[Luke Maslen]

Hi Ric,

[rshellhammer] “So, the Decklink HD Extreme does software only downconversions and Multibridge Extreme and DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4 PCI-X have the capability for hardware downcoversions. Right?”

That is correct.

[rshellhammer] “Not sure what you meant by “If you are using a HD deck, then you might well have the optional hardware downconvertor board in the deck and these will often cost around US$15000 but will provide a sharper picture than software down conversion.” Please explain.”

HD decks often have optional internal cards you can add to them such as a down conversion card so you can output SD from your HD tapes. There is no little this would provide a sharper SD image but there is a price to pay for the card and for a deck I use it was about $15000.

[rshellhammer] “The issue is most of our work is still SD.”

If that is the case, then stick with your SD CRT monitor as it is probably better ro SD work than a LCD or Plasma display.

[rshellhammer] “It just seems silly to me to view HD on one monitor, SD on another.”

While it initially would seem strange to do that, CRT monitors are great for showing SD interlaced material whereas LCD displays are progressive displays and are better for HD. So a lot of people would use an LCD display for HD and an old CRT monitor for SD. So don’t throw away your old CRT 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

For connection to a HD deck, we avoid connecting via the breakout cable as this would greatly limit the length of HD-SDI cable you could run to the HD deck. HD-SDI is a demanding standard and that’s why all of our HD cards provide BNC connectors so you can then run high-quality HD-SDI cables from the card to the deck. We have a support note named What kind of cables should I use for high definition video? which I recommend to anyone wanting to know what kind of cables to use for HD. A cable that works fine for SD-SDI will often be completely inadequate for HD-SDI, even over short lengths.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we received quite a few requests to have a short breakout cable as many people just use it for component video monitoring and don’t like a long tangle of other cables for analog input and audio. That’s why the cable is now shorter and it has also allowed us to bring down the price of the card to US$995 which is only $100 more than the SD version of the same card with it’s longer cable. There has never been an SD/HD card offering any where near this functionality which has come clost to the $995 price of the DeckLink HD Extreme card. You would need to pay hundreds of additional dollars to find another card that came close. That means you’ve got change left over to buy only the cables you need at the length you need without having unnecessary cables causing a tangle or still being too short for your needs.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Andrew,

SDI is not limited to 300 feet or 90 meters. We have verified the integrity of HD-SDI signals to over 100 meters which is about 328 feet.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

We still include 7 foot breakout cables with our SD cards as that is what we have always done so we didn’t want to confuse customers by changing that to a shorter cable. However we received quite a few requests to have a short breakout cable as many people just use it for component video monitoring and don’t like a long tangle of other cables for analog input and audio. That’s why the cable is now shorter and it has also allowed us to bring down the price of the card to US$995 which is only $100 more than the SD version of the same card with it’s longer cable. There has never been an SD/HD card offering any where near this functionality which has come clost to the $995 price of the DeckLink HD Extreme card. You would need to pay hundreds of additional dollars to find another card that came close. That means you’ve got change left over to buy only the cables you need at the length you need without having unnecessary cables causing a tangle or still being too short for your needs.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sameer,

The DeckLink HD Extreme has BNC connectors on the card for SDI in, SDI out and genlock/trisync. It also includes a short breakout cable for analog connections and RS-422. This means you can use cables of a length that you decide rather than being limited to the 7 foot long breakout cable that we traditionally used with our SD cards. If 7 feet of component cable is all your friend needs and he only works in SD, then the DeckLink Extreme or DeckLink Extreme PCIe would do. However if the cable run to the deck or monitor is more than 7 feet away, he is still going to need to add on some extension cables. We still include 7 foot breakout cables with our SD cards as that is what we have always done. However we received quite a few requests to have a short breakout cable as many people just use it for component video monitoring and don’t like a long tangle of other cables for analog input and audio. That’s why the cable is now shorter and it has also allowed us to bring down the price of the card to US$995 which is only $100 more than the SD version of the same card with it’s longer cable. I just ran a search on a few online video resellers and found that a 15 foot BNC x3 to BNC x3 cable made by Canare costs around $75. That’s a high quality commercially made cable or else you can make the cables up for yourself (which is what we usually do) and that can be a very inexpensive way of running long cables. I hope this information helps.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bill,

When you first install a DeckLink HD Extreme card in a Mac, Mac OS X defaults to the highest resolution available. That means the DeckLink desktop is outputting at 1920 x 1080 which is why you can’t see it on your NTSC monitor. It also explains why your NTSC projects in Final Cut Pro happily display on the same NTSC monitor. To resolve this issue:

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

You would be fine with any of the DeckLink HD Extreme, Multibridge Pro or Multibridge Extreme. They are essentially the same products as each other but with different combinations of inputs and outputs. The DeckLink card is obviously a PCIe card that is hidden away inside your computer whereas the Multibridge Pro and Multibridge Extreme are external boxes that connect to the computer via a PCI Express cable and a small adapter card. So your first decision will be whether you prefer an internal or external solution.

The second feature to consider is monitoring. By the sounds of it, your facility has not been working in HD in the past and that would probably mean that you don’t have any HD displays for monitoring video. The DeckLink HD Extreme has both HD-SDI and HD component analog outputs which you could use for monitoring but HD CRT monitors can be expensive especially if they have an SDI input. The Multibridge Pro and Multibridge Extreme provide low cost HD monitoring solutions. The Multibridge Pro has an HDMI output which you can use with plasma and LCD TV’s which is great if you need an inexpensive but large display. The Multibridge Extreme can connect via DVI-D to 23″ and 30″ LCD computer displays and also provides a HDMI adapter so you can use HDMI TV’s. Most HDMI TV’s are not full resolution 1920 x 1080 displays even though they accept that signal on their input. That’s where the Multibridge Extreme can be useful as it can output HDTV 1080 video to a full resolution LCD display such as the Apple Cinema HD 23″ display or the Dell 24″ display. Both of these displays have a resolution of 1920 x 1200 and are perfect for pixel for pixel mapping of HDTV1080.

