[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

That sounds weird. Given that reverting to the previous drivers does not help, is there anything else that changed when you first updated the drivers, eg any Mac OS X, QuickTime or Final Cut Pro updates? Does the same problem occur (with the audio) if you use Blackmagic Deck Control instead of Final Cut Pro?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

I wonder if the HDMI adapter supports SD video? I’ve previously encountered an HDMI board for a Plasma monitor which only supported HD. It came up in a post about half a year ago in this forum but I haven’t found it yet. Can you please try testing the SD functionality of the HDMI board, preferably with the HDMI output of a camcorder when playing back SD material?

If the HDMI board definitely supports SD, then please email support@ blackmagic-design.com and we can send you a utility to interrogate the HDMI board of your monitor. This might help reveal why SD isn’t working.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Stefan,

If you need to connect to a Betacam SP deck, a Digitbeta deck and the analog outputs of your HDV camera, then the DeckLink HD Extreme card would be the best option for you.

If you don’t need to connect to Betacam SP and Digitbeta decks, then the Intensity Pro would be the right card for you.

To what other hardware did you used to connect your DeckLink SP card, ie what monitors or decks? How did you acquire Digibeta files given that the DeckLink SP doesn’t capture from a Digibeta?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

I can’t see why not as it’s simply another codec and we always want to support the latest codecs. Another question is how well the codec will work with various video applications on Mac and Windows. We’ll know more when the camera and codec are released.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

Our advertising for Intensity doesn’t mention DVCPRO HD we’d usually assume that most DVCPRO HD users were going to connect to a some kind of deck. In your case you’re not doing that as you simply want to capture your material and monitor it prior to distribution via the web. So you don’t need to pay more for connections to a deck and the Intensity should be a perfect fit for your needs.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Dan,

You don’t need the Intensity card in addition to your existing setup and I just mentioned it for anyone else reading this thread who needed to connect to the Sony HDV deck but doesn’t need to connect to analog or SDI decks.

I would also have expected the 10-bit SDI capture to look the same as the 8-bit SDI capture but we don’t have the Convergent box so I can’t test that at the moment.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Mike,

Yes, the codecs in the Intensity, DeckLink and Multibridge drivers are the same, including the MJPEG codec. This means you could use a DeckLink HD Extreme to capture from the HDCAM to a single hard disk using the MJPEG codec and you’ll only need a Firewire 400 connection to the external hard disk. You can then take that drive to another system which has an Intensity card and use the same MJPEG material 🙂

While you can capture to a single disk, it would be preferable to use a Firewire enclosure which contains two disks which are RAID’ed together. Most manufactures make both 1 and 2 disk versions of their Firewire drives and the 2-disk models are obvious as they are both thicker and heavier than the 1-disk models.

The extra bandwidth in Firewire 800 is nice to have but Firewire 400 is far more common and less expensive and is perfectly adequate for MJPEG capture and playback. If you really need extra speed, consider copying the captured material to an internal 7200 rpm SATA II disk with 16 MB of cache.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Alfred,

If you were at NAB, you have probably already seen the awesome quality of the component analog output of the Intensity Pro connected to a Sony BVM 26″ monitor. I expect the down conversion to be very good but we’ll also run some comparison tests with the Sony deck to see how they compare. We’ve got a very full testing schedule leading up to the release of the card but hopefully we’ll be able to squeeze in this additional test too. Thanks for the suggestion as it is a good one that we should do internally to make sure that the down converted quality is as expected.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Keith,

The problem we’ve observed only occurs in Blackmagic Deck Control and does not affect Final Cut Pro? Can you test a capture with Final Cut Pro and see if the problem still occurs?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Erik,

Thank you for your information. I’ve spoken with a HDLink engineer and it sounds as though this is probably fixable with a firmware update and we’re intending to release an update in about a month. We’ll need to replicate the problem in order to fix it and I think your original posting has all the details we’ll need to replicate it. We’ve got your email address so we can seed you a fix when it is ready to see if it helps with your HDLink.

Thanks for testing out the problem and narrowing it down to the HDLink audio. That’s a great help and we hope to have a solution for you very soon.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design