[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

Macs don’t have PCIe and so the DeckLink HD card will enable you to connect the Multibridge Extreme to your Mac right now and hopefully Apple will do PCIe in the future.

PCIe is simply another evolutionary stage of the PCI bus and isn’t a great reason for excitement in itself other than that it is cheaper to make motherboards with PCIe compared with PCI-X. However one benefit of PCIe is that it allows for an external connector so that the PCIe bus can be taken outside of the computer. This provides a fast link between an external device and the motherboard of the computer and one of the things we can do with that is to provide 2K monitoring via an appropriate display, eg an Apple HD Cinema 30″ display. The quality is amazing and it is funny how full resolution HDTV 1920 x 1080 looks small on a 30″ display when viewed in its native x1 resolution.

I’m not sure when the bridge card will be available so your DeckLink HD card is going to be perfect for use with the Multibridge Extreme until PCIe connectivity becomes available.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paul,

I’m glad to hear you have overcome the problem.

[jasonsilzle] “what is the difference between 8Bit and 8Bit (2Vuy)”

There is no difference between these two formats other than the header information. Blackmagic 8bit is the current format and is directly compatible with Apple’s 8bit format. Blackmagic 8bit (2Vuy) is the older Blackmagic format which is what we introduced before Apple released there own codec. The Blackmagic 8bit (2Vuy) codec is included for legacy reasons including support of older Blackmagic 8bit files and is also what is used by Pinnacle.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jason,

This is great news and thank you for letting us know. Can you tell us how you discovered that the Firewire Audio interface was the cause of the problems and also how you fixed it? This would be very useful to know in case someone else runs in to the same problem.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Noe,

Thank you for running these tests and reporting your results. Can you tell me the source of your DV material, eg a Firewire DV capture from a DV camera or a SDI capture with the DeckLink card using the Blackmagic DV easy setup?

I’m looking at some PAL DV clips here which do not show the word Blackmagic so I’m trying to work out why there is a difference.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Kaspar,

Reconnecting solves the problem but is a nuisance. It would be nice to have a more graceful way of handling this so that reconnection is not necessary and I have asked the engineers to look at this in a FrameLink update. They want to do it as soon as they get a chance to look at it. Everyone is busy with IBC preparations but hopefully it will happen soon.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Eli,

Are you saying that all of your problems have disappeared after running the DeckLink Uninstaller and then reinstalling the drivers or do some problems still remain?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Kai,

Running the Uninstaller is a good idea with weird problems that cannot be solved using normal troubleshooting. Amongst other things, this will delete the Final Cut Pro preferences file which caches some information. This cached information has been a historical source of problems. For example, if we didn’t delete this cache, the the Blackmagic easy setups would fail to disappear from within FCP even though you might have deleted them from your hard drive. It is quite possible that deleting this file has overcome your audio issue. If this really has worked, then the problem should not return.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Keith,

Multibridge Extreme is not shipping yet but it is very close. We’ve been concentrating on the convertor itself and so the PCIe Bridge would not be immediately available.

If you do choose to go with the existing Multibridge, you may wish to consider using the base model DeckLink HD card with it. It is only US$595 and you don’t need one of the higher models of DeckLink HD series cards as the Multibridge has all the i/o options you will need and you simply need a card with HD-SDI in and out. This is nice as it keeps the overall cost down. You can use the Multibridge as a standalone convertor or you can connect it to the DeckLink HD card if you want to capture and playback with a Mac or PC.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jason,

Firstly, please ensure you are using QuickTime 6.5 and not the public preview of QuickTime 7 as there are some significant audio changes in QuickTime 7 Public Preview and we will need to modify the DeckLink drivers to support this change when QuickTime 7 is released.

Next, open the QuickTime

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Noe,

[Noe Marti] “the quicktime 7 movie “info window” tells me that my movies are using “blackmagic” codec, but in reality they are “DV-PAL”.”

Can you please quit out of all applications and then go to /Library/QuickTime and move any of the Blackmagic compoents to your desktop. Then open the DV-PAL movie and let me know what it says in the Movie Info window.

If the reference to Blackmagic has disappeared, then I will log a bug with Apple as QuickTime should not be identifying the file as Blackmagic.

[Noe Marti] “for my DV-PAL Movies the QT 7 Movie “info window” shows datarates of 28’802.82 KBits/s ???? did Apple switch from “Kbyte/s” to “Kbits/s” ???”

I’m not sure. Does this change when you remove the Blackmagic components?

When you are finished testing, quit all applications and reinstate the Blackmagic components.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design