Ultra scope

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Devlin and Dino,

That’s a good question and we’ll add the minimum system requirements to our website shortly before UltraScope ships. We just didn’t have enough time before NAB to post that information but we’ll post it soon.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Nigel Thompson]

ok cool loos like i’ll be buying one of these, when do they ship luke?

HVX200, RED ONE, FCS and more,
High End, Production & Post Production
in the Caribbean
http://www.bistt.com

[Baz Leffler]

Hey Luke – as a further suggestion ask the engineers to add an Expresscard32 interface (as Matrox does with the MXO2) along with Mac software and then we can put our MacBookPro’s to good use when back at the shop – imagine that…. I really am a dreamer eh!

Baz

What would I do without the ‘UNDO’ button!!!!

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Nigel,

UltraScope will ship in June so it’s not too far away 🙂 Thanks for your questions.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Baz,

It’s a good idea but one of the reasons why we didn’t make an Expresscard32 capture card was that the bandwidth was marginal and seemed to run slower than a x1 lane PCI Express slot in a computer. This meant that it just wasn’t reliable enough for uncompressed 10-bit capture and playback and we didn’t want to release a product that was on the edge of what would and wouldn’t work reliably. I’m guessing the same issue will be true for the UltraScope but it’s a good suggestion so I’ll raise it with the engineers when they return from NAB.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Margus Voll]

Hi.

Can Scope work wit really simple Atom based Intel win box or does it need something more powerful ?

Generally it sounds really cool.

Looking forward to it.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

[Baz Leffler]

[Luke Maslen] “the bandwidth was marginal and seemed to run slower than a x1 lane PCI Express slot in a computer.”

Interesting that Matrox seem to have got around that problem with MXO2 on the MacBookPro but they do blame bad HD performance on ProRes processor requirements.

Are you saying that when a more powerful MBP becomes available Matrox will have to think of a new excuse?

I run ProResHQ stuff rendered out of a Multibridge’d Mac on a MBP and a MXO2 with no problems but I can see your reasoning when uncompressed HD needs to be shifted.

Baz

What would I do without the ‘UNDO’ button!!!!

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Baz,

Clearly UltraScope is always going to need to work with uncompressed video input so whatever solution we provide has to be able to handle 10-bit SD and HD without any question of exceeding the bandwidth of the connection to the computer.

In regards to capturing to a compressed codec, our capture cards still need to handle the full bandwidth of an uncompressed capture because that’s what the card receives on its input regardless of to what compressed codec you might then decide to use when saving movies to disk. So the PCI Express or ExpressCard interface still needs to be able to handle full uncompressed video bandwidth and then you can choose whether to save to an uncompressed or compressed video file. Our capture cards work fine with ProResHQ on Mac Pro’s and it’s a nice codec if you don’t have the capacity for uncompressed video but it’s even better to stay with uncompressed for maximum quality if you can. Computers and hard drives are always getting faster so I’m sure we’ll all be editing uncompressed 2K on laptops in the future 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Nick Hasson]

I’m hoping to use something like this.

https://www.abmx.com/1u-mini-server

Add the card into it. Put it in line with the monitor and start coloring.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Nick,

The UltraScope requires that you have a monitor with a 1920×1200 resolution which is very common on 24″ DVI-based LCD computer monitors. As far as I can see, the computer you are considering only has VGA output and only at a maximum resolution of 1600×1280. If I understand its specifications correctly, once you add the UltraScope card in to it’s optional PCI Express riser card, you could not add a regular x16 lane PCI Express graphics card so I don’t think this computer would be suitable. Maybe I’ve overlooked something in the specifications but that’s my quick analysis of that computer model.

You should also consider whether you want a rack or tower style PC for use with UltraScope. Many rack-mountable, server type computers (“pizza boxes”) are very noisy and not something you want anywhere near you when concentrating on video and audio quality. Some tower PC’s can also be noisy but there are plenty which are whisper quiet. Many rack-mountable, server type computers are designed to run “headless” to cut down on cost and so they will have little or no graphics support. UltraScope requires that you use a 1920×1200 resolution monitor which in turn will require a x16 lane graphics card with DVI output. We’ve tested with several graphics cards and we’ve found some really expensive ones which aren’t suitable and some really affordable ones which work perfectly. We’ll be publishing that information shortly before UltraScope ships so that you can find a PC that is very affordable and perfectly adequate for use with UltraScope.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design