[Luke Maslen]

Hi Carey,

You’re out of luck for a few reasons. Firstly, you need to be using a NTSC or PAL frame rate in HD in order to down convert to NTSC or PAL. We also support 1080/23.98 to NTSC 23.98. You would need to reverse telecine any 1080/24p material before you could down convert and I don’t think that is going to be possible with a HDV camera for the following reasons.

I believe that the HDV cameras do not shoot in 1080/24p mode but use something named Cineframe 24 which provides the same “atmosphere” as 24p film.

A Google search on Cineframe 24 revealed a page named Cineframe modes explained which discusses Cineframe 24 amongst other things. It states, Cineframe 24 “… cherry-picks fields from the camera’s 60i video stream to simulate the juddery motion of 24p. However, the motion is worse (more uneven, more syncopated) than true 24p imagery, and it cannot be reverse-telecined to get smooth 24fps imagery.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Adrian,

Please refer to the support note Premiere Pro 1.5.1 caveats with DeckLink v5.1.2 and specifically the section entitled Using Premiere Pro and After Effects at the same time.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your feedback and this is great news. The new DeckLink Macintosh 5.0.1r2 (revision 2) installer can be downloaded from this temporary location on our web site and this should overcome the problems reported with the original installer.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread. It has been very helpful to receive your feedback and we’ve been investigating the reported problems.

We believe that all of the problems were related to a bad installer which meant that the software was not properly installed. We have rebuilt the installer and all is working fine on our systems with the same software but the good installer.

I have uploaded the good installer to a private location on our web server and it would be great if you could try it out and let us know if it avoids the problems previously reported in this thread. If so, we will publicly release it in the next day or so. We believe there should be no problems with this installer and we’re just being cautious in keeping this update semi-private for a day or two. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Assuming that all goes well, we’d also love to hear from people who have found that this resolves their gamma issues in After Effects as we’ve reintroduced our codec for that and it should help.

The new DeckLink Macintosh 5.0.1r2 (revision 2) installer can be downloaded from this temporary location on our web site.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Rick,

Yes, that is correct. We just did some quick testing but this seems to work fine and no transcoding was required. We would need to do more thorough testing to advertize this as a “feature” but we played around with it for a while and everything seemed to work just fine.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Eli,

Sorry for the delay and I definitely haven’t forgotten about this. I’ve done some testing but haven’t replicated the problem. I want to do more testing with a bunch of different cards which appear to have different firmware versions to see if that explains why you see a problem and I don’t. Our test machines have been very much in use in the lead up to the IBC trade show but I’m hoping that I’ll have a chance to perform more testing in the next few days once the show gets under way.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Robert,

This is very interesting information.

[Robert Brown] “I will also try another deck and make sure both are having the same problem. But this problem has existed since I got this card, and at one point I did try a replacement and it was no better.”

Someone was telling me yesterday that they believe the SDI on the Panasonic AJHD150 decks is known to have problems. I asked them for information to verify that claim and haven’t received it as yet. However that was their firm belief and I am still chasing information to substantiate that claim. That would fit in with the fact that you have never got this to work properly and it will be very interesting to see if another deck has the same problem. Thank you for checking that out and I will be very interested to learn of your results testing with the alternate deck.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Tor,

Thanks very much for this information as it all helps. We think we’ve worked out some, if not all of, the problem. It looks as though the installer itself might be bad and that will be very easy to fix. However we’re going to perform further testing to ensure that we’re not seeing any of the reported problems using a “good” installer. If that works, we’ll re-release the software very soon as we’ve received a lot of requests for the reintroduction of the Blackmagic codec.

Thanks again. Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sean,

It is possible that this works now. It always worked in OfflineRT resolutions but never in full resolution SD or HD. G5’s are so powerful now that they might have crossed the threshold where this does or doesn’t work. We’ll check it out soon but probably after IBC as we’re flat out now. Thanks for the post as it would be great if this worked 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Rick,

[Luke Maslen] “One of our support staff is going to test using Blackmagic Deck Control for Windows to capture to the PhotoJPEG codec and then see if the resulting file works OK in Vegas 6. I really don’t know if this will work but we’ll try and let you know.”

I’ve just heard back that this worked perfectly. So as long as you don’t mind capturing via Blackmagic Deck Control, you can take the captured QuickTime movie which has been PhotoJPEG-encoded, and it seems to work fine in Vegas 6 and also outputs through DeckLink.

You will need to have QuickTime 6.5 installed.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design