The Blackmagic drivers are mature on both the Mac and PC platforms. Clearly there are many more variations of PC’s than there are models of Macs so we do tend to see more issues on PC than on Mac but I think that is a function of the many differences in components used in PC’s having an impact on how easily they handle uncompressed video processing and data rates.

Dell Workstations are not certified for use with DeckLink cards and are currently unsupported. This is mentioned on our list of Certified DeckLink

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Ric,

Here are the answers to your questions but I also have a question for you at the end 🙂

The DeckLink HD Extreme provides both 1080i and 720p down conversion. In HD720, Final Cut Pro does not include native 720p50 support so we simply support 720p59.94 to NTSC down conversion. In HD1080, we support down conversion of both 1080i59.94 to NTSC as well as 1080i50 to PAL down conversion. All SDI and analog outputs of DeckLink HD Extreme output SD when down conversion is switched on so we simply use software down conversion for that. Multibridge Extreme and DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4 PCI-X have two SDI outputs so we have the additional feature of split HD1080 down conversion with those products so they can simultaneously output both SD and HD1080 video. Alternatively they can use software down conversion to output SD on all outputs from HD1080 or HD720 video. The software down conversion is useful for monitoring if you don’t have an HD monitor and its a feature we’ve added to the drivers at no extra cost. If you are using a HD deck, then you might well have the optional hardware downconvertor board in the deck and these will often cost around US$15000 but will provide a sharper picture than software down conversion.

Now here is my question for you. Have you considered monitoring in HD? In the past HD monitoring was expensive but the price has dropped thanks to pioneering products such as HDLink, Multibridge Pro and Multibridge Extreme. These products enable you to use a 23″ display (such as an Apple Cinema HD 23″ monitor) or a large screen HDMI TV for your HD monitoring. The advantage of using an LCD computer display is that you can have pixel for pixel display of your HD material. A 23″ or 24″ screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels is perfect for display of HD1080 material. If you are doing most of your work in 720p59.94, then you might even want to consider the Multibridge Extreme which supports the Apple 30″ display as well as the smaller displays. The resolution of the Apple Cinema HD 30″ display is high enough to display HD720p at x2. This is great for pixel for pixel monitoring of HD720p material on a big display. If you just need a big display but pixel for pixel mapping is not so important, then you might consider using a Multibridge Pro instead of a DeckLink HD Extreme. The functionality of the Multibridge Pro is essentially the same as the DeckLink HD Extreme except the Multibridge also includes HDMI monitoring which is perfect for use with a large plasma or LCD TV.

Presumably you want to keep monitoring costs down if you are considering using an SD monitor for your HD video and HDLink parterned with a 23″ LCD computer display, or Multibridge Pro partnered with a HDMI TV provide inexpensive ways to monitor your video in high definition. I hope this helps!

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paul,

[Paul Thurston] “The fact remains that it was already established on October 19, in this forum, that Adobe Premier Pro 2.0, with a Supermicro motherboard, QuickTime Pro 7.1.3 and BMD v5.7.2 exhibit the same symptoms as described above.”

Can you please provide the URL to the relevant posting as I’ve looked through a bunch of Oct 19 postings and have not found this information. I need to review that information and see what facts can be established so we can attempt to replicate the problem and then present it to our engineers for resolution. However I can’t do that at the moment as I haven’t found the key posting to which you have referred so the URL would be very helpful.

You might also wish to try the free Premiere Pro 2.0 trial to see if it helps, once you have found a compatible graphics card for your PC.

[Paul Thurston] “Besides, Deck Control from BMD v5.7.2, upon capturing video inserts a 13 frame (audio / video) delay on any 6 second sequence!(it ads/repeats frames as it captures.) Here Adobe Premier has nothing to do with the processes involved. So the fault remains within BMD as not even its Deck Control application can capture correctly with the present BMD / QT software versions involved.”

Where are the frames added or repeated? Does it happen throughout the clip or just at the start or end? Are the added frames blank or do they contain an image from your video clip?

[Paul Thurston] “Downgrading to BMD 5.3.1 and QuickTime 6.5.2 is not the solution either as QuickTime 7.1.3 cannot truly be uninstalled once installed on a PC.”

I am only aware of problems uninstalling QuickTime 7 on 64-bit editions of Windows. Are you running the regular 32-bit version of Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2?

[Paul Thurston] “This explains why I have never been able to capture correctly video / audio from within Premier as I have an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 and this card is not supported.”

Are you going to update the graphics card for compatibility with Premiere Pro? If so, I would be very interested to know if this changes the behaviour you see when capturing with Blackmagic Deck Control.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jaap,

Thanks for clarifying that. Please uninstall the DeckLink drivers and leave them uninstalled. Then launch Final Cut Pro and edit one the standard Apple capture settings and try to make it anamorphic. Does Final Cut Pro still crash or does the problem no longer occur? Once you have finished testing, you can reinstall the DeckLink drivers. I won’t be sure that the DeckLink drivers can be ruled out as part of the problem until you have conducted this test with the DeckLink drivers removed.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design