[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jean-Luc,

I was going to ask the same question as Nico but you’ve answered that one. We do plenty of PAL frame rate testing in SD and HD so we know it works.

If your monitor has both SDI and component analog inputs, then I would guess you are using the SDI ouput of DeckLink HD Pro for your testing. Switch to component analog output from the DeckLink HD Pro and see if that helps. Many broadcast monitors fail to detect a change in video format when you connect via SDI but they will happily switch when using analog connections. The DeckLink HD Pro can perform the SDI to analog conversion for you rather than using the SDI to analog board in the broadcast monitor. The quality will be just as good so it is worth trying to see if this makes a difference.

Please let me know what you find.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Adrian,

[Adrian Tecson] “It seems to be happening on the image sequences exported from 10bit only. The exports from 8bit look fine. I’m still using the 5.6 drivers on this test.”

That’s interesting and makes some sense. Can you see if it still happens with the current DeckLink 5.7.2 drivers? If so, we’ll check it out.

[Adrian Tecson] “Another thing i found though is that the 8bit avi exports are crashing AFX7. I haven’t used 8bit avis in a while so I just found this out now. Is this an 8bit/AFX7 bug or did I have a bad avi export?”

Adobe have fixed this problem and we have a support note about it named Serious error when opening AVI’s in After Effects 7.0.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Can you please email the Final Touch crash log to support[at]blackmagic-design.com. It’s strange that it’s crashing now but it didn’t before with the same drivers. That makes me suspect some extra factor is causing the problem but we’ll be able to tell more by having a look at your crash log.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bob,

If you want to back up your Betacam SP tapes to digital media so you could use the digitized material for potential editing in the future, then the Blackmagic PAL JPEG easy setup would be a very good choice. It is a full 4:2:2 color space codec unlike DV. The quality is set to 75% and many people use the PhotoJPEG codec at 75% for broadcast of standard definition material. It’s a little soft compared with uncompressed video but you have to be looking hard to notice and I think you’ll find it to be an excellent choice for backup. As you have also pointed out, the same codec is freely available on Windows so that would make it easy to revive your old material on either a Mac or PC.

You could use DV50 which supports real time effects at full resolution unlike PhotoJPEG. However if you are simply backing up video, then RT effects are not important and the main objective is to have a high quality compressed backup with minimal decrease in quality. PhotoJPEG will do that for you and you won’t have to worry about silly DV field order issues.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Paul,

I’ve passed that on to the engineers. I’m not expecting an immediate reply but I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paul,

We’ve encountered this once before but were never able to reproduce the problem reliably so it is still a bit of a mystery. You’ve provided excellent detail in your report so I’m going to ask the engineers to review your report and see if that helps them track it down.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

I noticed in one of your postings to another forum, you mentioned that you are taking delivery of a JVC HDV dedicated deck. The HDMI output of the JVC BR-HD50U can output 1080i50 when your tape format is 720p25. We’re just about to ship the Intensity and DeckLink HD Studio cards. Both of these cards allow you to capture and play back via HDMI so you can choose to capture to an uncompressed format or choose a professional compressed codec if uncompressed is not an option for you. In addition to the HDMI input and output featured on both the Intensity and DeckLink HD Studio, the latter card also has RS-422 device control and analog inputs and outputs. You could use the component HD analog outputs to connect to your CRT monitor and the picture quality would be excellent. Almost all CRT’s are interlaced and so this workflow might work well for you. The JVC BR-HD50U deck includes an RS-422 port so the DeckLink HD Studio would take advantage of this instead of using Firewire device control. It’s a somewhat different approach to your original plan but I thought I’d mention it in case it is of interest.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Martin,

FrameLink requires Admin privileges as a normal user wouldn’t have the privileges to write to or map a network drive which are required when using FrameLink.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Daniel,

Please let me know your findings when you can as I am keen to find out where the problem lies.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Damon,

As Yves mentioned, you need a token video source in order to capture audio with your DeckLink card. The DeckLink card is basically an SDI card with some additional analog convertors on it. SDI accepts video with embedded audio. If there is no video signal, then there is no signal to carry the audio and that’s why you must have some kind of video source, even if you are using the analog inputs of the card.

I also recommend you see the support notes Voice Over Tool in Final Cut Pro and Apple SoundTrack Pro