[Jim Leonard]

“So 7,200rpm drives should be solid for uncompressed SD then?”

Yes. I do it all the time with 8-bit; not sure if that’s enough for 10-bit or higher though.

“How come the min spec requirements state 10,000rpm then?”

Because you DO need that for HD 🙂

[Jim Leonard]

I striped two 7200RPM drives together and it works for me. But my numbers are similar to yours — it’s possible you have a motherboard that doesn’t handle bus traffic very well or something.

[Jim Leonard]

My DeckLink SP is in a plain 2.6GHz desktop with a single RAID-0 array (two disks striped together) and my numbers are very similar to yours and it works just fine. In fact, I’m using it to finish up a PAL and NTSC project right now.

[Jim Leonard]

1600×1200 is not advisable for a 19″ monitor. I run my 19″ Sony CPD-G400 (very high quality monitor) at 1280×1024 and that’s just about right.

Instead of trying to cram too much information for your monitor to display on it, instead try getting a cheap second monitor and run a dual-display desktop. No eyestrain, and you get more pixels anyway. 1600×1200 = 1920000 pixels; 1280×1024 * 2 = 2621440 pixels. TigerDirect has 19″ LCDs for $130… (granted, the color quality of those might not be great, but hopefully you’re not going to use them for color work, and/or have an external broadcast monitor for proofing video…)

[Jim Leonard]

It’s none of that, but I’ll answer anyway to satisfy your curiousity:

– Exporting as AVI (uncompressed, using Blackmagic Design 8-bit YUV 4:2:2 codec — yes, it is huge)
– 300GB available on export drive
– Obviously not that much available on C:\ but that never is touched during the export
– Scratch is set to the same as the export drive

There is plenty of space available — I’m just wondering if Premiere Pro 1.5 has some sort of goofy limit I wasn’t aware of.

Update: I’m getting around the problem by rendering to smaller chunks and then stringing them together using avisynth, since all I need to do at this point is feed the final project to the MPEG-2 encoder I’m using… still, if there is a real cause, I’d like to know it…

[Jim Leonard]

Also tell your engineers that they designed the DeckLink SP and drivers so well that, due to my budget, I am mastering my project on vastly UNDERspec’d hardware and it is still performing perfectly. The DeckLink SP I have is installed in a Pentium 2.6GHz machine with 1G RAM, with (currently) two IDE 300GB drives in a hardware stripe using a Highpoint RocketRAID 100 card. This works perfectly; I can capture 8-bit uncompressed SD without dropped frames and the editing is realtime. (I say “currently” because the original setup used two 120GB drives in a stripe 2 years ago, still worked fine!) No PCIe/PCI-X, no dual proc — just a regular machine.

Now, I understand fully this machine is *not* capable of 1080 HD material, but for 480i uncompressed SD it works just perfectly. I have never had any driver issues at all, no lockups, nothing wrong!!

[Jim Leonard]

Thanks for the interest! Our last project has some samples online and is for sale at http://www.mindcandydvd.com — we’re trying to get the DeckLink-mastered project finished for sale around December, which is not ready yet.

The last project was *not* mastered with the DeckLink card and in some scenes it shows 🙁 This new one is just about as good as it can get with an analog pathway. Again, all thanks to DeckLink.

[Jim Leonard]

I really have to concur. Because of the DeckLink SP, I was able to produce two features in a realm of quality that a hobbyist like myself could normally never get into. My features have a specific niche market of *realtime* computer animation (ie. you MUST record the animation as it is happening — there is no rendering to disk/file/avi!) and without the uncompressed quality of the DeckLink SP’s component input/output I never would be able to maintain the “transparent” video quality of the computer->DVD workflow. Thank you BMD!

[Jim Leonard]

So how did you eventually work around it?

I found an avisynth import plugin for Premiere Pro 1.5 that is free and actually works, so I may get around this by loading NOT my actual footage but rather the footage wrapped in a script that does an AddBorder(0,2,0,4) to pad the footage. At least that way I can edit without PPro doing any stretching, etc. I’ll have to find a way to auto-crop those lines out during encoding; it won’t be with Adobe’s media encoder, that’s for sure.

[Jim Leonard]

I’m using Premiere Pro. Although I can work in a generic 720×480 “video for windows” configuration, I would really like to avoid doing that as I’ll lose the realtime video output of my DeckLink SP (and I can’t check field order without it).

Unless anyone else has any better suggestions (and please pipe up if you do!), the only way I can figure out how to work this is to:

1. Pad my 480-line footage to 486 lines by adding 2 at top and 4 at bottom

2. Work with the footage in a 486-line project

3. Crop the top 2 and bottom 4 lines of the finished product before encoding to MPEG-2

This is going to take up literally terabytes of temporary disk space and weeks of my time unless I can find a better solution — isn’t there a way to pad/”de-pad” the footage from within Premiere Pro?

I should note that I am *not* on the latest DeckLink driver — it’s always bad mojo to change drivers in the middle of a project. However, the PAL phase of this project is done, so is there a driver update that lets the realtime video output feature work with 480-line projects?