[Ian Lewis]

For what it might be worth, I have successfully conformed a movie to HDCAM in Premiere from an EDL using a Blackmagic Decklink and a Sony JH3 Deck. Deck control playback was frame-accurate in that case.
Ian

[Ian Lewis]

I began again. It works as expected for me (playing both source and program monitor through the BM output) but you have to select the BM player in the “Player” options in general preferences.

[Ian Lewis]

Me, too. Just unwrapped and installed and been playng for an hour or so. Thought it might be some setting I hadn’t found, but maybe not…

[Ian Lewis]

Yes, I’m referring to Third Party plugins. Blackmagic took months to sort out CS4 drivers, Cineform are still only halfway there. I gather it’s because Adobe totally rewrote the plugin architecture. But, as I say, I’m still on CS3, so I only know what I read in the forums.

[Ian Lewis]

I’ve not had extensive need to compare, but certainly there’s no performance difference with DV or XDCAM HD on my machine. (Core 2 Quad, Windows 7 64 – but no problems with Win XP 32 either.) I’m using CS3, which might be different in this respect from CS4, which I’ve decided to missout on and wait for CS5. There seem to be a great many problems with CS4 and plugins.

[Ian Lewis]

The quick answer in my experience is – it depends. I’m able to run DV and XDCAM in real time beautifully in a BM project. Cineform HD (unfortunately) won’t usually play without dropouts, unless both the file and the previews are on the RAID that handles uncompressed HD (and even then it’s not reliable). You’re almost certainly fine with any of the MPEG based camera codecs, and with SD.

[Ian Lewis]

I used extended desktop extensively in Windows XP (which I still use occasionally). I know that extended desktop doesn’t work in Vista or Windows 7 because of the changed driver models, but my XP install is still useful for certain things, and there I use it both as a third monitor and as a full screen HD monitor window (dragging the Premiere Pro programme monitor to fill the extended screen) when using, say, Cineform video, which does not yet run in a Blackmagic project. (Though we’ve been promised it any time now for a couple of years…)

[Ian Lewis]

I have a Decklink HD Extreme working fine in Windows 7 64. I may be wrong, but I believe that the Intensity drivers are basically the same.

[Ian Lewis]

Yes, my fingers might have been too quick for my brain. However, in the same support document (I guess) that Sebastian began with, BM also say:

“If you really need to do 1080p/25, you will want to avoid rendering frames by modifying the easy setup in Final Cut Pro HD:
1. Launch Final Cut Pro HD
2. Select a Blackmagic HDTV 1080i 50 easy setup and then create a new project.
3. Go to the Final Cut Pro HD menu and choose Audio/Video Settings.
4. Click on the Sequence Settings tab.
5. Click on the desired Blackmagic HDTV 1080i 50 preset and choose Duplicate and then Edit the new preset.
6. Change the Field Dominance to None.

You should now be able to work in 1080p 25Hz without rendering.”
Ian

[Ian Lewis]

I have a Blackmagic HD EXtreme and I’ve captured and replayed 1080/25p through HD/SDI from HDCAM with no problems, and edited/monitored 1080/25p from EX-1/EX-3 routinely with no problems.

(Cineform’s next version, coming soon, will be able to use Blackmagic cards for monitoring.)
Ian