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Please Help : HDCAM capture issues with BLACKMAGIC card…
Ran into issues just trying to set this up… The capture machine turns out to be one of the new Intel Macpros running final cut 5.1.4. My director purchased a Decklink HD Pro PCIe board and rented a Sony J-H3 deck without telling me and was trying to start capturing his HDCAM tapes originating from a Sony f900 1080p24. The HD Pro doesn’t seem to come with the correct cables to hook everything up to our deck and our J-H3 is RS232 so the machine control cable doesn’t even fit. Are there additional cables we need to purchase?
The plan is to capture our tapes and on the fly have it downconvert to DVCPRO HD 720p24 for the offline. I called blackmagic this morning and they said none of their cards can convert from 1080p24 of an HDCAM deck to a DVCPRO HD 720p24 file on the fly. Bizzare, I thought this was the whole point of using the card?
Finally just to verify, what would the capture and control settings be in the Log and Capture window of FCP? I figure for the capture it would be “BLACKMAGIC Varicam 720p24 dvcpro hd” but I have no idea what the control setting should be for the deck. There didn’t seem to be any other Blackmagic dvcpro HD 720p24 options available…
Thanks so much in advance…
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3 Replies
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For reasons I won’t get into, 720p24 isn’t a real HDTV standard, so most products can not upconvert/downconvert to it.
Just convert it to 1080psf 24 DVCProHD. It’s the same amount of drive space as 720p.
You just need a 9-pin serial cable for deck control. Get one at Radio Shack if you’re in the US.
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[Bryan R] “I called blackmagic this morning and they said none of their cards can convert from 1080p24 of an HDCAM deck to a DVCPRO HD 720p24 file on the fly.”
For that conversion you need a Kona 3. Perhaps you could try to capture as 720, ProRes? Don’t know if that would work, but it shouldn’t take too long to try it.
Arnie
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I capture from JH3 machines into a Decklink Pro HD card all the time. The JH3 will be outputing 1080 24psf and that is what you need to capture. Cross converting to 720 is loosing resolution.
The Decklink card comes with a breakout cable with 9 pin machine control. A single SDI cable into the card from the JH3 will capture your picture & sound. If you have no house video sync then the Decklink will generate a composite black to feed into the JH3 for reference.
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