upgrading from camera/firewire capture to SDI uncompressed with Decklink

[Dalen Quaice]

You’d need a deck such as the Sony DSR-1500A which is about $5750 and an DSBK-1501 SDI option board for $1099.

SDI uses 75 ohm BNC cables – they are about $13.00 each for 6 feet length.

You need a computer that supports 64 bit PCI-X slots. The Dell XPS you mention does not have this, so you couldn’t use Decklink on that machine. You’d need to get a Dell Precision “workstation” class machine or a similar motherboard with at least 2 gb of RAM and a striped RAID of at least 2 SATA or SCSI discs.

[Graeme Nattress]

And you won’t get any better picture quality – so why bother??

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP

[Chad Treanor]

I thought that if you edit uncompressed DV footage that the quality of the image looks better than that of composite firewire video? Is this not true? Ive watched certain productions that were edited uncompressed on (component DV) media 100 machines that look better than productions that were created on like a FCP w/a camera firewire-ing in the footage.

I suppose my desire for more professional equipment blinded me from looking into the engineering aspect of this upgrade.

Thanks again.
Chad Treanor

[Graeme Nattress]

Editing DV uncompressed is only of value if mastering to a higher format such as Digital Betacam, and even so, this does not require you to capture it uncompressed, as DV is always DV.

However, Quicktime does not smooth DV chroma, so if bumping to a higher format you should do this by:

1) capture component will smooth chroma, but will introduce noise and artifacts due to an analogue process being involved – not recommended
2) capture over SDI uncompressed. Easiest workflow if you’ve got the gear to handle it, but you need big fast drives, SDI card and SDI equipped DV deck
3) capture Firewie, smooth with Apple 4:1:1 chroma smoothing filter
4) capture Firewire, use my G Nicer chroma reconstruction filter. Does nicest job, but slowest to render.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP

[Kaspar Kallas]

You DO NOT NEED pci-x for SD SDI card
You DO NOT NEED raid for uncompressed 10 bit work (sata drives are about 30MB/s on slow and it is enough for 10bit 4:2:2)

You DO NOT NEED a new deck if you are willing to do the conversion in software – I don’t know about PC but mac even captures from firewire to 10 bit in realtime

Make Your investments where it counts and don’t belive everithing you read
-Kaspar

[Dalen Quaice]

Decklink requires at least a 64 bit PCI 33/66 slot. Desktop motherboards such as the Dell desktop systems WILL NOT WORK because they have standard 32 bit PCI slots. You need a “workstation” class machine. You do not have to have a Dual Xeon machine to do standard def, you can use a Supermicro P4SCT+II.

[Dalen Quaice]

That is a topic of debate. I too feel that DV looks better when edited uncompressed. The keys, compositing, and graphics added while editing are cleaner when you are working with uncompressed – and you don’t lose a generation re-rendering like you would working in the lossy Apple DV codec.

There is a helpful site that compares codecs:

https://www.onerivermedia.com/codecs/

You can see how each holds up render after render. Look at generation 10 Apple DV! Yuck!

[Graeme Nattress]

But if you’re mastering to DV you’re no further forwards, other than have wasted a tonne of disk space. Indeed, because of the filtering the SDI output does to the chroma, you could have slilghtly worse quality after going back to a DV deck over SDI rather than keeping in DV throughout.

And if you’re outputing to digital Betacam, there’s no need to capture you DV uncompressed, just, when done editing as DV, flip the sequence over to an uncompressed setting and re-render. The Apple DV codec is very much as good as the hardware at decompressing DV. The difference is in the chroma smoothing, for which, see my above post.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP

[Kaspar Kallas]

All the SD cards are 32 bit and work fine in all computers that can handle the data
64 bit slot is double size

I have tested the card in P4 with 32 bit PCI slot and works like a charm
Also I have tested it in opteron box in 32 bit and 64 bit slot worked in both

64 bit slot is almost double lenght from 32 bit (like pci-X)

SO YOU DO NOT NEED 64 BIT SLOT

-Kaspar