RS-422 direction reverse

[Bob Zelin]

To my knowlege, unless something changed very recently, the Blackmagic cards (and everybody elses cards) are always the RS422 master, and simply control the RS422 VTR. Blackmagic, AJA, Aurora and the old Cinewave do not have the capability of becomming the slave to the VTR (or Telecine, or automation controller), as you have seen with older AVID’s that supported VTR emulation. It just means that the entire Blackmagic line has the ability to control RS422 VTR’s – like the entire Sony and Panasonic line (and other products that support the industry standard Sony P2 protocol).

Bob Zelin

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Bob,

The Decklink card can be made to work in the ‘slave’ mode.

I’ve been using my Dual 1.8 G5 system as a slave VTR to telecine since Nov 2004. It has a BM HD Pro card installed. I have a ‘Y’ cable attached to the BM cards’ RS 422 port. One is wired as Master, one as slave. And I need to swap out the cable depending on what I’m doing with the system.

So in my application it would really help if I could do this via software.

Incidentally, I use this application to grab uncompressed SD and HD off telecine without having to go off to tape.

Neil

[Igor Babic]

Bob.
RS 422 interface for DPS PVR was having VTR emulation as a player. It has a switch on it. But is useless without his own propriatry player software.
I like to see that in Decklink software control also, together with playlist/batchlist.

[Arjen Abbestee]

This is very interesting. We would like to use a Mac with Decklink as a virtual VTR to lay off video from telecine without tape. But so far we have not managed to get a working setup. What software and/or hardware do you use? (We tried the demo version of VirtualVTR without succes and I don’t know of any other software)

Thanks in advance,

Arjen

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I use a PM G5 DP 1.8 GHz, 2 Gb RAM. BM HD Pro Dual link, Apple FC card, 5.6 Tb XRAID.
I started with VVTR ver 4.5 or so and MacOSX 10.3.6. Sometime in Nov ’04.
Gradually upgraded till I now use MacOSX 10.4.3, BM 5.4, QT 7.0.4.

For accurate timecode we use a MOTU Midi timepiece receiving TC from telecine and sending it to the Mac via USB.

The system has been in operation in telecine since Nov ’04. Has worked, by and large. We do have occasional TC issues, but none that can’t be worked around. We record video as SD, BM 10-bit. For offline-only use, we do it as DV-PAL. And for use in Avids, we compress using the Avid Meridien codec. This does not convey TC to Avid, but we stripe TC manually in Avid.

We have managed test captures at HD resolution, but since we don’t use HD regularly, I haven’t tested HD extensively.

Neil