Joshua Helling
Forum Replies Created
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Hehe,
Good point, I hate the way those are labeled. Slot 3 or 4 will work great. Those are the top two slots. The MacPro’s label from the bottom up. This means Slot 1 is on the bottom (typically your graphics card) and slot 4 is on the top.
FWIW, when I build rigs in my lab or for use at trade show, I put the Decklink in Slot 4 and the HBA (for the drive controller) in slot 3 and it works a treat every time.
Hope that helps.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
This combination should be fine. Some of the original X58 chipsets (the 1.0 revs) had problems with our 1x lane PCI express boards (including Intensity Pro) but this situation was corrected by intel a while back.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Hrm, it seems unlikely that you received two “bad” units.
More likely there is an incompatibility between the monitor. Are these monitors DVI based monitors or HDMI? Are you using an adapter? I can be important. DVI is RGB and the HDMI signal out of the Mini Converter will be YUV. Most of the times the device will handle the translation but at times the monitors will not (if they are DVI only, in this case using a HDMI to DVI adapter will not work).
As Sam mentioned a solution to this could be to use the HDLink Pro instead as it’s output is DVI and might be better suited to connect to those monitors.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Yeah, sounds like you bought the Decklink Studio 1. The main difference between the 1 and 2 is that the 2 has the HDMI connections.
Now, you can buy an Intensity but it might not work like you think. You can use two of our boards in the same system (they are controlled independantly through the Blackmagic control panel). The problem will be that most “single card” applications will only pickup and notice the first card that is installed. This means that in Final Cut you will not be able to CHOOSE which card you want to use without removing one of the cards. In short, it will be a pain.
Now for other applications that know how to deal with two cards it is very simple, but for the standard type of apps it is not so simple.
So again, it can work, but it might not work like you expect it to.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Just to recap here. Because it seems like this thread is really getting off track.
Mike, I’ve asked Hersh to email you directly for your system specs. Though I must say again, that I think you need to try to change you slot configuration.
You used semantics yourself when you took what I said about Ultrascope working in any TYPE of slot and turned it into it will work in ANT slot. As I’ve been trying to explain, this is simply not true.
To add to what Bob said about the rigs I used in the office here in the US let me clarify. I’ve personally tested the z400, 600 and 800, but it is not what I use. I have 3 custom built rigs (2 of which are based off a micro ATX form factor and are luggable). I use these in my office and send them all over the world to be used in tradeshows. In all of these rigs I had to play around with slot configuration to get it to work properly.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
That’s odd. There should be nothing in our software that will AUTOMATICALLY change the capture type in Final Cut.
So, my guess is that there is something going on with the project.
Give this a quick try:
Open Up FCP.
Click on the Final Cut Pro menu at the top.
Choose Easy Setups
Choose the appropriate easy setup (it should match what’s coming out of the camera).
Now right click in the bin and start a new sequence.
Double click the sequence to bring it to the timeline and make it active.Now when you go to log and capture it should show all the appropriate settings for the Decklink board.
You might also need to go to the blackmagic control panel (Apple -> System Preferences -> Blackmagic) to make sure that the input and processing options are set appropriately.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
The quick answer is, yes. But it is a choice not really an issue. We capture SMPTE 425m level B which would be 3GB. So 3GA format would not be supported.
If your source has the option to choose which formate level you want you will want to set that to Level B.
I hope that helps.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
I agree. The first thing I would do is try to reseat the card. It is short and it does “dangle” from the back of the machine, so if it misaligned the card it could cause a problem.
In this case it might not be a bad idea to use a screw to fasten the card instead of the normal bar bracket in the mac pros. They use normal case screws so finding shouldn’t be a problem and this will lock that board down tight.
If that ISN’T the problem it’s possible that the board failed and needs to be replaced.
You mentioned that you tested with multiple softwares. Did you try in Media Express 2 as well? This will help eliminate any potential software settings issues that may have gotten munged up.
Something to check.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Hey there,
I apologize if you feel you were treated rudely. We take the quality of our support very seriously. Sometimes we have to give people answers they don’t like but we always make sure that when we give those answers we give them with consideration and a little bit of humility. Rude, is not acceptable regardless of the outcome of a support call. If you remember, I wouldn’t mind knowing who you talked to so I can make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
That aside. It is worth mentioning that you will not get the same performance from a system with a Decklink board in it (regardless of which board it is) that you will with Premiere in software mode. This is to be expected as Premiere can gracefully scale back the resolution and quality of the output which will make it seem that you are getting much more “real time” performance. But when our cards are brought into the loop the output has to be full quality and full framerate and resolution. This will make it seem that the performance is reduced some.
Now, with CS5 you can get alot of this back by using a supported CUDA based nVidia graphics card which will allow you to use the hardware rendering available through the Mercury playback engine native to Premiere Pro.
To be honest if you are getting frame drops after 15 frames with no real effects or transitions then there may be some problem with hard drive speed (for uncompressed video). But if the clip has a bit of work done on it, then the performance is going to vary greatly depending on what was done to it, if you are using the Mercury hardware rendering or not. But your post doesn’t really say.
Can I ask what preset you are using? What is the format (frame size and rate) of video you are using and what codec are you using? Sometimes having the wrong preset can affect performance adversely as well.
If you could give some system details that would help too. Maybe I can see if anything stands out.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc. -
Ah…okay, got it. When we first setup the lines there was a glitch where people would in fact go off into some queue in the ether. That has since been fixed. That’s probably what happened there. So I do apologize for that.
As for if it needs to be bought from a reseller or not, i’m actually not sure. We haven’t done too much to that software since we’ve purchased DaVinci, but I do know that a few units have been sold (not sure via what method).
From my personal knowledge (and on this product there is a lot that is undecided yet) I know it runs on a similar core build to the Resolve (with less GPU reqs). I’ll ping the PM of the product and see if he can comment more on that.
Sincerely,
Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.