[Luke Maslen]

Hi Richard,

I’ve made you famous as this question has come up again. So I’ve posted a technical note “2 channel stereo capture in Final Cut Pro HD 5.0” with your original question 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Nic,

That’s great news about your 35mm commercial – congratulations!

[Nic Alderton] “What’s my best choice of codec?”

In Final Cut Pro HD 5.0, we have adopted the Apple codecs for all 4:2:2 work in SD & HD. Apple have added HD color space to their 4:2:2 codec so there is no longer a need for the Blackmagic codecs in 4:2:2. We do however still include the Blackmagic 10-bit RGB codec for 4:4:4 work which you might need with a telecine or a Sony HDCAM SR deck. This is because Apple do not yet have their own RGB codec for HD.

So if you’re going to work in 4:2:2 SD or HD, then you can use the Apple uncompressed 4:2:2 codec. If you are going to work in 4:4:4 HD, then you can use the Blackmagic 10-bit RGB codec.

[Nic Alderton] “1080p25 would be my first choice”

Kaspar’s comments are well worth digesting. Please also review the technical note entitled
Does DeckLink HD support HDTV1080p/25 in Final Cut Pro?

[Nic Alderton] “Wil the Decklink HD card will allow us to monitor in realtime on our SD studio monitor?”

Yes, all of the DeckLink HD series cards will enable you to work in either SD or HD. In addition, all of the DeckLink HD series cards have down conversion capabilities which are documented in the technical note
Software and hardware down conversion with DeckLink cards.
In fact even your existing DeckLink Pro has down conversion capabilities when playing back HD video on your dual G5/2.7 GHz.

When you first install a DeckLink HD series card, the extended desktop will default to a HD mode which of course won’t display on your SD monitor. We’ve documented the steps for changing the extended desktop to standard definition (720 x 576, 25 Hz for PAL) in a technical note entitled Can a SD monitor be used with DeckLink HD and Mac OS X?.

If you are going to be capturing or playing back uncompressed HD material, then you are going to need a HD-capable disk array. A fully populated Apple Xserve RAID (14 disks and at least 512 MB of RAM on each RAID controller) will usually support HDTV Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 but a faster disk system would be required for 4:4:4, eg eight U320 SCSI disks RAID’ed together.

If you are testing disk storage, fill it up to about 80% of capacity and then run your tests as this will slow down the performance significantly and should give you a real-world idea of whether the disk array is fast enough for your needs.

Kaspar’s comments about planning and testing are very good comments. If you find that you do not have enough disk capacity for capturing HD video, you could consider capturing to a Blackmagic HDTV 1080i/50 DVCPRO HD timeline. The compressed DVCPRO HD codec provides very impressive quality and DeckLink cards support down conversion from both 8 and 10 bit HD timelines as well as from DVCPRO HD 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sean,

Are you using an Admin account? An Admin account should never encounter such a problem. I suspect you are using a “Managed” account with “Some Limits” and so your change in the preferences is not being retained. Would this explain your problem?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Francisco,

The system requirements are becoming quite long as we’ve added more equipment which works well with DeckLink cards. We’ll see if we can find some way to make it clearer.

We haven’t tested a A8N-SLI motherboard so I can’t gurantee it will work. However it’s specifications look OK to me. Unfortunately Matt is a way for a few days so I can’t check with him for his opinion.

The A8N-SLI does not have any PCI-X slots. It has PCIe slots and PCI slots. The DeckLink Extreme can be used in PCI-X or PCI slots. That means your only choice is to use one of the PCI slots for your DeckLink Extreme.

The nVidia GeForce 6 series PCI Express graphics card should be placed in a 16 x PCIe slot.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

LCD displays are progressive and do not include native support for displaying interlaced video. HDLink Utility 1.71 includes an Interlace Simulation mode which should help interlaced video to look better on a progressive, LCD display. Having said that, HDLink is already having to perform some trickery to display PAL footage on a display that does not support 50 Hz so it is possible that the two factors combined will make it difficult for the video to look great on your monitor.

SD monitors are so inexpensive that, when we created HDLink, we thought that people would only use it for HD and hence the name “HDLink”. It was revolutionary in that there was nothing like it at the time with such quality and at such a low price. What did surprise us was the way that people used HDLink and we received requests to provide standard definition support. No sooner had we added that than customers told us that it was nice but looked pretty small on a 23″ monitor and it would be great to view it at x2 size. So we did that and next customers requested 16:9 scaling and so on. If you review the information on our HDLink product page, you’ll notice that we have lots of details about how it’s great for use with HD and we only fleetingly mention that it can be used for NTSC and PAL as it is primarily aimed at HD video but has some SD capabilities.

It’s quite exciting to see how customers adopt our products and find new ways to use them. One of the nice things about HDLink is that it has a USB port so we can easily flash upgrade the firmware to add new features. In the current example, we received reports from standard definition users that interlaced video did not look great and particularly when it was displayed at x2 scaling on the progressive LCD monitor. So our engineers have worked hard on this problem and we’ve released a software update which should improve the display of interlaced video on progressive LCD monitors. The nature of the technology means that this cannot be perfect but we believe the new software offers a definite improvement, particularly in HD.

If you mainly want to work in SD and with interlaced video, then a CRT is still the best choice. If you mainly work in HD, then HDLink is great quality so you can see every pixel in your image. The interlaced simulation mode in the HDLink 1.71 software does seem to offer a significant quality improvement. Many people use both a component analog CRT display in addition to a HDLink with a LCD so that all aspects of the video can be seen.

If you haven’t already updated to the latest software, you can find it at https://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/software/.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Peter,

“Soon” is a wonderful word 😉 At NAB 2005, the PCI Express versions of Multibridge were announced and it was stated that they should ship this (northern) summer. I think we’re still pretty much on track or not much behind so they “should” be available “soon” 🙂

As for recommended motherboards, the engineers have not provided us with a list yet and I suspect we won’t have a list until we’re virtually ready to ship.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Gary,

I’m not sure if you’ve seen the new technical note named Apple SoundTrack Pro

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jarrod,

Your problem is very puzzling. I’ve got a bunch of Kona SD cards here and none of them have the issue you have encountered. No one else in this forum has reported similar problems with playback on Mac OS X 10.4.2 with FCP 5.0.2. CharlieX in this forum reports he is having no problems with the same configuration as you except his G5 is the 2.7 GB model. I’ve run our tests on the 2.0 GB (PCI-X) model and just don’t see these problems.

The fact that swapping cards, with no other changes to the system, led to a change in playback behavior could mean a possible issue with firmware. However that is pure speculation and I don’t really know. Another possibility is that we are testing on different models of the G5/2.0 DP (PCI-X). The original G5/2.0 was the “best” model in its range. The second generation of G5’s included a G5/2.0 as the “better” model in its range. It is conceivable that there is some difference in behavior between these two machines. Can you tell me which model you have?

Finally, please quit out of FCP and launch Blackmagic Deck Control. Open a 10-bit clip in to Blackmagic Deck Control and try playing it out to your NTSC monitor. Does this work OK? This is a useful comparison test which will help us to understand if the problem is confined to FCP or whether it is more general.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

Yes you can use the DeckLink card for previewing HDV material captured via Firewire. Please see the technical note HDV capture preview missing in Final Cut Pro HD 5.0 for details of how to make this work.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Robert,

Are you using Mac OS X 10.3.9? If so, we’ve heard of various audio dropout issues with this system and I would recommend you use the combination of either: