[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Yes it can work for standard definition but definitely not for high definition. We often use LaCie Big disk drives connected to the Firewire 800 port of the Mac. These Firewire drives contain two hard disks which I think are striped together and work surprisingly well for 10-bit capture and playback. If you have complex edits and effects, you might well encounter speed issues, ie dropped frames. However this solution does work well for 10-bit SD capture and play back and might be adequate for your needs. It’s pretty handy to be able to pick up a Firewire drive with 500 GB or more of 10-bit captures on such a portable solution.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sean,

I’m glad you worked that out and thanks for posting the solution as I’m sure that will help someone else.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Margus,

We released DeckLink 5.7.2 drivers yesterday and while it would be a good idea to update, they do not include a fix for the problem you are seeing in Premiere Pro 1.5.1. I would expect that fix in the next update which will presumably be DeckLink 5.7.3.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jasmine,

[Jasmine1919] “what a nice picture of the back of the machine”

Those pictures are linked from Sony’s web site. I take no credit for them 🙂

[Jasmine1919] “what i gathered is that the computer does not need the ext.sync signals anyway”

That is often true if you have a simple setup consisting of just a computer and a deck. If you need to connect to other decks and computers, then you will need external reference.

[Jasmine1919] ” apparently it works perfectly and i have been digitising now over 8 hours”

That’s great news. Thanks for letting me know.

[Jasmine1919] “I went to check the individual quicktime files on the capture scratsh and found that each 30 minute tape had an average of 50 Gb!!! one even took 74Gb!! Is this normal?”

If you choose to capture video in an uncompressed format, it will quickly use up a lot of disk space. You are working with PAL video so the following numbers should provide you with an idea of the amount of disk storage you will need.

625 PAL uncompressed
8 bit @ 720 x 576 @ 25fps = 20 MB per/sec, or 70 GB per/hr.
10 bit @ 720 x 576 @ 25fps = 26 MB per/sec, or 93 GB per/hr.

If you don’t have enough disk space to cope with uncompressed video, then you will either need a bigger disk array or else you will need to use compression. The quality of uncompressed video is noticably higher than compressed video but you might not have any choice.

If you wish to capture compressed video, launch Final Cut Pro, go to the Final Cut Pro menu and choose Easy Setup. You will find lots of Blackmagic Easy Setups and I suggest you choose Blackmagic PAL – DV50. The DV50 format is also known as DVCPRO 50 and is much higher quality than DV as it uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling. This format also supports Apple’s RT Extreme real time effects so it is probably a good choice as the data rate is only 6.25 MB per/sec, or 22 GB per/hr.

You could use the Blackmagic PAL – DV easy setup and then your video capture would only take 11 GB per/hr. However there will be a visible decrease in quality and so I’d recommend you use DV50.

[Jasmine1919] “Did I change something without noticing or is this really possible?”

My guess is that you might have chosen a different easy setup. Perhaps you switched between using an 8-bit uncompressed easy setup and a 10-bit uncompressed easy setup. In any case, the guidelines above should help.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

That’s a surprising response for a few reasons.

Firstly, we already have 720p50 and 1080i50 support in our Mac and Windows drivers as those are the two standard formats for Europe recommended by the EBU and those are the main HDTV broadcast formats for PAL countries. DeckLink supports capture and playback in these formats but there is one significant technicality that Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 does not yet support 720p50 as a native frame rate. So if you’re using 720p50 in Final Cut Pro, it will work in a Varicam format but not as native 720p50. If you need to capture and/or play back 720p50, you can use Blackmagic Deck Control as it does support 720p50 and then you can work on the video in applications such as After Effects. We’re having ongoing discussions with Apple about 720p50 support in Final Cut Pro so hopefully it will happen soon. Final Cut Pro has no problems with capture and playback of 1080i50 material.

Apple have just added HDV 720p25 support in their latest update to Final Cut Pro 5.1.2. We’ve never previously supported this format as Final Cut Pro did not support it so there wasn’t much point. I’m also unaware of any hardware that will support this format other than recent camera and deck models from JVC so we haven’t received many requests for 720p25. Can you tell me if you have any hardware, other than JVC, that supports this format? We’ll consider adding it either way but it would be helpful to know how widely this format is being used so I can make a case to our engineers.

The reference to NTSC relates to the fact that Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 supports 720p59.94 as a native format and so it can be downconverted to NTSC. However as Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 does not support 720p50 as a native format, there is no way to downconvert it to PAL.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

It’s OK if the Expansion Slot Utility didn’t open automatically. All that means is that the current PCIe profile is fine for use with your card. If you want to manually open it to verify the settings, go to /System/Library/CoreServices/ and you’ll find the Expansion Slot Utility there.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Edward,

Thank you for your kind words and good news. I’m happy that solved the problem.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Pete,

Maybe this is something related to the new audio adjustments. We’ll check this out. Thanks for your report.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Daniel,

I don’t have one of these displays and so can’t test it. It would be very helpful if you could run the following tests:

1. Try monitoring any of the audio outputs of Multibridge Extreme while playing out HD video, eg monitor the RCA analog outputs. Can you hear any distortion? The analog and AES audio outputs are de-embedded from the SDI-embedded audio and so if there is distortion on the SDI audio, there should also be distortion on the other audio outputs. If you find no distortion on the other audio outputs, then that would suggest a problem with how the LCD display is handling the embedded audio of the HD-SDI signal.

2. Quit out of all applications and ensure that your Mac OS X desktop is showing on the Panasonic BT-LH2600W display. Open the System Prefences and click on Sound. Set the Output to DeckLink Audio.

While in the System Preferences, click on Displays and enable the Show displays in menu bar option. Quit from System Preferences. Now go to the Displays menu and set the Number of recent items to 10.

From the Displays menu, change the Television resolution to an SD setting such as 720 x 486, 29 Hz (NTSC). Launch iTunes and start playing some music. Does this sound OK through the Panasonic BT-LH2600W? Assuming that it does, keep playing music and switch to 720 x 576, 25 Hz (PAL). Note whether the audio from the Panasonic BT-LH2600W is clean or distorted. Continue to work through the various 1280 x 720 (HDTV 720) settings and the 1920 x 1080 (HDTV 1080) settings and note whether the audio is clean or distorted for each setting. Are there any resolutions or frame rates at which the display will not correctly display video? If so, how does the audio sound when you select these troublesome video settings.

---

Please let me know what you find for tests 1 and 2.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

It doesn’t matter either way on Mac OS X. On Windows you must install the hardware first.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design