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Serious Problems with Media Express Capturing
Hi All,
I work for a national art institution which has recently begun a two-year project to digitise and preserve all video artworks held by all public museums in the country, some 2,500 hours of material. For this, we chose to capture to 10-bit uncompressed AVI using the Blackmagic Multibridge Pro and Media Express.
However, now a few months into the project, we are experiencing repeated problems with the capture software, which is costing many wasted hours and frustrated hair-pulling, so I’m now appealing to Cow members for any help or suggestions. Incidentally we have tried every update and version of Media Express available, and have now settled for what appears to be the most stable, 2.02.
We are batch-capturing almost exclusively through the SDI input on the Multibridge, from a Sony DVW-500P deck which either acts as a Digibeta player or as an A/D converter from other analogue formats such as Beta SP or U-matic.
The main problems we are experiencing as as follows:
– At start of capture, tape stops. Media Express continues to capture, and has to be forced to quit as an unresponsive program.
– On restarting the software and reopening the XML project file, the batch’s timecodes have become jumbled and random.
– After reinserting the correct timecodes and beginning the capture again, the duration of the first title in the batch list resets to zero and capture has to be stopped to amend the batch.
– Capture often stops (with no error message), halfway through a tape. Media Express has to be force quit, and the capture restarted from the beginning.
– During capturing, batch list timecodes suddenly become jumbled and random.
– Completed captures are saved in random locations in the computer instead of the specified destination folder. Changing the destination folder within the software preferences has no effect until the entire computer is restarted.
– Media Express periodically does not capture incoming audio, only video.
I should say that these problems are intermittent, not all the time. But all the same I’m force-quitting the software and re-capturing files at least twice a day. We have very tight deadlines for this project, and can’t afford to lose any more time to these extremely irritating and time-consuming problems.
Any help greatly appreciated.
Matt
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2 Replies
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So by the fact that there are no replies or comments, I have to assume that nobody else has experienced any of these problems? At all?
Seems very strange. Patience here is running out very quickly with the continuing problems with using Blackmagic Multibridge/Media Express. If we can’t find a solution in the coming weeks we’re switching to an AJA card, so please if anyone has even an inkling about what could be wrong, any ideas are very welcome.
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Hi Matt,
Unfortunately, the issues you’d reported are not known to us. I would encourage you to give our support team a telephone call with details about your system specification so that they can help you.
regards
Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design
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