[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

I have just created the following technical note based upon your question: Broadcast monitor goes black during capture.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

Please open the DeckLink preferences in the System Preferences and look at the setting named Black Video Output to Deck in Capture.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Yes, the $295 DeckLink card would do this in a G4 or G5 and can also do many other things. It has a spare SDI monitoring port on it. If you wanted to monitor via an analog CRT monitor, then you might consider the $595 DeckLink Pro which is basically the same as the DeckLink but has a few extras including analog video monitoring output.

One question I would have for you is why you would want to capture to DV via SDI. If you are wanting to use DV as an offline mode for editing, then that makes perfect sense. However if you already have DV material on tape, then you might as well just capture that via Firewire to avoid decompression and recompression cycles which lead to loss of quality. If you then wanted to output to Digibeta, you could use the DeckLink card in DV bridge mode to output your DV material from a Blackmagic DV timeline as uncompressed SDI ready for the Digibeta.

You can happily run DV off one disk and even an iPod will do this although I would usually suggest a faster disk such as a standard SATA disk that comes with a G5. Ideally it would be preferable to capture to a seperate disk to the startup disk but, if desperate, you could use the same disk and it should be OK.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

Can you please use the “Uninstall Blackmagic DeckLink” utility and then open one of the troublesome movies in to QuickTime Player. Choose to show the Movie Info so you can monitor the frame rate as it plays. Does it successfully maintain 25fps or does it slow down after some while. I found that it slowed down after 10 to 20 seconds of playback.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arka,

Thanks for mentioning Titlebox and I just received the following information from Playbox.

TitleBox will do the job to key animations and graphics over incoming live video. Unfortunately our products are working only on PC and there are no MAC versions. If you already have a DeckLink installed in a PC, you can download the TitleBox Demo from our web site (http://www.playbox.tv).

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Lars,

We’ve just run a 30 minute pip test and found no shift in capture and playback using Blackmagic Deck Control. Testing was conducted with the DeckLink Windows 5.1 drivers. If you have not already updated, we suggest you do so. If you have ongoing problems, please answer the questions in my previous post.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bryan,

That’s really interesting and you’re absolutely right that a restart might have been necessary to solve this apparent caching problem. I don’t know why it only affected you but it’s great that it’s all working now and I’ll keep an eye open for any similar problems in the future. Your feedback has been very helpful and may well help other customers in the future.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Kevin,

Please do drop by and that’s a really good idea as the engineers pick up a lot of information from the show as to what DeckLink owners want. If they keep hearing the same request, they are sure to work on it.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Michael,

[Michael] “In your conclusion you talked about DV being a lossy compression and therefore when adding gfx and renders, it can/will suffer quality loss. I agree with you, which is why I like to up convert my current DV projects to the Matrox mjpeg codec for editing and compositing.”

MJPEG is also a lossy codec and the very process of transcoding from DV to any other compressed codec immediately results in the loss of some quality. All compressed video codecs, of which I am aware, use lossy compression and suffer from generational data loss. Some may be better than others but the only way to prevent such loss is to work with uncompressed video.

[Michael] “Are you suggesting that instead of digitizing a DV tape in it

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Morten,

Thank you for your answers to my questions. On your Tiger system with Final Cut Pro HD 5.0.2, are you logging in with an Administrator account or just a User account? The reason for this question is your surprising observation that “In FCP 5 it chooses the mac audio card as default.” This is very strange as that should not be the case and we are baffled as to how this could even happen unless the preferences were manually changed in FCP5 to use the Mac’s built-in audio output.

Assuming that you are already using an Adminstrator account, I would like you to run a test by quitting out of all applications and then go in to System Preferences and create a new Administrator account. Log out of your existing account and log in to the new one. Now try using Final Cut Pro HD 5.0.2 in the new account and see if the same problems occur. For example, when you launch Final Cut Pro HD 5.0.2 and select a Blackmagic easy setup, does it output the audio through the DeckLink card as expected or does it still output audio through the built-in audio speakers of your Mac?

This test will tell us if there is something strange with the preference files in your normal account which are contributing to this problem.

Please let us know how you go and it would be great if you could continue to copy Kristian on your responses as he has been running tests in an attempt to replicate your problem and is familiar with the history of your problem.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design