Which card?

[Dalen Quaice]

Do you want to capture/edit in high definition or in standard definition?

Decklink support of high definition on Vegas is limited right now I think.

[Dylan]

Edit SD for now to just burn a DVD for project approval of rough cut. Client is shooting 1080i HD with the Sony 730 camera and he wanted to capture thru firewire and downconvert to DVCam. Save files on a firewire drive. Recapture in the future to edit full HD after approval.

I was told we could use a Sony JH3 player with the firewire option, but I was also told the quality would be better with a decklink card for the capture and downcovert. I don’t know. Looking for answers and solutions.

Dylan

[Dalen Quaice]

If you want to use the PC platform, you are probably best off sticking with Premiere Pro instead of Vegas if you are planning on eventually doing an HD conform using one of the Decklink cards.

You can use the Sony JH3 with the HKJ101 optional firewire output to downconvert to DVcam in real-time and then capture via firewire into Premiere. You could also capture via SDI from that deck to a decklink hd card. You will certainly need a RAID to conform in HD later as a single firewire drive is not enough speed for HD.

To work with HD in Premiere w/ Decklink HD, you need a “server” type Dual Xeon motherboard such as the Supermicro X5DAE, X5DA8, or X6DA8-G2 and 2 GB of RAM. A standard PC motherboard is not sufficient.

As far as the decklink card goes, if you plan on producing both a standard def and high def from your final hd edit, the Decklink HD Pro dual-link is ideal because it features the best hardware downconversion of all the cards and can output both standard def and high def at the same time. This can be a great workflow time saver if you are going to output to both DigiBeta and HDCAM copies of your program.