naive question

[Bob Cole]

I’m looking to stay in the PC realm, using Premiere Pro.

[Emery]

The Multibridge is both a stand-alone converter and a capture board. Its the most robust solution blackmagic offers. The original multibridge was only a standalone converter but the new ones announced at NAB can be connected to a PC to handle all the functionality of their top of the line HD capture card and then some.

You dont need any card to work with HDV, but it you want to monitor your HDV on an external display (in HD) youll need the Decklink HD for $559. If you only want to monitor HDV on a SD NTSC display then the SD cards will downconvert (although im not sure HDV is supported for downconvert yet).

Hope that helps.

Emrey

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bob,

That’s an excellent question as the products have overlap and so it’s a little hard to know what you need.

I guess the concept of the capture card is easy-enough to understand. We have digital cards for connecting via SDI to digital decks such as Digibeta, HDCAM or D5. There are also analog cards for connecting to analog decks such as Betacam SP. The DeckLink Extreme card is a standard definition card which has both analog and digital connections so you can connect to either kind of deck. All of our current HD cards are digital and support HD and SD. You can use them with a standard definition Digibeta or a high definition HDCAM. However you cannot use them to capture from analog sources, such as a Betacam SP, unless you use an analog to digital convertor.

The original DeckLink Multibridge is an example of such a convertor. It is bi-directional and can convert from analog to digital and digital to analog. It is a standalone convertor but you can partner it with your choice of capture card. For example, if you had a DeckLink HD card and a Betacam SP, you could connect the DeckLink HD to the Mulibridge using SDI cables. Then connect the Betacam SP to the analog video and audio ports of the Multibridge. If you set the DeckLink HD in to capture mode, the Betacam SP will output analog audio and video to the Multibridge, and this will be converted to SD-SDI which can be captured by the DeckLink HD in your Mac or PC. If you want to record back to tape, the DeckLink HD will output SD-SDI to the Multibridge which will then output analog audio and video to the Betacam SP.

The next generation of Multibridge with PCI Express (PCIe) is due this northern summer. They do away with the need to have a capture card by having the Multibridge act like an external capture card. These units will ship with a tiny PCIe adapter card which connects via a cable to the Multibridge. The advantage of this method over the previous generation is that PCIe is very fast and is 25 times faster than FireWire. It is so fast that it not only allows you to capture and play back SD-SDI and HD-SDI, but you can also play back 2K, ie film quality. The new Multibridge with PCIe also include a bunch of new inputs and outputs which you can read about on our web site. One of the most interesting new features is the dual-link DVI-D monitoring port. You can attach almost any LCD display with DVI-D input and use it to digitally monitor your video. You can use both single-link and dual-link displays and you can even use a display such as the Apple Cinema HD 30″ for monitoring 2K.

If your SD work is all from digital sources, then the DeckLink HD Pro 4:2:2 card would problably be a good choice. It will allow you to work with standard defintion and high definition decks via SDI. It also includes RS-422 deck control, genlock, trisync and analog video monitoring. This means you can use an inexpensive CRT monitor for monitoring your video.

If you are working with both digital and analog sources, then you could use the current DeckLink Multibridge along with any of the DeckLink HD Plus, DeckLink HD Pro 4:2:2 or DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4 cards.

Once the two Multibridges with PCIe are shipping, you will no lonnger need a DeckLink card and you could just use one of the Multibridges.

Based upon what you have mentioned in your post, my guess is that you only need a DeckLink HD Pro 4:2:2 card. This card requires a 100 or 133 MHz PCI-X slot in your Mac or PC. More system specs are available in the DeckLink manuals avaiable from the Support page of our web site.

Final Cut Pro 5 is due to be released in half a month and will enable you to capture HDV via FireWire and then playout of a DeckLink HD series card to a deck. While Premiere Pro and Vegas have HDV capabilities via FireWire, there is currently no way to play out the HDV material via the DeckLink card as the HDV codec is built in to Microsoft’s FireWire driver and is not available to non-FireWire devices.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design