[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the link. You mentioned that you can capture composite video plus analog audio from the old Sony BVW 25 and that you can also play video and audio from the deck to a video monitor and speakers. However when playing back video and audio from the timeline of Final Cut Pro, through the deck to the attached video monitor and speakers, you cannot see any video or hear any audio.

If you set the deck to record, and then play out from the Final Cut Pro timeline, is your video and audio recorded on tape even if you cannot monitor it via the deck’s video and audio outputs while recording? If so, then my suggestion would be to perform your monitoring via the spare DeckLink outputs while capturing from or playing back to the deck.

If you find that you cannot record to tape, then presumably there must be some setting in the deck that has to be changed, or else the deck is malfunctioning. Has this deck previously accepted composite video input via the Video In BNC port or has it only been used with the Camera input?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jason,

I believe the problem you are seeing first appeared with Final Cut Pro 5.0 and that your deck would have worked fine with Final Cut Pro HD 4.5. Does that match what you are seeing? If so, please email support[at]blackmagic-design.com and just mention you are using a Panasonic AJ-D950 and experiencing capture problems. We will email you a solution which should work with your model of deck.

Incidentally, I believe you will find that Blackmagic Deck Control has no problems capturing from your Panasonic AJ-D950 deck using the DeckLink RS-422 control.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

[iManvideo] “I’m not concerned about 720p/50 as the JVC does not shoot in that format, it is 25p only.”

I understand this so I’m interested in your workflow and that’s why I was asking if you also use non-JVC hardware with your video. Once you capture in 720p25, what do you do with it? Do you send it to broadcast in that format or do you down convert to PAL SD and send to broadcast. Do you create DVD’s in SD or HD formats? I’d really like to know what you do with 720p25 material as I don’t believe it’s a mainstream standard and am wondering how you get on for compatibility with decks, monitors and other video hardware unless you are confining your workflow to exclusively using JVC hardware.

[iManvideo] “There are thousands of JVC users in PAL land who have to shoot 720p/25p as it is the only format the camera shoots on.”

I’m sure there are plenty of JVC users shooting in 720p25 but the question is whether many of them are using Final Cut Pro with this format and therefore whether we should add this format to our cards. We’ve received very few requests for 720p25 support for the simple reason that prior to September 26th, 2006, Final Cut Pro did not support HDV 720p25. It’s great that Final Cut Pro now supports this format and we’ll keep an eye on it to see if it’s something that a good number of people want. I’d be surprised if thousands of people have adopted this support in Final Cut Pro in the very brief time this new feature has been available but I’m happy to learn otherwise.

The only reason not to add new formats immediately is just that there are so many other exciting developments that we’re working on and 720p25 isn’t on the top of the list. 720p25 is not something we’ve advertised or promised but we’ll definitely consider it.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Given that you already have a LaCie disk, you’ve got nothing to lose by trying. If you find your work demands more disk speed than can be provided via Firewire, you can always look at other options.

If portability is not an issue for you, then you could use the built-in RAID facility in the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has 4 disk bays with plug-in disk carriers. You can bolt a SATA II disk to the carrier and push it into place without needing to fiddle with any power or data cables. It’s a very clever design.

We ran some tests on this in our lab and mounted 3 x 500 GB SATA II disks into the three empty bays, and striped them with RAID 0 for a 1.5 Terabyte internal disk array. We only used three disks because the fourth disk is used as the Mac OS X system disk. Testing was conducted using the following model of hard disk: Seagate 500Gb 7200rpm 16Mb 3.5″ SATA II [ST3500641AS].

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reported about 170 MB/sec which was easily fast enough for HD uncompressed 10 bit. However this three-disk internal solution is more suited to people needing simple capture and playback of HD, such as designers and effects artists. They just want simple clip capture and playback and the built-in three-disk array is a great solution for them. There are also newer 750 GB disks, which are faster, and so performance could increase further.

For editors who have hundreds of cuts and/or effects in their projects, we would strongly recommend an external disk array with multiple disks.

You’re only working in SD so I’m sure the 3 disk array would be fine for your purposes. However if you want portability, then the Firewire drive would be nice.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Gunleik,

When you have a chance and you’re not in the middle of a job, please update to the DeckLink 5.7.2 drivers. If the card then fails to respond, would you please collect the information requested in my first reply. It would also be great if you could test your theory of a driver conflict with MOTU by uninstalling the MOTU software. Does that overcome the problem?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Yes this is normal behavior with the newer drivers. We’d had requests to make the Playback window default to output when Blackmagic Deck Control was launched. In the past it used to default to showing the Deck output. Well spotted!

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for posting the solution to this problem. I’m sure that must have been a somewhat painful process to work through but it’s great you’ve got it all sorted out now and can sleep at night 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Leonardo,

This is a developer question and I’m not a developer so I don’t know the answer. However if you are using the DeckLink 5.7.2 drivers for Windows, then please download the DeckLink SDK 5.7.2 for Windows XP from software downloads.

If you have any further problems, you can email the developer mailing list for help. If you have not done so already, you can subscribe to the Blackmagic developer mailing list. You can post questions there and receive answers from other developers and also from our engineers.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

I can’t find the post to which this refers. Can you give me the subject or a link to the old article?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

The Sony J-H3 deck has an optional Firewire board which will down convert your HDTV 1080p23.98 to compressed DV25 NTSC material. This might well have some uses but DV25 is a low quality compressed codec which defies the point of working in HD in the first place. The DeckLink HD Extreme card will enable you to capture uncompressed video from the HD-SDI output of the Sony J-H3 deck and you can choose either to capture it as uncompressed for maximum quality or else capture to a professional compressed codec such as DVCPRO HD. This will provide you with much better quality and resolution than DV25.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design