[Luke Maslen]

Hi Giuseppe,

You should receive a reply fairly soon although some of the support staff from our Europe office are at NAB so it could take a few days but not too long. I hope they can help you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Helge,

The new DeckLink HD Extreme has all the connections you could possibly need. It has 3 Gb/s SDI in and out which means you can use it for SD-SDI, HD-SDI and even full-resolution (2048 x 1556) real time 2K via SDI via a single SDI cable. If you have dual link SDI equipment, like a HDCAM SR deck, it also includes dual link in and out so you can work in 4:4:4 RGB color mode in HD-SDI.

Aside from SDI, it also has both analog video and analog audio connections for input AND output. The three video cables for analog video switch between component, S-Video and composite analog video. Component analog video can switch between HD and SD and of course S-Video and composite are always SD.

HDMI has become really popular so we include HDMI input and output on the card too! The HDMI color precision is 10-bit 4:2:2.

Reference input is included on the breakout cable and works with both blackburst and Tri-sync signals.

There are a number of other audio inputs and outputs and you can check out all the connections on the DeckLink HD Extreme 3 connection diagram.

If you’re working with high quality video like 2K film, you don’t want any processing happening as it will just be messing with your video. DeckLink HD Extreme is very powerful and allows you to work with uncompressed formats all the way up to 2K so that your video is kept clean and unaltered as you work without any worries about compression artefacts. If you want to work with compressed formats in SD and HD, then we support the same compressed codecs that pretty much everyone supports through Final Cut Pro including ProRes HQ, DVCPRO HD and others. By working in uncompressed video, you get the maximum RT effects and maintain maximum quality without having to do further processing.

In regards to LUT’s, we offer the HDLink Pro and HDLink Optical Fiber products for monitoring using DVI and HDMI displays. They include 3D LUT control so you can tweak your display as required and can also apply the LUT’s to your SDI video output if you want to send it to tape with the LUT’s applied.

I don’t know enough about S3D to comment so I’ll leave that to others but I’m not aware of anything in any of the products you’ve mentioned which might give one an advantage over the other.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Julius,

I wonder if this unit was operational when you received it or whether it was shipped to you in that condition? Are you anywhere near a Blackmagic office where they could check it out?
https://www.blackmagic-design.com/company/

It’s probably out of warranty but if you are near a BMD office, they might be able to check it out for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hey David,

Thank you very much for the reference to that monitor. I’ve checked it out and it looks good so I think we’ll get one soon for testing as HP make some really nice monitors. We already use their 30″ DVI monitor for 2K monitoring but this DreamColor monitor looks very nice for color work. I’ll also do some homework on the Eizo site as we have previously been very impressed with their monitors and I’ll be very happy if they’ve got something suitable.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Baz,

It’s a good idea but one of the reasons why we didn’t make an Expresscard32 capture card was that the bandwidth was marginal and seemed to run slower than a x1 lane PCI Express slot in a computer. This meant that it just wasn’t reliable enough for uncompressed 10-bit capture and playback and we didn’t want to release a product that was on the edge of what would and wouldn’t work reliably. I’m guessing the same issue will be true for the UltraScope but it’s a good suggestion so I’ll raise it with the engineers when they return from NAB.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Nigel,

UltraScope will ship in June so it’s not too far away 🙂 Thanks for your questions.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Robin,

Broadcast Converter has many of the features of the Mini Converters but not all of them and uses different chips as it is bi-directional. The different chips mean that we can’t just add the down converter in to it because it’s completely different code and not designed for the Broadcast Converter.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Baz,

I didn’t know that and that’s very helpful info.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Baz,

You must be getting better intel’ than me as I just asked Matt and posted the response he gave me! I’ll hide his lunch to punish him 😉

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

HDLink Pro currently doesn’t use HDMI 1.3 but I think it could as there’s a lot of spare capacity on the chip in the HDLink so we can probably upgrade the quality with a firmware update. The engineers are at NAB, so I can’t check with them this week, but that is what I recall from hearing some conversations between our engineers. As we’re not currently using HDMI 1.3, this means that any 10-bit YUV or RGB signal received on the HDLink input are output via HDMI as YUV 10-bit. In other words, we perform a colorspace conversion if HDLink receives an RGB signal and is connected to an HDMI display. As you may know, DVI displays are always RGB and are always 8-bit because that is what the DVI standard requires. So any YUV 10-bit or RGB 10-bit signal received by HDLink is output as RGB 8-bit otherwise it wouldn’t work on the DVI display. Finally, while some HDMI displays advertize “10 bit processing”, the displays themselves are usually only 8-bit and I’m confused by whether any displays truly have an all 10-bit RGB path as the technical specifications never seem clear enough on that point. In any case, if there are HDMI displays with an all 10-bit or higher bit RGB path, then we should be able to add a firmware update to HDLink to support that. I’d also be interested in learning of any HDMI displays that readers of this forum believe are fully 10-bit RGB including the display. My feeling is that no processing should be required if the display is 10-bit RGB native so I suspect that “10-bit processing” means that the HDMI display is probably a YUV display but that’s just my speculation. Maybe there are some true 10-bit RGB HDMI displays and I’d love to hear about them as we could then buy some and test with them to see if we can add support.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design