[Luke Maslen]

Hi Trent,

Can you try another cable? Some DVI connections are not very good and the pins can be too short so trying another cable is a good idea. It is also important to firmly tighten the screws so that the cable is firmly attached to the HDLink. If the cable has been wrenched in the past, this could damage the pins on the cable, or maybe even the port on the HDLink, but hopefully that hasn’t happened.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Beak,

That does sound very weird. You mentioned you have other DeckLink cards. Would it be possible to take out the suspect DeckLink card and try one of the other cards that you have. If the problem no longer occurs, then it would appear that the card is faulty and we should be able to repair or replace it via your reseller. If the substitute card shows the same problems, then either the Mac itself has a problem or, more likely, you have a software problem.

If you have recently updated some of your software, as many people have done with Tiger, FCP5 and DeckLink5, then it might be worth uninstalling the DeckLink drivers, reinstalling Final Cut Pro plus updates and then reinstalling the DeckLink drivers as the last step.

Good luck and please let us know how you go.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bryan,

Please go to the System Preferences and click on Blackmagic DeckLink. Look at the setting for video output. My suspicion is that it is set to NTSC/PAL which is composite analog output. Please ensure it is set to Analog Y, B-Y, R-Y for component analog output. Does that help? If not, use the DeckLink Uninstaller from the DeckLink 5.0 disk image. Then reinstall the drivers and see if it is working again as something weird might have happened when updating to all the latest software.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Colin,

If you want to work with maximum quality, then capturing uncompressed video from the J30 player using the DeckLink Extreme card will be the best choice. However if you are going to work in DV, then you might as well use the DV port of the J30 player and use the PAL DV easy setup in FCP provided by Apple. You could still use the DeckLink card for monitoring your DV material on a breadcast monitor. The advantage of capturing in an uncompressed format is that you will not lose any quality when applying effects or text to your video or if needing to render the video. However uncompressed video takes up much more space than compressed video.

If you are going to capture from the Betacam SP using DeckLink, you will just need to connect the 3 from deck component analog video cables plus the from deck XLR analog audio cables. Also you will need to connect the RS-422 deck control cable included with the breakout cable for DeckLink Extreme.

Next go in to the System Preferences and click on Blackmagic DeckLink. Set the Video Input to Analog Y, B-Y, R-Y. If you are going to be monitoring the video via a broadcast monitor, set the video output to Analog Y, B-Y, R-Y if it accepts component analog video. Alternatively set it to NTSC/PAL (Y out) if it only accepts composite analog video.

Your J30 player does not allow you to record to tape so Disable the option to Black Vide Output to Deck in Capture. If you find that you run in to any sync problems, you will need to use a black burst generator to connect to the deck and to the genlock reference input of the DeckLink Extreme.

While a single SATA hard disk in a G5 should be fast enough for capture and playback of 8-bit uncompressed video (which is very high quality), you might run out of space on your hard disk. You can use the Easy Setups in Final Cut Pro to select a Blackmagic PAL timeline in any of the DV, DV50 or JPEG compressed formats. DV50 is better quality than DV but takes twice the space. DV and DV50 are supported by Apple’s RT Extreme realtime effects. The JPEG easy setup provides even better looking video capture and the only downside is that you cannot use RT Extreme effects with it in realtime. You would need to render any effects with JPEG.

You should first determine if you need RT Extreme effects. If the answer is “yes” then the choice is between DV and DV50. If the answer is “no”, I would personally choose JPEG but you can check that out for yourself and make your own assessment of the quality.

Another reason for choosing JPEG is that the DV standard in PAL is a bit messed up.

When DeckLink captures from the component analog outputs of the J30 deck, it receives uncompressed analog video. Depending upon which Blackmagic easy setup you choose in Final Cut Pro, the video will be automatically stored in any of the uncompressed, DV, DV50 or PhotoJPEG formats. It just happens seamlessly in real time and is not something you need to think about much. The Blackmagic easy setups will also configure the RS-422 serial control.

So you don’t need to worry about capture and sequence settings. Just choose the desired Blackmagic easy setup and all the FCP settings will be configured for you 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Troy,

The DeckLink drivers include a utility named Blackmagic Deck Control. It is a very basic capture and playback application. You can use it to set an In and Out point or alternatively you can use Capture Now. Blackmagic Deck Control will capture in 8 and 10 bit uncompressed QuickTime formats. You can also capture in the compressed PhotoJPEG format but I would advise against that on the grounds that it won’t be compatible with many non-QuickTime applications.

While we offer AVI capture and playback support in Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas, Blackmagic Deck Control is one of our older utilities and only supports QuickTime movies at this time. When we get a chance, we would like to update it to also support AVI movies. However After Effects and Photoshop will be fine with QuickTime movies.

The LaCie Big Disk Extreme is perfectly fast enough for capture and playback of 10-bit NTSC movies using a FireWire 800 connection. Having said that, there seems to be some great variance in FireWire 800 speeds on different computers and this solution will only work well if your FireWire 800 connection is working well. The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, installed by the DeckLink drivers, will provide a helpful indication of disk speed. You need 30 fps for NTSC and I would recommend you aim for a benchmark of 60 fps for both read and write speeds on the Big Disk Extreme. This will allow for fluctuations in disk speed and the inevitable slow down which occurs as disks fill up.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Dave,

Might you describe the specks as “sparkles”? If so, this is a known firmware issue with older Kona SD cards and G5’s. The firmware chip will need to be replaced or reprogrammed to overcome this problem. The good news is that once the card has been returned with updated firmware, it will work fine in G5’s. If your card was purchased before or around the time that G5’s were introduced (I think that was September 2003), then you will need the update for compatibility.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jacobo,

The “Enable Legacy QT Playback” option relied upon the use of Blackmagic codecs. In the DeckLink 5.0 drivers, we have largely eliminated the Blackmagic codecs and adopted the Apple uncompressed codecs as Apple have requested that we do this for simplicities sake. One of the side effects of this is that the “Enable Legacy QT Playback” option cannot be used. However, we’re examining options to see if we can make this work again so we haven’t removed it from the interface. If we can’t find a way to make it work, we will remove it but we haven’t given up yet 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jarrod,

Thank you for your kind words.

