[Luke Maslen]

Hi Alisa,

The confusion between the numbers people are telling you relates to bits (b) versus bytes (B). Remember that there are 8 bits to every 1 byte.

DVCPRO HD is often referred to as DV100. It has a data rate of 100 mega bits per second, ie 100 Mb/s. If you divide this number by 8, in order to express it as mega bytes, it will return 12.5 mega bytes per second, ie 12.5 MB/s. We quote 14.5 MB/s in our documentation so as to include both audio and video date.

The DVCPRO HD data rate should be expressed as 100 Mb/s and not 100 MB/s. As with other DV formats, it’s data rate is fixed, regardless of whether you are using HD 720p or HD 1080 formats, and regardless of the frame rate.

I am quite sure that a FireWire 800 solution will be fine for this purpose because even my 3G iPod can handle capture and playback of HDTV1080 video in the DVCPRO HD format and iPod’s use energy-efficient disks which are comparitively low speed.

Can you provide some sample clips for us to review and also tell us from what source they were created? Hopefully we’ll be able to diagnose what is going wrong.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your report and you’ve seen more of Vegas v6 than me 🙂

Our drivers contain a lot of specific support for Premiere Pro and, to a large extent, we get to dictate how these features appear and behave in Premiere Pro.

This contrasts with Vegas v6 where we don’t write any support for Vegas. We simply have an open architecture through DirectShow. The Sony folks have written Vegas v6 to invoke some of our DirectShow filters as required. This approach is nice as it means that anyone can write software to control our cards via DirectShow and if we add a new feature in to the DirectShow filters, it is available to everyone. The Sony folks have done a great job at hooking in to our cards but bear in mind that this is the first time that Vegas has been released with this support and I think you can expect a natural progression of features and refinements over time. It’s great to have a big company such as Sony adopting our DirectShow support and building it in to their products. This was the whole idea behind adding DirectShow support to the DeckLink Windows drivers and it is great to see so many developers using it, both big and small.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Nick,

I haven’t been able to find out much as our team at the show is just flat out all day on the show floor and anyone there is more likely to get answers than me 🙂 However I’ve found out that we can at least mix 8 and 10 bit uncompressed clips on the same time line with effect handling set to Apple’s RT effects. That’s pretty nice but I don’t know about any other combinations as yet, eg compressed with uncompressed formats or SD and HD. We may have to wait until after the show to find out more but even 8 & 10 mixed formats will be fantastic.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Charlie,

Lucid brevity is clearly your forte 😉

Regards

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

They were originally shipping back in December but stopped when problems were found. We’re embarrassed and frustrated by the delays. The short version of the story is that the chip which handles analog input has had bugs and the supplier had to make new chips to rectify the problem. This took much longer than we had ever expected and the timelines we were given for their delivery were very unclear and so we just didn’t have clear information to provide to customers. We’ve just received new chips which are supposed to fix the problem but we’re being extremely cautious and running some time-consuming tests to show up any other issues which might or might not occur with the replacement chips. If all the tests go well, then we would ship the current Multibridges very soon as they are already built and ready to go. If the tests don’t go so well, then it will take longer. It’s really frustrating not to be able to provide definitive timelines to customers and I don’t even want to provide you with an estimate as it would just be fiction. However as soon as there is news, we’ll definitely post it here.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hey Bettsy,

Thanks for your comments and the bridge must be symbolic of the PCIe to PCI-X bridge which allows the new Multibridges to connect to a G5 😉

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hello Bettsy,

It’s good to hear from you. Thanks for your kind words which I will pass on to the Blackmagic team at NAB.

Multibridge with PCIe is not due to ship until this northern summer. I will be better able to answer your question closer to the shipping date. However we would like to support 2K playout from both FCP and Premiere Pro and we’ll definitely be looking at that before Multibridge with PCIe ships. There are also other more traditional film applications which support 2K which we will be testing with Multibridge and we’ll publish more details about workflow options closer to the time.

In the meanwhile, make sure you keep that drip tray handy 😉

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Nick,

Good question. I’ll ask what information is available when the Blackmagic team ring in from NAB 2005. I haven’t heard from them today as they’ve been working unbelievable hours but I hope to hear something tomorrow and will let you know what I learn.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

I expect our 3-way color corrector, for uncompressed HD, to continue functioning in FCP5. We’re currently under NDA as FCP5 has been announced but not released so there is only so much I can say. However I have no reason to believe that the 3-way color corrector feature would be removed as FCP5 adds new features rather than removing old ones.

The Multibridge with PCIe will essentially work like a DeckLink card as far as the computer is concerned and therefore I would expect, but am not promising, that it will also support 3-way color correction in uncompressed HD. The Multibridge with PCIe has been announced and is not due to ship until this northern summer so I will only know the full feature set closer to the time.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Neil,

That is hilarious and embarrassing. I’ve clearly missed some references to “Try Sync” which should have been “TriSync”. I’ll fix that shortly and thanks for bringing it to my attention.

TriSync traditionally relates to high definition so it is essentially the HD version of genlock. I’m sorry that you’ve been waiting on a solution to your sync problem. I checked with the engineers and it’s on the list to be looked at ASAP and I hope we have some progress shortly after NAB. Unfortunatley the problem with the original Multibridge chips has consumed a lot of time which we would ordinarily have allocated to investigating and resolving issues such as the sync issue. We will get to it as soon as we can.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design