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In need of Decklink workflow advice
Hello everyone. Its been a while since i’ve lurked on here, but i remember this being THE place to go for good advice. Please excuse me if any of these are dumb questions, and if this should be moved, please feel free to do so.
I have been very fortunate to land a job designing video production suites for large churches. The problem is, I’m a bit out of my league! I have some install experience, a little videography, very little editing, and most of my experience is in live production. I have a great base of knowledge for the job, but post production is definitely a weakness for me.
First a little about the entire setup. My first job has a $140,000 video budget which includes construction, gear, and installation. I figure I need to keep the gear to around $65k. Ive decided to take advantage of Black Magic Designs new ATEM line for all the switching/comms/etc. I will be using 3 PTZ cameras with hd-sdi out, and one canon XA10 with Hdmi out. I was thinking of using one of BMD HDMI–>SDI mini converters at the XA10 to give me a long sdi run back to the switcher. Each of the PTZ cameras have 2 sdi outs, so I plan to run to the switcher and one straight to a BMD Decklink Quad (for each of the 3 cameras) and use distribution to give me two feeds from the XA10. I will be using one PC to run the ATEM television studio switcher, and another to capture and web stream the H.264 stream that the television studio’s built in hardware encoder spits out. That takes care of the live aspect of things.The client wants the ability to capture feeds from all four cameras, in case they want to do a better edit than the live broadcast (for DVD, Web, etc.) Also, they want to use Adobe Premiere Pro to do all of the post production.
Now to the point! I really need help figuring out what kind of machine to build that would be able to capture and compress 4 live 1080i camera feeds. I really want to save the client as much as I can, so I was planning to opt for windows instead of Mac, so I could build it myself. Im really not sure which is the more cost effective AND practical route to go. I could capture uncompressed, but Wouldn’t I need a 4 drive Raid 0 array for each stream? 16 drives seems a little unpractical, to me so I was thinking of capturing into a compressed codec. Do you think the “HOT ROD” version of videoguys DIY9 (link below) would pull off such a capture? If not, do I really need a 8 core Mac? Please help!Thanks for reading all of that and for any suggestions!
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26 Replies
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Get one of these for each camera, and the biggest SSD drive you can afford for each also:
https://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/hyperdeckshuttle/
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thanks for the response! I have actually considered both the hyperdeck studio and the hyperdeck shuttle as possible solutions. however, the only compressed codec the hyperdecks currently support is DnxHD, and uncompressed just isn’t practical for me. I would normally have no problem using this codec, but I read in a Adobe forum that Premiere Pro CS5.5 Does NOT support the DnxHd codec. I have considered the Ajax kia pro mini as well, but it only compresses to Apple Protest 422. Another great codec, but again not PrP CS.5.5 friendly. Surely there is a hardware solution that compresses to DVCPro HD or even AVCHD? And if there isn’t, would a souped up CPU (like videoguys Diy9) and a decklink quad not do the trick?
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thanks for the response! I have actually considered both the hyperdeck studio and the hyperdeck shuttle as possible solutions. however, the only compressed codec the hyperdecks currently support is DnxHD, and uncompressed is too impractical in this application. I would normally have no problem using this codec, but I read in a Adobe forum that Premiere Pro CS5.5 Does NOT support the DnxHd codec. I have considered the Ajax ki pro mini as well, but I only compresses to Apple Protest 422. Another great codec, but this would put me over $8000 just to record 4 cameras. that seems like a bit much to me, but maybe I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too. Surely there is a hardware solution that compresses to DVCPro HD or even AVCHD? And if there isn’t, would a souped up CPU (like videoguys Diy9) and a decklink quad not do the trick? If it won’t, maybe I would consider capturing in DNxHD with the hyperdeck and then converting to another codec later. however, this seems like another unnecessary step in the workflow. maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing! lol
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Blackmagic updated the firmware, so now it records DNxHD wrapped in a quicktime container, which Premiere Pro CS5.5 can now import correctly.
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thanks again for the quick response. we are definitely getting somewhere now! will the DNxHD in a .mov wrapper be editable by premier pro on a Windows machine? want to try to avoid the Mac route…
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Yep, I had someone send me a test file, it works perfectly under Windows and CS5.5.
If you search one here, you’ll find the file if you want to test it yourself.
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So i just spoke with Black Magic Tech support. He said that the DNxHD MXF file that the Hyperdeck encodes is NOT compatible with Adobe premiere CS5.5 for windows 🙁 Now im a bit confused. I’ve dug around on several forums, but I’m seeing conflicting answers. Can anyone confirm from experience? He did say I had the option of using a Decklink Quad to capture and real-time encode the 4 uncompressed feeds into mpeg-2 at around 18Mbs. I asked him with a PC using a core i7 2600k with a 4-drive Raid 0 array would be up to such a task, and it said no problem. Do you agree? I’d love some opinions on both options. Thanks!
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I don’t know why he said that, because it’s been confirmed it does work. I’ll post some links tomorrow.
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[Robbie Brandon] “So i just spoke with Black Magic Tech support. He said that the DNxHD MXF file that the Hyperdeck encodes is NOT compatible with Adobe premiere CS5.5 for windows”
Hi,
I think there was a misunderstanding with the tech support. Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 and Studio record in DNxHD QT (.mov) container too. And it is compatible with Premiere CS 5.5 (not 5).
If you need to record into other formats, or to store files directly on the server (maybe for editing during capturing, like live multicamera non linear editing), you may consider to use the Decklink Quad and a proper application.Best Regards,
Paolo.Castellano@ivs.it
http://www.ivsEdits.com
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“Post Fata Resurgo” -
could you possibly direct me to a proper software that is compatible with the decklink? it seems media express is limited to a motion jpeg compression. wouldn’t I want a different/ better codec? thanks!
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