Luke Maslen
Forum Replies Created
-
Hi Jon,
Thank you for highlighting the confusion information on our web site. I have now updated it so hopefully it appears to be consistant. Often when new versions of Mac OS X, FCP, QT or our drivers are released, we do not immediately update our “recommended configuration” notes until some days have gone by and we receive feedback from early adopters of the new software. However in this case it had been left too long and I appreciate your message.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Felix,
OpenHD have certified PC’s from both HP and Dell whereas we have only certified DeckLink cards for use with HP PC’s. The reason for not certifying the Dells is that we received many customer reports regarding the Dell Precision Workstations 650 & 670. Some customers had no problems and found they worked brilliantly. Others could not start up their PC’s after installing a DeckLink card along with other PCI cards, especially some models of SATA cards and also non-NVIDIA graphics cards. Some of these PC’s shipped with NVIDIA cards (and worked fine) and others shipped with other cards and did not always work well. The exact driver version for the graphics cards also seemed to be very important.
The problem for us was that even though there were just two models of these PC’s, the components inside seemed to vary and so we were unable to say that DeckLink cards would work with a particular model of Dell PC as one Dell Precision Workstation 670 could have different components to another Dell Precision Workstation 670.
In short, some of these PC’s work very well but others did not. We had no easy way to determine whether a customer’s Dell Precision Workstation would work well with DeckLink cards and hence the decision not to support them even though they are great machines for many purposes.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Steven,
Do you see it happen on any other model of monitor or is it limited to this one monitor or model of monitor?
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Kurt,
If you are running Mac OS X 10.3.8 and FCP 4.5, then any G4/800 MHz dual processor or faster will be fine with the DeckLink Extreme. If you are running Mac OS X 10.4.3 and FCP 5, then a dual processor G4/1.25 GHz or faster will be fine with the DeckLink Extreme.
The FW800 drive might or might not be fast enough for uncompressed 10-bit capture. It would probably be fine for 8-bit uncompressed or alternatively you could capture in any of the DV, DV50 or PhotoJPEG formats.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Stephen,
We’ve also seen this on our Dell monitors. We’ve investigated and found it does not happen with 1080 HD video as the video takes up the full width of the screen. You can only see it in SD at x1 or with 720p material as these do not fill the display. As Shane mentioned, you will only see it with the brightness turned down.
It’s a strange problem as we haven’t seen it on any other monitors and only on this one model.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi David,
Have you tried setting each of the sequences to 16:9 and seeing if that works? That would be easier than changing the aspect ratio of every individual clip.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Robert,
We’ve tested and replicated your problem and have a scheduled a fix for this coming release. Thank you for your report and sorry for the slow feedback of Christmas – New Year.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi,
I’m not sure what is causing this problem so a few tests might help to narrow it down.
Were you using FCP5 with DeckLink Extreme or were you previously using FCP 4.5? The reason for this question is that FCP5 has a higher memory (RAM) requirements compared with FCP 4.5.
With what functions does FCP go slow? For example, during capture, playback or performing some other function?
Does the problem occur if you create a new project and work with it or is the problem limited to your existing project?
Please shut down your Mac and remove some of its RAM. Then start it up again and see if the problem goes away. If so, then I would suspect bad RAM. If reinserting the RAM causes the “out of memory errors” in FCP again, then it is bad RAM.
This is just a start but should help to narrow down the problem.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Felix,
Our engineers have been working over Christmas and the New Year and I think the next release you will see later this month will address the issues you have raised. Please also note that Dell Workstations are not certified for use with DeckLink cards and are currently unsupported by Blackmagic Design.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Stephen,
Sorry for the delay and yes it is finally close to happening. I think it will be in one of the next couple of Multibridge software releases. The downconversion our engineers have been working on for Multibridge Extreme is what we’re also going to add to Multibridge HD. This means you will be able to set Multibridge HD to downconversion mode which will be perfect for SD dubs. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the new hardware down conversion so I think you’ll be very happy with the results.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design