Luke Maslen
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Adolfo,
Thanks for your encouragement and we do hear you 🙂
We receive a lot of great suggestions from customers and our engineers have a lot of fun turning some of these ideas in to reality. We’d like to make them all today but development takes time and sometimes we are aware of technology changes in the near future which influence the order in which we develop products.
We’ve received a few similar requests to yours from other customers but we’ve also received many requests for other kinds of products too. It’s going to be fun sorting through the requests and working out what to do next. However right now we just want to release the Intensity and DeckLink HD Studio and then we can move on to new ideas 🙂
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Jerry,
In order for PCIe cards to work with more than 2 GB of RAM in the Mac Pro, the cards need a complete 64-bit PCIe implementation. If a card is running at 32-bit, then it will be limited to 2 GB of RAM.
All DeckLink PCIe cards and Multibridge PCIe hardware have a complete 64-bit PCIe implemenation and so you can use the maximum amount of RAM that the Mac Pro can take. 2 GB of RAM is really the minimum that one should consider for video work in the new machines.
As you have noted, some third party cards may limit a Mac Pro to using a maximum of 2 GB of RAM. If a SCSI, Fibre Channel or SATA card only has a 32-bit PCIe implementation, then you will need to confine the memory to 2 GB of RAM even though DeckLink and Multibridge support more. It is also worth checking with the vendors of those cards to see if they can support over 2 GB of RAM.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Brian,
Be careful, you might end up with a BOB Zelin 😉
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Brian,
Please check out the DeckLink HD Extreme as I believe it may have the features that you want at a very attractive price. The DeckLink HD Extreme is a PCI Express card whereas the Multibridge Pro is an external box that connects via PCI Express. It is very similar to the DeckLink HD Extreme but also includes HDMI monitoring and can be used as a standalone convertor when not connected to your Mac. This is nice as most capture cards become out of date after 2 or 3 years but the Multibridge Pro will still provide service as a digital to analog and analog to digital convertor long after it’s days as a capture/playback device are over. The current generation Multibridges are very reliable as is the DeckLink HD Extreme. They also run on both Mac and Windows and the drivers for both platforms are a free download from our web site.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your feedback about the JPEG codec. That’s great news and at 6.3 mb/sec is tiny and is only half the rate of DVCPRO HD which is about 14.5 MB/sec with audio.
[Peter Gruden] “On HD studio printed leaflet that I got at IBC it clearly says that it supports 720/50p, while on Blackmagic home page this format is missing.”
The good news is that 720p50 is supported but Final Cut Pro does not yet support 720p50 and so sometimes we mention it and sometimes we don’t. I guess we should add it to the web site if it’s on the brochure but I can imagine some customers buying cards and then finding that they can’t do 720p50 editing in FCP even though we mention support for it. Premiere Pro supports 720p50 on Windows and Blackmagic Deck Control supports 720p50 on Mac OS X. I’m just hopeful that an update to Final Cut Pro will allow for native 720p50 editing soon. Thanks for pointing this out.
[Peter Gruden] “In the previous thread you are also saying that there is no 720/50p.”
I did? Can you please give me the link as I can’t find it. Maybe I need to correct or clarify a previous post.
[Peter Gruden] “I was asking about the possibility of HDMI to DVI conversion at Blackmagic and Convergent Designs and got different answers from different people.”
HDMI to DVI conversion is a tricky topic so I’m not surprised you received different answers. DVI displays expect an 8-bit RGB signal at a fixed frame rate, typically 60 Hz. However television rates are 25 or 29.97 Hz and so cannot be directly displayed by a DVI monitor.
Add to this the fact that all of the HDMI sources I have seen are YUV and not RGB and you can see that there is going to be a problem outputting directly to a DVI display without the need for some kind of converter.
Let us suppose you were to capture YUV from a Sony HDR-HC3 camera or a HD-DVD player. There is no way that attaching a HDMI to DVI cable to Intensity (or to the camera or HD-DVD player) is going to allow you to use a DVI monitor to display your video as the video will be a the wrong frequency and will be YUV. It would be best just to use a HDMI TV which allows for a range of frame rates and will accept both YUV and RGB video. If you really want to use a DVI display for your video, I would suggest you check out HDLink and Multibridge Extreme which both provide DVI monitoring and include an adapter for use with HDMI displays.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Chris,
Can you please temporarily interrupt your workflow by connecting the Composite Y output of the DeckLink SP directly to your NTSC monitor. Does the monitor now display a desktop? This will help understand if the deck is introducing a technicality.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Peter,
While we don’t want to have a confusing array of codecs, if the demand is there and it seems to work well, there is always that possibility of adding a new codec especially if we haven’t already added something similar. I’ll mention your comments to the engineers.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
[Peter Corbett] “Can the Intensity operate alongside a standard Decklink in the same PC to allow monitoring to a HDMI monitor or can only one BM card operate in a PC at a time? Now that would be useful.”
Hi Peter,
In the current implementation, the dual-card support is just for two Intensity cards working with On-Air 2.0. We’ve had multi-card support on Windows (via DirectShow) for some while and we’d live to add this support to Mac. It’s not something we’ve advertised but I think it should be possible in the future for our drivers to support capture via a DeckLink card and then playback via Intensity in the same computer. Right now that feature is not provided but we’ll look in to it after the show and see what our engineers can do as it would be nice feature.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Jerry,
I don’t have a Prospect system to test. What I can tell you is that the Online JPEG solution results in great quality and we’re very happy to finally have a compressed codec for our Windows users which can be used in both SD and HD and which retains the full 4:2:2 color space. Best of all, there will be no extra cost for this codec. We’ve wanted to have a codec for Windows users which cost little or nothing so that when you capture a movie with it, you know that others will be able to read it. We’ve looked at a bunch of commercial, proprietary, open source and free codecs and found many technicalities with their adoption. Finally we’ve settled upon a codec that not only looks great but can be used by anyone without having to pay anything extra.
As soon as we release the drivers on our web site, I recommend that you try them and see for yourself what you think of the results. I think you will be very happy.
The nature of JPEG codecs is that the data rate is not fixed (unlike DV, HDV and DVCPRO HD) and so the data rate will fluctuate to preserve the full 4:2:2 color depth of the captured material. It won’t just throw away color information to conform to a data rate. However one way to answer your question is that you can certainly capture and playback full resolution HDTV (1920 x 1080) with a single hard drive.
Can I ask what is the source of your video, ie what model of camera or deck? If you can just capture directly from the camera or deck via SDI or HDMI, that would eliminate the technicalities of converting from HDV via Firewire to SDI for no additional quality of image.
Finally, capturing in an uncompressed codec is always going to provide superior results to a compressed capture. This is particularly noticable when adding graphics and titles to video as they can suffer from becoming “soft”. For the sharpest graphics and titles, I would recommend you use an uncompressed capture codec, even if it is only 8-bit rather than 10-bit.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi,
Proc Amp will be added for DeckLink HD Extreme soon. I think most of the work for that is done but just got held up because of preparations for the IBC show.
Please see the support note “Component analog video. Betacam or SMPTE?” for information about which option you should choose.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design