Picture drop upon taping to UVW-1800P using Decklink Extreme

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Argot,

Can you tell me why you are using a DV timeline? You mentioned that you capture in an 8 or 10 bit timeline but later you use a DV timeline. Uncompressed 8 or 10 bit clips are captured in the 4:2:2 format and their quality is excellent. DV is a useful codec if you want to save disk space or if your disk array is not fast enough to cope with uncompressed files. However it uses “lossy compression” and quality will be lost every time you apply an effect or render it. Furthermore, DV is only 4:1:1 so it doesn’t look as good.

My guess is that the grainy image you are seeing on your monitor might result from your use of the DV format. Accordingly, can you try capturing some 8 or 10 bit clips from your deck and then play them out to your monitor? My guess is they will look excellent. Capture the same clips from the deck to a Blackmagic DV timeline and then play them out to the monitor? Is the quality the same or does the video look a little grainy? My guess is that this will explain the grainy image you are seeing but I will be interested to learn the results of your tests.

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I am not clear about your print to tape problem. Are you saying that sometimes you encounter an audio/video sync problem after 9 minutes? When this problem occurs, what is the format of your PAL AVI file, eg 8-bit uncompressed, 10-bit uncompressed or DV?

If you are working in an uncompressed format and you find that audio lags behind video after about 9 minutes, then this sounds similar to a support note we have documented named “Video increasingly lags behind audio in Premiere Pro“. While your disk array should be fast enough for uncompressed standard definition video, it might be that it is running slower than expected, possibly due to file fragmentation. Can you please run Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and let me know what Read and Write speeds it reports for your disk array? If your disk array is the cause of the problem, then the Read and Write speeds should confirm this.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Argotmedia]

Dear Luke,

Sorry for the late answer. Been busy trying to capture and taping with D. Extreme.

“Can you tell me why you are using a DV timeline?”
I’m using this to get the real time from the timeline. Since i’m using many TGA file on 2nd layer in the timeline for subtiting project, and using the decklink timeline it won’t give me the realtime. But I guess that would be the problem since then i import the project on Decklink Timneline, and render it using the decklink timeline also. Or can you give me other suggestion on this?

And i’been trying to capture the footage and taping them as your suggestion, all in Decklink Timeline. But i still see what i call it in here “soft picture”. It looks like the captured picture is experiencing some looses. And on further observation on 14′ PVM monitor (only) i see a noticable grain in the picture, event on the captured picture. Note : i also set the gain in proc amp (in Control Panel) to maximum, yet the loss is still noticable.

I know that the 8 or 10 bit Decklink Codec isn’t loseless, but since the picture drop is noticeable, could you give me any diagnosis.
Or can it be from my UVW 1800 player, but the connection is directly from the Extreme card to the player.

Thanks a lot

Dear Shane,

I’ve been using Decklink Extreme with 4.6 driver on PPro, and it has worked
seamlessly perfect, either capturing or printing to tape.

I use the Extreme card for my subtitle project using TGA as Alpha Channel.
With the old driver, prior to 4.8 driver, it all worked well.

But after using 5.0 and afterward driver, i always find that upon Printing To Tape from the timeline, the video result (using PAL AVI format) is lipsync after 9 menit. But it sometime can be corrected after trying for 2 or 3 time.

Could you give a brief solution on this?

Thanks a lot

Regards

Argot.

Here is my Configuration :
Dual Opteron 1,8
2 Gig RAM
Windows XP Service Pack 2
Ppro 1.5
Using Inscriber for producing TGA image
4 Hard Disk SATA Raid 0
DirectX 9c
Windows Media Player 10