[Luke Maslen]

Hi Dean,

I’m not familiar with this problem. Would you please experiment with rendering to the Blackmagic 8 bit and 10-bit AVI codecs and also to the Blackmagic Motion JPEG codec. Now try these files in other applications and let me know what you find. It’s weird as I haven’t heard of other reports of this.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

If you don’t want the DeckLink desktop, just go to your System Preferences>DeckLink and disable the Desktop option. Restart your Mac and the desktop feature will be disabled but you will still be able to preview to your broadcast monitor via the DeckLink card using video applications such as Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Mike,

The engineers are still at NAB but this is the final day and then most of them will head back to the office. My current believe is that the new drivers should be released in about 1.5 weeks.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

Did you manage to find one of the engineers at our booth? I know they were swamped and it might have been a little tricky to get near them. However I hope you managed to catch up and have a chat.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

Thanks for the link and I missed the new information as it was buried in the detail of the press release itself and not on the main press releases page.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

[David Newman] “I’m supprised anyone at BlackMagic would want to suppress this information (maybe you’re not keeping up with all the press releases.)”

This comes as news to me as I’m not aware of any Cineform announcement regarding support for DeckLink cards and there’s no conspiracy of suppression – I just can’t find this informaton on your web site. I’ve just reviewed the press releases on the Cineform web site and can’t find mention of this anywhere. The only one I could find was in relation to Intensity. Can you please post the link to the relevant press release as this would be good info to have.

Every compressed codec has its pros and cons so it’s good that customers can choose to use Cineform if you’re now supporting DeckLink cards and presumably this also means you are now supporting Multibridge hardware too as they are essentially external DeckLink cards?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Wynn,

That is a significant observation and might indicate a disk-related problem. If you can capture to PhotoJPEG, DV and DV50 without problems, but find that either or both of uncompressed 8 and 10-bit encounters problems, then it seems likely that your disk array is not running fast enough for uncompressed video. I notice you are running a G4. What are you using for disk storage for your video captures? If you’re just trying to capture to a single internal disk, that will not be adequate and would explain your problems.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paulo,

We’ve never advertized support for Vegas 7. The Vegas documentation states that they had tested some of our cards for SDI capture and playback with Vegas 7 as well as analog monitoring. However they did not verify that analog capture would work and indeed there are definitely problems with analog capture and Vegas 7. We’d really like all our products to work perfectly with Vegas 7 and we’ll continue to pursue that goal but in the meanwhile we’re not advertizing support for Vegas 7 until we can be sure that everything works well together.

Premiere Pro can be used to batch capture files which you can then take to Vegas 7. I would suggest capturing to an 8-bit uncompressed AVI format for ease of use when moving the files to Vegas 7.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Wynn,

DeckLink 5.7 and newer drivers are Universal Binary drivers which were developed for use with Final Cut Pro 5.1.x. They are not tested with Final Cut Pro 5.0.x and so if you’re running the latest drivers, I do not know how well they would be working with your copy of Final Cut Pro 5.0.4.

My first suggestion to you would be to quit out of Final Cut Pro and launch Blackmagic Deck Control. Go to the preferences and choose an NTSC easy setup and set the location of your disk array for captures. Now use Blackmagic Deck Control to perform the 30 minute capture.

If this works fine without drop outs, then the issue may well be that you are running all the latest Mac OS X and DeckLink updates but an older version of Final Cut Pro and there is some incompatibility. If so, experiment with reverting to the DeckLink 5.6.2 drivers which were the last specific PowerPC drivers designed for use with Final Cut Pro 5.0.4. Do these older drivers help to provide compatibility with the older Final Cut Pro and so overcome the dropouts?

If the same problem occurs when capturing with Blackmagic Deck Control, then the issue is not specific to Final Cut Pro and we will need to examine this further to find the cause of the problem. Please let me know how you go with the Deck Control test and then we’ll take it from there.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi John,

The short answer is “no”. We looked at adding specific Cineform support to DeckLink cards but decided against the idea and instead have provided a free full-resolution real-time Motion JPEG codec which you can use instead in both HD and SD.

The Cineform guys have added specific support for the Intensity card to this software but not for the other Blackmagic cards.

The Motion JPEG codec we have provided can be used by anyone regardless of whether or not they have Blackmagic hardware. That’s a real advantage if you need to share your movie clips with other people as they don’t have to buy anything extra to use them. The Motion JPEG quality is set to 95% so the quality is always excellent and yet the file sizes are small and you can capture full-resolution 1920×1080 video to a single hard disk.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design