[Jarrod] “As for system through put, i really don’t think that’s a problem, Video continues to play in computer monitor”

That is curious as the test I ran showed dropped frames in FCP5 and QuickTime Player could not maintain 29.97 fps. I will continue to pursue this with Apple as they should be able to help with either suggestions or a fix.

Thanks for your answers and do let me know how the PhotoJPEG test goes as it could be quite a helpful diagnostic.

[Jarrod] “BTW you can play QTs out to the NTSC monitor throught the Kona/BMD card by selecting it for your full screen viewing.”

I assume you’re this is in reference to playing out of QuickTime Player? If so, that’s not good way to play movies out through your Kona SD card. The extended desktop is useful with applications that have no other way to output via SDI. However it will sometimes lead to jerky playback as it is kind of a cheats way to output video to SDI. To guarantee smooth playback, you need to use a video application which supports SDI output such as FCP or Blackmagic Deck Control.

QuickTime Player has some built-in smarts to help with streaming video over the internet. If your Internet connection slows down, QuickTime Player automatically adjusts the frame rate of the video. This is great for the Internet but highly undesirable when outputting to tape or a broadcast monitor. The Apple codec does not support direct output to SDI hardware and so you cannot output from QuickTime to your SDI output with a guaranteed frame rate. If you want to run a quick test of your video without launching Final Cut Pro HD, then Blackmagic Deck Control would be a good option.

I’ll let you know when I hear back from Apple.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jarrod,

We might be making some progress in understanding your problem. Having said that QuickTime Player was not a good test, it looks as though it might be an excellent test but in a different way.

I managed to configure a system here so that it would drop frames when playing back NTSC 10-bit clips. I did this by using a slower, Firewire disk array. It dropped frames using Tiger, Kona SD and the DeckLink 5.0 drivers but did not drop frames using Panther, Kona SD and the DeckLink 4.8 drivers. This appears to match the behavior you were reporting.

I then uninstalled the DeckLink drivers so that G5 would not recognize that the Kona SD was present. I opened the 10-bit NTSC movie in to QuickTime Player 7.0.1, chose to View at Actual Size and then hit play. After a few seconds, the displayed frame rate rapidly fell and then the movie started to stutter and eventually the image froze just as you had described.

The significance of this is that the problem occurred when the Kona SD and DeckLink drivers were not in use and had been uninstalled. For all intents and purposes, the Kona SD card was not there. Therefore this appears to be a QuickTime 7 problem. Accordingly we are going to take this up with Apple and will see if they can assist.

The problem occurs with just G5 with Tiger, QT7 and the Apple Uncompressed 422 codec and this most probably means we no longer need to examine the card and drivers for the cause of the problem. However anything is possible and so it will be great to hear back from Apple on this issue. I will let you know what I can when I receive a response. Finally we seem to be making progress so this is good news and thanks again for all your information and patience.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jarrod,

Thanks for your answers and your patience in pursuing this problem. FYI, QuickTime Player is not such a good test as it has no way to output directly to SDI. Making it go full screen over the extended desktop is not really a valid test especially as QuickTime Player is designed to vary its playback speed for use with Internet streaming video. Final Cut Pro and Blackmagic Deck Control are valid utilities for testing this problem.

[Jarrod] “doesn’t the firmware get updated with the BMD driver update?”

The firmware on the Kona SD works differently to our cards. The firmware chip on the Kona SD is programmed when manufactured. Any updates require that the card be returned to the manufacturer for reprogramming or a replacement chip. We do things differently in that we dynamically load the firmware in our cards at startup time but this is not applicable to the Kona SD due to the differences in hardware.

This raises a question as to whether you purchased your Kona SD before or after G5’s started to ship? I think there was a firmware update to help with G5’s but you might already have it if you bought your card(s) in more recent times. The fact that you did see a difference in behavior between you two cards, without chaning any software, does suggest some kind of hardware difference between the two cards and firmware could well be the explanation for this. Can you please answer the following questions:

1. When did you purchase your Kona SD card(s)?
2. When the video image “freezes” during playback, does the audio continue to play smoothly?
3. When the video image “freezes” during playback on your broadcast monitor, does it continue to update smoothly on your computer screen or does it also only update when the video is paused?
4. Finally, open one of your troublesome 10-bit NTSC movies and use QuickTime Pro to export it with the same settings but choose PhotoJPEG encoding and set the quality to “High”. Save the PhotoJPEG clip to your internal disk and then remove all PCI cards except for the Kona SD. Can you successfully play out the PhotoJPEG movie to the broadcast monitor using FCP5 and Blackmagic Deck Control? If so, can you also Edit to Tape successfully?

I’ve been discussing your problem with our engineers and they requested answers to these questions so we’re doing our best to work out your puzzling problem. I’m also going to test the oldest Kona SD card that we have as we usually test with the one with the newest firmware for best compatibility with G5’s. If I see any major difference, I’ll let you know.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design