Joshua Helling
Forum Replies Created
-
Christian,
Thanks for sharing this. At first I was thinking that you were dropping frames and was gonna ask about your hard drive setup, but this is very interesting. So if you have no video in a background (id assume your V1 is being used as the source of the pip) you are getting this problem?
I’d be interested in getting a sample project that shows this so we can check and send this to engineering.
If you’re so inclined you can email that to support-usa@blackmagic-design.com. Put ATTN: Joshua in the subject and reference this post. That way we can check and look into this a bit more.
But really appreciate you posting your finding!
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
So I can verify that the ProRecorder at this time does not do interlaced. If you feed it 1080i59.94 it will give you 1080p29.97.
This is something we’d like to add but we don’t have any time frame on this currently.
As for the codec. This is a more subtle point. HDV and H.264 are two different compression types. MPEG2 vs MPEG4. And H.264 is far more complex of a compression algorithm. What does that mean for real people? It means that it requires less data rate to achieve the same video quality. So you could expect that H.264 at 20Mb/s to look better than HDV at 25Mb/s. Okay, then, so what’s the downside? It’s more complex, so it’s even more cumbersome to edit with than HDV. This is why Kristian mentioned that neither are really preferred formats for editing.
MPEG2 and MPEG4 are widely considered delivery formats (mostly because they’re a pain to edit), both can be used in Blu-ray, but MPEG4 is more widely used because it is significantly smaller. But it require a bit more horsepower to decode.
I hope that helps clarify.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
While we have no specific release date, engineering is actively working on this.
We are definitely doing everything we can to get these features out to customers. But rest assured it’s coming.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Okay…I’ll chime in here (not from Aus though).
The H.264 compression is much more complex than HDV, so at similar data rates you should find that the H.264 looks better. Because the compression is so different you should stay away from comparing 25Mb/s HDV to the same rate in H.264…they’ll be two different beasts. The downside is that due to the increased complexity it makes H.264 even harder to edit than HDV, and consequently it doesn’t hold up as well to editing. But for delivering dailies or stuff for streaming (basically stuff you don’t plan on adding renders to, its perfect).
As far as interlaced support, how it works now is that if you feed 1080i59.94 to the encoder it will output 1080p29.97. Same data rate, its just doing a deinterlace. I think we’d like to add proper interlaced support to it in the future.
As for allowing lower bitrates, I think that’s something we’d also like to consider adding in the future.
I hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
As Chris mentioned the only difference in the card is the upgrade to the HDMI chip. In the Decklink HD Extreme 3D the HDMI chip is 1.3. In the Decklink HD Extreme 3D+ the HDMI chip is 1.4a.
The cards look identical. So the only way to tell the difference is the serial number sticker which will say specifically what model. The other way to tell what model it is, is to look at the title bar of the Blackmagic Control panel, which will say Decklink HD Extreme 3D or 3D+.
So…what does all that mean?
In the 3D it supports the typical side by side, top/bottom and Interleaved 3D modes. This is basically a 2D raster with two images stuffed into it. The monitor takes these frames, and separates them, stretches them back out and displays as 3D. This is well and good, and very common. But of course, who wants to loose half of their frame data. So they introduced frame packing over HDMI..this of course requires HDMI 1.4 which required for us to update the board. This allows the board to (and i’m oversimplifying) essentially put out 2 full frames simultaneously. Those two frames are independently displayed by the TV.So, that’s the difference. Usage of frame packed HDMI requires a TV of course that supports it (look for HDMI 1.4a on the box). If you connect the HDMI out of the Decklink HD Extreme 3D+ it will detect if the tv is compatible. If it is, it will use the new tech. If it doesn’t, it will use whatever 3D pattern you’ve specified in the Blackmagic Control Panel.
So hopefully I didn’t cause more questions than answers.
To answer your question about HDMI cables. If you wish to use Frame Packing features (in HDMI 1.4a) you should have a 1.4a rated cable.
HOWEVER, do NOT buy these from Frys or Bestbuy as the guy there is likely to force a 150 dollar cable down your throat. It’s not necessary.
Check out:
And this is also useful and might help you understand more about the cable thing:Please note I have nothing to do with those sites other than that’s where I personally buy cables from, I didn’t have anything to do with writing that article, I just find it helpful as a primer because retail stores will lie about this stuff and tell you silly things like you need a 240Hz cable.
I hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Actually there are a number of cards on that list that work. Including a 580 which I added last week.
Obviously there are a TON of cards out there. Generally many of the midlevel cards will work, and even the entry level cards will too, quadros are still hit or miss though some of them NOW meet the requirement. Its because there are so many cards, that we posted the specific requirement that the Ultrascope application is looking for. This way people can make good decisions regardless of the fact that graphics cards are out dated in 3 months.
I hope that helps to clarify.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
This is really the key line:
BMD also says here that “Blackmagic Ultrascope requires a graphics card that supports Open GL 2.1 or better and have a Texture Fill Rate of >22,000 MT/s.”Most of the time the Quadro boards do not meet this requirement. That is why most of the boards are GeForce or Radeon.
It’s an odd thing that mid level gaming cards are better for the Ultrascope application than the higher end Quadro.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Yup…sorry about that. This is a funky installer issue that we are working on.
Basically that firmware updater is for the H264 ProRecorder, which is only supported under 10.6.x or higher. But the installer doesn’t handle this gracefully and so this keeps running and crashing.
So delete the BMDStreamingAPI.bundle file from the:
/Library/Application Support/Blackmagic Design/Streaming/ folder.This file only affects the H264 recorder and will not bother the decklink board at all.
We will be correcting this installer issue in an upcoming update.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
I’m sorry to hear this. I do not find that kind of response acceptable. I’ll check into it. In the meantime I’ve had one of my senior techs look up your information in our call logs and give you a call. You should have a message.
To directly address your issue. Hard drive performance is going to not be an issue as we record and playback MJPEG on a single hard drive all the time. CPU is the most important factor here.
I have to say, that I my self am not 100% sure of the minimum CPU required to encode/decode an MJPEG file, but that’s mostly because I haven’t seen a processor in a long time that couldn’t handle it.
You mentioned you had an HP workstation. I’ve worked with most of those and probably have one. Is it an 8200, 8400, 8600, z800? If you let me know I can certainly have that checked out.
Normally i’d ask how many hard drives you have in your RAID0 but it seems you can do 10bit uncompressed, so I doubt there is a problem there at all…and like I said, we work with MJPEG on one drive all the time. It won’t ever be a problem unless the drive is really full. So I think its likely a CPU thing.
That being said, I’m relativity certain that the MJPEG codec is single threaded so 1 CPU or 40, its all the same. So if you can get back to me, or get in contact with Albert (who was the tech that called this morning for you) we can actually figure out why this isn’t working for you.
Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any other questions.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
This should work just fine. You would just want to set the output resolution of the second port to whichever video standard you are using. (example 1080i or 720p). Basically you want it set to a video resolution and not a computer resolution.
Outside of that just make sure the DVI Extender is set in Video mode and you’re off to the races.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.