Luke Maslen
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks Aaron,
That is good to know.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Keith,
Unfortunately I’m not at all sure you could use Intensity Pro with Vegas and a DV codec as all the testing we conducted with Vegas was with uncompressed codecs and I think there was some reason for that (which escapes me) but had to do with Vegas supplying it’s own uncompressed codec format.
If you happen to have Premiere Pro CS3 or CS4, then you can certainly use it to play out your DV media through the Intensity Pro card and monitor via its component analog outputs or the HDMI output. Intensity Pro has a choice of several compressed and uncompressed codecs when using Premiere Pro so that might be a solution for you.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Robert,
I’m not sure about the codecs you are using but a common problem which leads to poor performance in After Effects is that you might be using <Standard Preview rather than RAM Preview. You should be able to see real time playback with the RAM Preview function.
Standard Preview uses the Space Bar to play back your video and this will appear slow. Use the 0 key on your numeric keyboard to use RAM Preview to play back video and audio.
Hopefully this will make a big difference to what you see after the video has first been rendered to RAM.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Steve,
I’m guessing a little here but this is what I think is happening. You can find some information in the Apple document Final Cut Pro 6 Working with High Definition and Broadcast Formats. On page 21, it mentions the following.
Important: If your computer has a PCI graphics card installed and you are logging or capturing HDV footage, Final Cut Pro does not preview video or audio in the Log and Capture window. You can still log and capture, but you need to use your HDV camcorder display to preview video.
We also have a somewhat dated support note on our web site named HDV capture preview missing in Final Cut Pro HD 5.0. The key point in the article is that this problem can be resolved by switching of the extended desktop provided by a Multibridge or DeckLink. To do so, open your System Preferences and click on DeckLink or Blackmagic (depending on your driver version) and configure the following preference. When not playing video, send Black to all the video outputs. Restart the Mac and I think this will fix your problem.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Margus,
Multibridge uses the same 3D LUT system as HDLink Pro. So if your Cinetal LUT tables work with the HDLink Pro, they should also work with Multibridge 🙂
Multibridge applies the 3D LUT’s to all outputs whereas HDLink Pro and HDLink Optical Fiber provide the option to only apply the 3D LUT’s to your display or to apply it to the SDI loop-though output(s) as well. However my belief is that you only need the Multibridge for your intended workflow.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Margus,
That’s a really common problem and it often happens if you switch between using Firewire for DV or HDV and then back to a capture card for uncompressed input or output. Switching to Firewire settings will disable the external video monitoring and you have to manually switch it on again when you next want to use your capture card.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Baz,
[Baz Leffler] “… but I am not sure if it needs an SDI input or can ‘add’ the audio channels and create an SDI data stream – I will leave that one for Luke to answer.”
Thanks for raising this point. Yes, to embed the AES/EBU audio channels in to SDI video, an SDI video signal is required. It could be any SD or HD format but some kind of SDI video signal must be present, even just color bars. In Final Cut Pro, one can then choose to capture both SDI video and audio or just capture the audio.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Baz,
Clearly UltraScope is always going to need to work with uncompressed video input so whatever solution we provide has to be able to handle 10-bit SD and HD without any question of exceeding the bandwidth of the connection to the computer.
In regards to capturing to a compressed codec, our capture cards still need to handle the full bandwidth of an uncompressed capture because that’s what the card receives on its input regardless of to what compressed codec you might then decide to use when saving movies to disk. So the PCI Express or ExpressCard interface still needs to be able to handle full uncompressed video bandwidth and then you can choose whether to save to an uncompressed or compressed video file. Our capture cards work fine with ProResHQ on Mac Pro’s and it’s a nice codec if you don’t have the capacity for uncompressed video but it’s even better to stay with uncompressed for maximum quality if you can. Computers and hard drives are always getting faster so I’m sure we’ll all be editing uncompressed 2K on laptops in the future 🙂
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Robin,
I can’t say that it will never have a downconverter but I haven’t heard any discussion of it and I don’t think we’ve received many requests for it. By contrast, we’ve had lots of requests for a downconverter in the Mini Converter SDI to Analog so that’s why our engineers have spent months working on a high quality down converter for the Mini Converter. It’s not something we ever advertised or promised when the Mini Converter SDI to Analog first shipped and it’s just something that we’ve decided to add now because of the feedback we’ve received. It’s great to be able to add these features but downconverters can look bad and we wanted a really good quality one for the Mini Converter. It would take months more to develop one for the Broadcast Converter and we just haven’t received enough requests to justify the engineering time so far. Of course sometimes these things change and we always listen and react to change so if enough people ask for it, we’ll definitely consider it and see if it is possible to do. Sometimes we also have other things we want to add to a product and we might have to make a choice about what we want to add.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Julius,
Unfortunately there isn’t any diagnostic software for it and you’ve already tried everything that you could by trying to apply a firmware update via USB on two different computers. I think that a chip needs to be reprogrammed on the unit itself but that could only be done by one of our support offices. That’s my best guess as it’s hard to know what has really gone wrong given the unit is second hand and presumably we don’t know if it was previously working or not. If you can return the unit and get your money back, I would suggest you do that.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design