[Luke Maslen]

Hi Stewart,

The Decklink HD Pro single link card is capable of software down conversion and cross conversion on Mac OS X. Software down conversion and cross conversion is not supported on Windows at this time. There is a support note regarding Down conversion with DeckLink cards on our web site. It is pretty long but it does detail which features are implemented on Mac and Windows.

The only card currently supporting down conversion on Windows is the Decklink HD Pro dual link card as it includes hardware down conversion. If you have any other model of card, the down conversion option will be grayed out.

If you are using a PowerMac G5 and this option is grayed out, then something strange is going on. It could be that your DeckLink HD Pro card is sharing the 100 MHz PCI-X bus with a slower PCI card. This would slow the whole bus down to the speed of the slower card and would disable the HD functionality of the DeckLink card. However you could still use it for SD work and for playing out HD video as SD.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Esteban,

We started a Linux project a long while ago but shelved it when there seemed to be little demand for Linux support in DeckLink drivers.

We might add support in the future but I am not aware of any immediate plans to do so. The Linux Cow forum is always very quiet whenever I check it so this is also a sign that there does not seem to be much demand. If that changes, we might well add support in the future.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

The DeckLink Extreme PCIe is the first capture card for PCIe. We are mainly concentrating on the new Multibridge Extreme and Studio as they use PCIe and replace the need for a capture card because the are a capture and convertor system all in one. So I don’t know if and when we will be transitioning other DeckLink models to PCIe. The decision would be based upon customer demand.

Many new PC’s have both PCI or PCI-X and PCIe slots so there might or might not be much customer demand to convert the other DeckLink cards to PCIe. The DeckLink Extreme was the logical card to convert to PCIe as it does everything digital and analog in and out. If there is enough demand to convert other models of DeckLink cards, then that is something we can consider in the future but we’ll have to wait and see.

One thing that might be slowing the transition to PCIe at the moment is the lack of HBA’s for PCIe, ie SCSI, Fibre Channel and SATA cards. Fortunately many of the inexpensive Dual Core PC’s have SATA on board which means you can connect up to 4 SATA drives internally to make a great disk array for SD video. The move to HD video will be accelerated once there are HBA cards available for PCIe.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paul,

What make and model of HDTV are you considering? I could then find out some details about it and give you my best guess.

The HD from a HDCAM deck will look awesome via HDLink.

HDLink and HDTV’s are primarily for use with HD formats. You can use HDLink to display NTSC and PAL material via a DVI-D connection but not via HDMI. SD material is interlaced whereas DVI-D LCD monitors are progressive which means that you might or might not be happy with the quality of SD on the large display. If you do a lot of SD work, then it would be good to see a HDLink in action at your nearest Blackmagic Design Reseller. It would also be a good idea to review the support note Why do circles appear egg-shaped in standard definition? This is a difference between digital and analog monitors. Many people would use a standard definition CRT for SD in addition to the HDLink for HD & SD monitoring.

You might be able to use either DVI-D or HDMI to connect HDLink to your HDTV.

Some TV’s provide higher input resolutions via HDMI compared with DVI-D and so HDMI may be a better choice in this case. Typically these video displays accept a maximum resolution of 1280 x 720 via their DVI-D input but will happily accept 1920 x 1080 pixels via their HDMI input. These differences might or might not be documented and you may have to experiment to discover the capabilities of the DVI-D and HDMI inputs of your video display.

The maximum resolution of an HDMI display will often be less than full resolution HDTV, even if the display is rated to accept HDTV signals. This is a physical limitation of the display itself and full-resolution HDMI displays, or DVI-D displays, should be considered if pixel-for-pixel video is required.

Please check the HDLink specifications page for the latest information about video formats supported via DVI-D and HDMI as there are some differences. In particular, NTSC and PAL formats are supported via DVI-D but are not currently supported via HDMI.

In HDMI mode, HDLink supports HDMI video only and audio is output on the two RCA connectors for connection to HiFi audio equipment.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Peter,

I think you are asking if it is OK to run both the DeckLink HD and the LSI card on the same shared bus? In theory that should be fine as they are both PCI-X cards. In HD mode it would be preferable to have the DeckLink HD on a seperate bus as both cards will be very demanding for a shared PCI-X bus and there is the potential to run out of bandwidth. It should not be an issue when working in SD with the DeckLink HD card.

Alternatively, the DeckLink Extreme PCIe will be on its own bus and so there would be no issue with the LSI card.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Felix,

That is great and I’ll let you know when we have some ready for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Shane,

I’m very pleased to hear that you are no longer seeing DV field issues in 5.1.2. I will certainly pass on your thanks to the relevant engineers 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Oscar,

Thank you for your additional information. We will try to replicate that and then reply to you either way with what we’ve found.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Craig,

That’s nice timing as our engineers should be back from IBC by then and we’ll be able to investigate this further.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Tangier,

I think that’s an FCP bug we also observed during testing and hence the fairly specific list of what we do and don’t currently support on down conversion. I’ll check with the relevant engineer when he returns from IBC.

Thanks for your report.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design