[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the suggestion which I will pass on. I think there have been various AVI issues on Mac in the past including file size limitations so we’ll need to check for the latest information.

Can you tell me what workflow you have in mind where AVI support on Mac would be useful?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sean,

That’s right and one of the nice things about the PCIe bus in the new G5’s, compared with the previous PCI and PCI-X buses, is that there are no shared buses. Every slot is on its own independant bus and this means one card will not slow down another card 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Dan,

Are you using Premiere Pro 1.51 on Windows XP. Premiere Pro 1.51 has HDV support in it via a third party codec from Cineform. This is really for use via FireWire and if you capture HDV in Premiere via FireWire, it will automatically transocde to an uncompressed format for use with DeckLink HD cards. The HDV codec used in Premiere Pro 1.5.1 is provided by Cineform and the HDV codec on Mac is provided by Apple. You might be able to take the Apple HDV files in to Premiere but I would expect you will have to render them in to the Cineform HDV format for them to work. If you can’t even get that working, please let us know and we’ll do some testing here.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paul,

I don’t suppose you’re running an “old” Medea disk array? I remember when G5’s first appeared, there were a number of strange problems using Medea disk arrays including some strange video problems. I really don’t know if this explains your intermittent problem but, given it has come and gone over a few years, perhaps this might be the consistent factor which would have been present over that time.

I would suggest that you contact Medea with your model of disk array and firmware version and see if they think your problem might be related to firmware. They might have newer firmware for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Kaspar,

Yes, I would expect 16 SATA drives to be adequate especially if they are SATA II drives. The Quad Mac isn’t available yet and nor are PCIe versions of the DeckLink HD series cards but they’re coming soon. Hopefully by the time you can obtain a Quad Mac, these cards will be available as well as PCIe SATA cards and also PCIe SCSI cards.

SCSI disk are more expensive and the increasing reliability of SATA may well mean that it’s days are numbered. However I don’t expect SCSI to die as a technology at least for a while as it is still a tidy way to provide low cost, high speed connections to external devices, such as a bunch of SATA disks housed in a SCSI chassis.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Thanks Sean,

That’s absolutely right. Other formats which fall in to this category include DV, DV50, DVCPRO HD, HDV, PhotoJPEG and 8 & 10 bit Apple Uncompressed 4:2:2 formats.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Keith,

Juan’s advice is spot on. You might also like to review the support note Does DeckLink HD support HDTV1080p/25 in Final Cut Pro? which provides some additional information.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paul,

I don’t think you are losing anything other than the usual security of rendering prior to mastering to tape. I posed a similar question to Apple a while ago and asked why the HDV conforming process takes so long given that you can monitor HDV output from DeckLink HD in real time. I was told this was a “good question” but the HDV support was new at that time and answers weren’t available. With a bit of luck this might mean a faster conforming process in the future but it’s hard to be sure as HDV is a useful but tricky format for NLE’s to process.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for letting us know about your new SATA disk array and those results sound great. It would also be very interesting to hear from you when the disk array is filling up to see if the disk array is still performing well. It will definitely slow down but the question will be by how much?

I just set up an 8 disk SATA II disk array with all drives striped as RAID 0. The speed was only around 148 MB/sec and it connected via a Fibre Channel card. I’m puzzled by the slow performance as it is too slow for HD. So you appear to have done very well 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Peter,

I’m not sure if your HVX-200 system provides any software or codecs for working with DVCPRO HD on Windows. If it does, you should be able to transcode your DVCPRO HD material in to an uncompressed 8 or 10-bit format suitable for use with your DeckLink HD card. Does it provide some software for working with DVCPRO HD on Windows?

On the Mac platform, Final Cut Pro HD provides a DVCPRO HD codec in QuickTime which is then available to all video applications on the Mac as they all support QuickTime.

Unfortunately on Windows, there is no equivalent. I believe that Windows XP Service Pack 2 may have added hardware support for DVCPRO HD via FireWire but does not provide a software codec. So a video application such as Premiere Pro or Vegas would need to provide that and I’m not aware of any application providing DVCPRO HD support at the moment. Even if they did, the support would probably be limited to FireWire captures and might not work with media provided to you via another source, eg on a disk.

There are expensive proprietary systems on Windows which provide DVCPRO HD capture but that doesn’t enable you to share your files with anyone else in your facility or with a client unless they have the same system.

DeckLink cards are built upon open formats so you can give your files to anyone else and they should be able to open them. The most they might need is to download our freeware AVI and QuickTime codecs

I believe your camera also has uncompressed component analog output so one option would be to use your DeckLink HD in conjunction with a (US$1995) Multibridge convertor. The Multibridge will convert your component analog output from the camera in to uncompressed HD-SDI which your DeckLink HD will capture.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design