Multibridge not working anymore

[Joao Velho]

After changing the monitor resolution and playing a clip with BM Decklink coded that I had captured, I got the video output. But no audio I/O and no video input yet. Any other people having the same problem?
Thanks,
Joao

[Joao Velho]

I decided to reinstall the Tiger and everything else again. This time I installed FCP 4.5 and and then Decklink 4.8 and Multibridge 1.4. Doing that, I got the inputs. But not so easy and I spent more than 12 hours with some tricky behaviors of MB. for instance, I had problems to get a stable reference. Actually I couldn’t understand which is the best way to put everything in sync. I tried many sync configurations, including using an Horita box CSG-50, without much success. Doing that, connecting and disconnecting cables for reference signal, I lost the video input many times. The configuration that worked better was to connect the composite output of MB to the reference input of the UVW-1800. Each time I lost the video input, I had to unplug and plug the Multibridge to get the video input back. Even after all those experiences, doing the best configuration that I could get, I still had problems with the video input. From time to time, I simply lost it just running, quitting and reopening the Deck Control app. My conclusion is that, if there is no hardware problem with my MB unit, there are still a lot of work to make it really reliable and useful. I hope Blackmagic can respond quickly to this situation with new drivers! Is there someone else with problems like those that I reported?

Thanks,
Joao

[Joao Velho]

I guess I got a happy end for my Multibridge saga. It seems that all the problems were related to wrong connections. How it is working:
– the component output has to go to the PMV-14M4U and then to the deck (I couldn’t connect the deck because of the lack of three BNC cables – I hope it works!).
– the sync reference has to go to the deck and then to the monitor. No need of reference input to the Multibridge
– I connected the composite output and the RCA audio output of Multibridge to a SVHS deck. I am using it for monitoring the audio during edit sessions.

Doing that, the Multibridge is working perfectly well! No more “no video input”. Great product from Blackmagic. It deserves a better documentation for the connection setup. I know there is a workflow diagram showing that. The problem is that is unclear if we must have to use the component input of the monitor directly connected to the component output of Multibride, or if this is just an option. Consider a guy that don’t have a PVM model with component connections, what would he do? Well, I am happy because I guess I got my setup working, that’s what is important now. I hope there are no more problems and my experience can help others.

Thanks for your attention,
Joao

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Joao,

That sounds really odd and, while I am happy that you finally got it working, we’re going to do some testing today to see what could have caused the problems you saw. It’s early days for Multibridge and we’re always nervous when a product is newly released and so we appreciate your detailed reports. We’ll look at it today and see if a firmware update is required or if something else strange was happening with your system.

In regards to documentation, we should have a manual released in the next few days and we hope it will help with most issues.

Thanks again for your reports and we’ll investigate at our end. I’ll let you know if we find anything.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Joao Velho]

Hi Luke,

As it seems that it is so important to make it work well, it would be interesting to know the best connection setup for Multibridge suggested by BM guys in a detailed description, including the reference sync signals.

Thanks,
Joao