Why do I need Blackburst or Reference/Sync? – Cross Post from IO Forum

[Walter Biscardi]

Horita BSG-50 is a great little unit that feeds up to 6 devices. Around $250 at http://www.markertek.com

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

G5 Dual 2.0, AJA Kona 2, Medea FCR2X

[Bob Zelin]

As Walter said – a Horita BSG-50 (NOT A BG-50) is what you need. The last 2 people I told to get a BSG-50 tried to save 50 bucks, and ordered the wrong unit.

You need a black generator to keep all of your equipment “genlocked” or synchronized.
When you don’t use a master sync generator, you get the little flashing blue stop lights on your VTR’s, and the “Error-Non Std. Ref” error messages, as well as the dreaded vertical roll bar upon trying to record to analog VTR’s. Some products will lock to incomming video, and AJA’s new “thing” is to allow their products to operate in “free run”, but to avoid all issues, just buy the damn Black generator.

Bob Zelin

[Tony]

Wow,

What happened Bob. I was holding my breath waiting for your response. I figured you would B!@#$ch slap the next victim to ask that age old question “Why do I need a black burst generator.

You seem to be getting more mellow. Has the recent Hurricane thrown you off balance?
Say it ain’t so please.

Tony Salgado

[Bob Zelin]

Some people have asked me not to do the “crazy bob” thing here. Some people love that stuff (I love it), but others take offense (meaning that they can’t take a joke). Don’t worry, one day, there will be some guy that will ask how to use the Kona 2 card in a MAC 9500 – then I will threaten to kill him and his family, or something creative like that.

There are plenty of people still out there that will buy a HD VTR, and all the MAC/AJA stuff, and would still rather go out of business than buy a $289 black generator. I recently saw a post on Cow (on another forum) where a guy is waiting for a product to come out, and appears to be willing to “leave the business, and consider an alternate career” rather than to consider a competing product. I was just at a company that just bought a brand new AJ-HD1200A HD VTR, and wouldn’t send someone out to K-Mart to buy a $2.99 outlet strip, so they could plug it in (all their rack strip outlets were being used by other equipment). I wound up giving them one that I had in my car (I watched for over an hour as they contemplated what to do about plugging in this VTR, while I did some wiring).

Bob Zelin

[Ramona Howard]

lol…..

Isn’t it the truth.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Tony]

Bob,

I will still always love you just the way you are.

Thanks for holding back even when you want to let loose.

Tony Salgado

Tony Salgado

[Marco Solorio]

[Bob Zelin] “Some people have asked me not to do the “crazy bob” thing here.”

DAMN! I miss it so! The “crazy Bob” thing is becoming a distant memory! So sad!

[Bob Zelin] “Don’t worry, one day, there will be some guy that will ask how to use the Kona 2 card in a MAC 9500”

BTW, I’m trying to get my Kona 2 card to work in my Mac Classic, but it seems OS6 (I know, I know, I should bump up to System 7) and it’s 9-inch black *and* white screen isn’t working well with it. Got any tips? Surely it’s not the 68030 CPU… is it? Hmmmm, maybe it’s the lack of the optional floating point processor chip.

Amazing to think that my Palm Treo 650 cellphone is infinitely more powerful than that Mac Classic was…

[sigh]

Marco Solorio  |  OneRiver Media

[Bob Zelin]

Marco tried to make a funny, but it’s not as funny as this real life
example just posted on the Blackmagic forum

any suggestions? the monitor is my old Commodore 1084 (yes, low budget TV at it’s finest!) and has worked great with my Toaster and then my PC running Speed Razor.

Bob Zelin

[Michael Escher]

I thought that I’d ask my question here, even though this thread is over two years old.

I’ve followed the sage advice and bought a Extron BBG 6 A blackburst generator a couple of years ago before I went to HD. Since I switched to HD I bought a Kona LHe and JVC BR-HD50 deck. The deck doesn’t have any ref in but the card does. I’ve never had any issues with capture or playback but I kept the Extron box after selling my old SD gear and hooked the ref in from the card to the blackburst generator because I was told that was the thing to do to avoid any bugaboos.

The question that came to me the other day while dusting my editing set up and re-patching all the cords is does the Extron box do me any good? I am shooting and editing in HDV, sometimes in 24p and sometimes not, but almost always in HDV. The Extron box puts out a signal for either NTSC or PAL (I had it set to NTSC the whole time).

Does the reference signal have to match the video, or does it matter one way or another as long as you are feeding some sort, or any sort of reference signal?