[Ken Jones]

That’s essentially what I am trying to communicate. The AJA and Blackmagic hardware both work perfectly by themselves.

The problem is that Final Cut Pro will not communicate properly with the Sony HVR-1500 deck when your are trying to capture HDV footage.

[Ken Jones]

Blackmagic has their own standalone software called “Deck Control”. It’s a very basic program that allows you to control the deck to do single captures, FF, rewind, etc.

I also own Premiere Pro CS3. This morning I attempted a batch capture. I did the exact same test as I had attempted with FCP, and Premiere captured all of the clips PERFECTLY. I captured the clips using HD-SDI input and RS-422 deck control. Not one hiccup or error message.

FCP works fine with DV and BetaSP – but when I attempt to capture HDV utilizing either firewire or RS-422 it will not capture reliably. About 50% of the time it will capture the correct clip, but the other 50% of the time it captures footage that might be 2-3 seconds off. It still captures the exact duration, and my bin shows my logged time code numbers, but the footage captured has actually “slipped” 2-3 seconds.

My thought is that the FCP I/O driver for the HVR-1500 is written poorly.

[Ken Jones]

I also have an HVR-1500 (not the the 1500A). I am using a Blackmagic Deck Link Extreme.

I get the exact same error messages that you do anytime I try to batch capture with FCP. Sometimes it captures clips and the time code is off by 2-3 SECONDS. Other times it gives me a TC error message and stops cueing. I believe I have tried every possible menu setting in the HVR-1500 operational menus. I have all the latest software updates for FCP and Blackmagic.

However – if I use the stand alone Blackmagic Deck Control software the HVR-1500 captures footage accurately and without any problems 100% of the time. It works PERFECTLY – just like my BetaSP 1800, a Digital Betacam deck, or a DVCPro HD deck.

My theory is that the FCP software is not able to accurately control this deck during cue-up. It somehow loses communication with the deck’s time code. I have spoken with two different Sony broadcast engineers, and one Blackmagic tech support person. They all acted like they had never heard of the problem, but the Blackmagic support person is the one who told me to try the Blackmagic Deck Control program. I have not spoken with anybody at Apple (yet) because they want to charge me $$$ just to talk to them about a bug with their software!

I am also going to post this info/question in the HDV and FCP forum to see what kind of response I can get.

[Ken Jones]

Roy Schneider… from Houston?

Howdy from Ken Jones. Email me.

[Ken Jones]

I own an HVR-1500 with all of the optional input/output cards.
This deck will output HD-SDI and SD-SDI, but will only input SD-SDI.