Vegas 6 Real-Time Playback Via Decklink

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bill,

Here’s everything I know, about Vegas and DeckLink, which isn’t much 😉 The following was copied from Grant’s email to customers.

Sony Vegas v6 is also supported in this new DeckLink for Windows update, and we know a lot of people have been asking for this. Support is mostly for standard definition currently, however we expect that to expand. We will be showing Sony Vegas on one of our demo stations at NAB playing back to DeckLink.

I don’t know about RT effects and you mind find out more information on the booth if you are at NAB. I’ll try to find out but I’ve only just found out about compatibility with Vegas v6 and don’t know about any specific features. The driver update referred to above will be in the DeckLink v5 drivers for Windows due fairly soon.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Bill Buchanan]

Thanks, Luke. Glad you’re back. Unfortunately I’m not at NAB, but I am anxious to learn more about what advantages/features Vegas 6 may provide those of us with Decklink cards. While I’ve done pretty well using Prem Pro 1.5, there are issues Vegas 6 addresses that Prem Pro has yet to resolve.

Bill

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bill,

The DeckLink Windows v4.8.1 drivers include some RT effects in SD. We’ve got more planned as well as HD RT effects.

I’ve got a list of questions to ask the Blackmagic team at NAB when they ring the office so I’ll ask about Vegas then. I do know that Sony provided us with a custom plug-in for the last year which allowed us to run Vegas 5 with DeckLink cards. It was never made available to customers as it was kind of a temporary bridge to make the two products work together. As far as I know, it was happily previewing in real time but I’ll ask for that to be confirmed with Vegas 6. It’s nice to have choice no matter what platform you are using. Vegas v6 adds to the existing choice of tools for Windows XP users and it specifically uses the DirectShow support in DeckLink drivers to control the card. There are lots of features that can be controlled via DirectShow and I can’t wait to receive more information from the show and have a play with the finished product.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

The DeckLink Windows v4.8.1 drivers include some RT effects in SD. We’ve got more planned as well as HD RT effects.

I should have mentioned that this comment is in relation to Premiere Pro 1.5.1.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Peter Corbett]

Thanks Luke,

I just loaded up 4.81, but there doesn’t seem to be any more RT than 4.8. Have I missed something?

Regards,
Peter

[Luke Maslen]

[Bill Buchanan] “While I’ve done pretty well using Prem Pro 1.5, there are issues Vegas 6 addresses that Prem Pro has yet to resolve.”

Hi Bill,

Can you let me know what issues you would like resolved when working with Premiere Pro? I don’t know if it’s something with which we can help or whether it would require a change to Premiere Pro but, if we can help, we’ll do our best.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Peter,

Sorry if I have confused you. I was simply saying to Bill that there is some RT support for standard definition in the current v4.8.1 drivers. I was not implying that there was more than in v4.8. We do have more RT effects for SD and HD planned for another driver update and Grant believes these will be in the v5 drivers.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Peter Corbett]

No problem Luke. I didn’t want to miss out on any new toys. RT CG on the timeline would be nice. I’m not fussed about RT colour correction. Color-Finesse is just sensational and worth the render time (which is pretty fast).

Peter

[Bill Buchanan]

Luke:

Thanks for your interest. RT for basic effects, i.e. color/ brightness/contrast corrections, speed, reverse, gradient filters, scaling, re-framing…those sorts of things would be very welcome. Also–and I’m a bit confused about this–10-bit rendering would be nice, assuming it has not already been addressed. Reason I mention it is that when I apply an effect to a shot that was captured 10-bit and render it, the render file appears to be 10-bit, according to its interpretation. It was my understanding PPro only did 8-bit rendering.

After reading Peter Corbett’s take on Vegas 6 (he tried it out on his Decklink sys), I’m not at all anxious to abandon PPro now. Surely Adobe will soon announce profound updates/features for PPro. Maybe their strategy is wait for everybody else to trot out their new wares during NAB season, then blow everybody away with theirs. I hope so.

Bill

[Lance Bachelder]

I have been running the Decklink Extreme and Vegas 6 for about 2 months now. Vegas 6 is software realtime like all previous versions, however, I’m getting way better realtime external previews via Decklink than firewire and all my projects are uncompressed NTSC avi’s. The image via SDI is pristine. I am previewing via SDI to my edit monitor and component at the same time to the client monitor using the Extreme – all working perfectly. I highly recommend the Decklink boards to Vegas users.

For best realtime performance in Vegas everyone should be running at least a 2 drive Raid 0 array for media. 2 7200rpm SATA drives shows about 82MB sec. sustained using the Blackmagic drive tester. My 4 drive SATA Raid is showing up to 214MB sec. I’m using Seagate (VERY quiet) 300GB SATA’s with a Promise controller card on a dual Xeon system.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California
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