[Luke Maslen]

Hi Mike,

Please open your Blackmagic control panel and it should show Preference settings for your Intensity Pro and there should be some menus and other options you can click on that are active. If the control panel does not include the text Intensity Pro and the menus and all other options are grayed out and inactive, then the card is not functioning. That could be a hardware problem or perhaps the drivers have not loaded correctly.

If possible, it would be helpful to test your Intensity Pro in one of the other workstations which currently is working with an Intensity Pro. This will help establish if the card is dead or is working. Regardless of whether or not you have conducted this test, I would suggest you then contact your closest Blackmagic Design office for further help so they can give you some suggestions over the phone and help diagnose the problem.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

To simplify this problem, I’m going to start by concentrating on playback only.

If you review the Intensity tech specs, you will see that the following formats are supported in HD: 1080i50, 1080i59.94, 720p50 and 720p59.94. NTSC and PAL are also supported.

As you are probably aware, there are very few displays that support 720p23.98. In order to work with 720p23.98 material, the Intensity 720p24 easy setup performs pulldown processing and plays out your DVCPRO HD 720p23.98 video as 720p59.94 which is compatible with almost any HD display. This is also a frame rate which can be down converted to NTSC.

So if you want to view your 720p23.98 video on an NTSC composite analog monitor, you will need to conduct the following steps:
1. Create a new project with the Intensity HDTV 720p24 – DVCPRO HD easy setup.
2. Drop your DVCPRO HD 720p23.98 clips on to the timeline in that new project.
3. Open System Preferences>Intensity and change the Select output processing to either HD to SD Letterbox 16:9 or HD to SD Anamorphic 16:9. Use the latter option if your NTSC monitor supports 16:9.
4. Choose to Set output to HDMI & NTSC/PAL (Y Out) & S-Video.
5. Connect the Y Out (green RCA connector) to the composite input of your NTSC monitor.
You should now be able to see the down-converted image in color on your NTSC monitor.

If your NTSC monitor is not showing the desired image, and you’ve definitely chosen the composite input on the monitor settings of your NTSC monitor, then please call the support group at your closest Blackmagic Design office so they can try troubleshooting the problem with you over the phone.

Assuming that does work, then we just need to look at your input settings. The Intensity input settings should not affect the output of the card except when capturing from the card’s input. Whatever you capture on the output will be passed through to the card’s output. So if you capture NTSC on input, that is what will be sent to the HDMI and analog outputs of the card. If you capture a high definition format on input, that will be sent to the HDMI and analog outputs of the card. Down conversion will not be applied on the output of the card while capturing so you won’t see any useful video on a composite or S-video output. You could however monitor via either HDMI or component analog video as they both support HD.

I hope this helps but it seems like your problems are a little complex and it may be worth giving one of our offices a call and speaking to a support technician. They’ll be happy to help but hopefully these tips will help you to overcome some of your problems in the meanwhile.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Edward,

The DeckLink HD Extreme 3 has a fan but the previous models did not. We test all of them before they leave the manufacturing plant to ensure they are working and also for fan noise. However fans can become defective because they are a mechanical part. Your fan sounds very noisy and must be defective as it should be pretty quiet.

Would you please contact your closest Blackmagic Design office and request one of the following two options depending upon your preference:
1. a replacement fan. Blackmagic Design will ship you a replacement fan which you can then swap over yourself. This will ensure that your only down time is the time it takes you to unplug the old fan and attach the new fan.
2. a replacement card. This will avoid you needing to replace the fan yourself but could mean you would be without a card for a couple of days unless the office organizes and advance replacement.

Please discuss these options with a support person at your closest Blackmagic Design office and they will arrange this for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Matt,

As long as your Windows XP or Windows Vista has the current service packs installed, I don’t forsee any problem with simply uninstalling your old copies of Premiere Pro and the DeckLink drivers and then installing Adobe CS4 and lastly the DeckLink drivers. The DeckLink drivers should be installed last otherwise they won’t find the Adobe CS4 software and won’t activate when you launch software such as Premiere Pro CS4. Please note that the current DeckLink drivers no longer support Premiere Pro 1.5 or 2.0. They do support both Premiere Pro CS3.1.2 and 4.0.1.

