Intensity or Decklink Studio for monitoring

[Matt Schulze]

Hi,
I don’t know anything about Decklink cards but if you want a little insight into Intensity, check out my thread from March 21 2009.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/124/870587

[Pablo Hill]

I use intensity and it works awesome with Final Cut, plus my deck has HDMI output so I capture my video using blackmagic’s motion jpeg at 4:2:2 at full 1920×1080 skipping HDV video codec for 300 bucks. My only problem is that I’ve been trying to switch from Final Cut to Adobe Premiere, and I cant due to the fact that there are no drivers for CS4 on Mac. I’m sure this wont be an issue in a few months.

[Joshua Helling]

Hey Guys,

Let me see if I can answer some of those questions for you.

1> Generally this is the case, though there are some specific exceptions. One of those is the issue of 24p. While our boards will not yet natively capture this format, they can play it back. The playback of this will be over 59.95i, so our driver will add the 3:2 pull down on output. This allows you to edit in the native format while still being able to monitor in one of our supported formats. We of course would like to add other formats as time permits us.

2> Well, in fact for uncompressed we use the Apple codec. So if you select our Intensity HDTV 1080i 59.94 preset you will be using the apple uncompressed codec. You can also choose the ProRes, DV, PhotoJPEG codecs as well. As for using other formats and getting output, generally it is actually possible. You simply need to put the codec in one of our preset timelines and FCP will generally decode this and send it to our card (though performance may be somewhat reduced). But it should work.

3> Down converting is a little bit different on those two boards. On the Intensity Series if you enable the down converter everything that comes out of the board will be down converted. So say from 1080i to 480i. On the Decklink Studio it works a bit different as it has a hardware downconverter. So there is actually a dedicated (always on) downconverted SDI port. Essentially if you were working with HD one SDI port would output HD and the other would be SD. So you get the best of both worlds in that case.

I hope that helps with some of those questions…please let me know if you have any more.

Sincerely,

Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.

[Jonah Kaplan]

Thanks so much!! just a few more…

On the studio card, you said:

“working with HD one SDI port would output HD and the other would be SD”

Is that SDI only or does that work for the analog outs as well?

I’am also going to assume that the downconverting on the Studio is superior due to the hardware downconvert? What does the intensity do for downconvert if not hardware?

also:

“This allows you to edit in the native format” But you essentially need to render? Not for monitor, but for final product.

thanks again so much.

jk

[Joshua Helling]

Currently you cannot set the component analog to be down converted. But it is a feature that we hope to add via software update.

Superior? Okay..how to answer this one cleanly. Personally I feel the hardware down conversion on this board is better than the software. But hardware isn’t inherently better. It does reduce the CPU overhead. But suffice to say, the hardware down converting on these board (and the HDExtreme 3) is phenominal.

The Intensity and our older Decklink boards feature a software down converter.

I hope that helps.

Sincerely,

Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.

[Jonah Kaplan]

thanks again for your time and help

jk