RCA cable to connect to the component input on the Dell monitor.
The SD 23.976 material is working fine.
However, I can’t get the 1080 23.976 PsF material to play at all. It won’t downconvert to SD and play – it just stays on the static frame as the clip plays on the Cinema Display. When I try to switch to 1080 HD setting, the monitor goes black, and won’t even switch back to the SD mode. The computer must be rebooted to get the signal working in SD again. Since that takes about 15 minutes (including launching FCP), it’s a real drag. Any thoughts?

Thanks
David

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

Good news, bad news. The bad news is that we confirmed a bug reported with 1080p23.98 down conversion which was first reported to us a week ago. The good news is that we think we will have a driver update to fix that bug later today. I would imagine its version number will be DeckLink Macintosh v5.1.2 and please let me know if that helps or is still causing problems. 1080/59.94 and 1080/50 down conversion should be working fine. It is only the more complex 1080/23.98 down conversion which was failing and it is more tricky as both 3:2 pulldown and down conversion are being performed simultaneously.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[David Mallin]

Luke,

I’m using FCP4.5 and 4.8.1r2

David