Margus’s suggestion is an excellent approach particularly if you would like to keep Premiere Pro 1.5 running on your existing hard disk in case you need to revert to it for some reason. The choice is yours 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Steve,

I’m very happy to read that you have your preview back. I’m a little confused about why changing the extended desktop to black helped given that your preview continued to work when you re-enabled the extended desktop. I do know that video output via an uncompressed capture card will automatically be disabled if you switch to using FireWire capture. If you then switch back to your uncompressed capture card, you have to manually re-enable external video in Final Cut Pro. Between this trick and the one that disables HDV preview with a PCI capture card, there are clearly at least two factors which can affect affect video with your Multibridge. I think you would need to perform a number of trial and error tests to work out exactly what scenario switches off your preview but I’m glad you’ve managed to re-enable it by simply setting the extended desktop to black. If the problem recurs even though you have set the extended desktop to black, make an immediate note of what changes were made immediately prior to losing preview, especially if you were switching between using FireWire capture and your Multibridge. The note will be helpful in troubleshooting the problem if it occurs.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Keith,

I’m on the forum this week as the usual guys who might really know the answer to your question are at the NAB trade show. It could be worth checking with them next week but with Vegas 9 having been announced, I don’t expect further work would be conducted for retrospectively adding additional and official format support to Vegas 8 for DV. There were a number of issues we encountered which lead us to provide beta driver support for Vegas 8 and never advance to “release drivers”. There have been some big changes in Vegas 9 so I’m hopeful that those past issues will be resolved as we’d love to have official release drivers for Vegas and the flexibility to work with multiple codecs so that customers can choose which ones they want to use. Vegas has a very loyal following as it works differently to other NLE software and that’s one of its attractions and that’s why we’d like to provide full support for it. My reference to Premiere Pro is only because I know that we have official DV support there that will work if you need to do DV work right now but I’m guessing you want to stick with Vegas if it’s already the NLE that you use 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Michael,

It sounds as though you’ve got either the original DeckLink HD Extreme or the DeckLink HD Extreme 2 card. Your problem sounds odd and I think it’s going to be easiest to fix by talking with one of our technical support staff at your closest Blackmagic Design office. They will be able to take you through a few tests to work out why the genlock keeps deactivating when you launch your graphics software. That’s a really weird problem but not one that is related to the topic of this thread and I don’t think it will be an easy one to solve via correspondence. Some of our support staff are at NAB this week but will soon be back in the office and will be very happy to work through the problem with you over the phone.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Russel,

Thanks for letting us know what you’ve managed to test so far and what troubleshooting you’ve already been through. While it’s starting to sound like a card problem, it would be great if you could test with a different HDMI display to be sure. Is that something you can test before contacting tech support?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bob,

That sounds like sound advice (sorry I couldn’t help it!). As Baz mentioned, decks like the Digibeta and HDCAM will only support up to 4 audio tracks so Steve might need to use a D5 (which supports 8 channels) if he wants all 6 channels on tape. Of course the HDCAM SR supports up to 12 channels but would be more expensive to use.

Thanks for introducing another approach to Steve’s workflow. It’s good to consider completely different ways of approaching the same problem.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Nick,

The UltraScope requires that you have a monitor with a 1920×1200 resolution which is very common on 24″ DVI-based LCD computer monitors. As far as I can see, the computer you are considering only has VGA output and only at a maximum resolution of 1600×1280. If I understand its specifications correctly, once you add the UltraScope card in to it’s optional PCI Express riser card, you could not add a regular x16 lane PCI Express graphics card so I don’t think this computer would be suitable. Maybe I’ve overlooked something in the specifications but that’s my quick analysis of that computer model.

You should also consider whether you want a rack or tower style PC for use with UltraScope. Many rack-mountable, server type computers (“pizza boxes”) are very noisy and not something you want anywhere near you when concentrating on video and audio quality. Some tower PC’s can also be noisy but there are plenty which are whisper quiet. Many rack-mountable, server type computers are designed to run “headless” to cut down on cost and so they will have little or no graphics support. UltraScope requires that you use a 1920×1200 resolution monitor which in turn will require a x16 lane graphics card with DVI output. We’ve tested with several graphics cards and we’ve found some really expensive ones which aren’t suitable and some really affordable ones which work perfectly. We’ll be publishing that information shortly before UltraScope ships so that you can find a PC that is very affordable and perfectly adequate for use with UltraScope.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design