[Mark Whitney]

Thanks for the link to that tip. I tried this morning to get to BMD’s support page but the link is broken.

I’ve been going in circles trying to resolve this very issue. Just built a new system and couldn’t use my MultiBridge Pro with it (single lane PCI-e slot instead of 4-lane), so picked up a DeckLink Studio II.

I see no mention of the phono plug needing to be stereo in the manual. Why would anyone suspect that a single channel output would require anything other than a mono jack??? Silly.

The manual states:
Professional analog audio levels and XLR audio connectors are standard on DeckLink and Multibridge products. If you need to connect to consumer audio equipment with analog RCA inputs, enable the option to Use HiFi Audio Levels and use an inexpensive XLR to RCA adapter for each audio connection.

Well, this isn’t quite true. The MultiBrige uses XLR but if you don’t have HDMI access, the only options on the DeckLink breakout cluster are BNC, Phono, and S-Vid.

Anyway, thanks again. I’ll pick up some stereo adapters when I can after the holiday. In the meantime, I’ve been able to set the BMD Control Panel Analog Audio Outs to -12 dB and get by. The distortion fortunately is only on playback and doesn’t actually record to captured clips.

Mark

[Mark Whitney]

I think I understand part of the problems your experiencing. I’m still back with AI 10 but I’m sure the principles are still the same.

When I create an Illustrator file that with be used in AE, I set the Document Setup settings to correspond to the AE comp that’s to be used. Most importantly, I then immediately create a new layer in AI (and keep it the lowest as you work), use the Make Crop Marks tool, then Release. This creates the bounding box that AE will use to set the layer dims later when you import.

Although I’ll work in AI with a stroke color, I often set it to None before exporting and have just a solid Fill color.

AE only sees the highest level of an AI layer so when you import it’ll be like Flattening Artwork for each layer. If you need to have a particular layer in AI as a layer in AE, you’ll have to move it up to to a highest level layer in AI first.

When importing into AE, use Import As: Composition rather than footage or cropped layers. The bounding box you created in AI will set the subsequently created AE comp and it’s layers to the dims you set up to begin with.

Hope that helps,

M. Whitney

[Mark Whitney]

Talking to myself again. Not the first time though …

I finally figured out what was going on so thought I’d add to my post in case anyone else has the same problem sometime in the future.

The documentary that I’ve been working on for some time now is a real Franken-project. When it came to me, it was already a mish mash of clips of varying formats, codecs, frame rates, field order, etc. Ironic, as the film is about classic horror movies. I really wanted to start afresh by re-digitizing everything, but wasn’t allowed that option so I’ve had to work with what I had. As it was, I had to do a great deal of conversions to get 21st century editing software to cooperate. Re-digitizing in this case wouldn’t have mattered as the problem was in the old source tapes.

The edit project is set up for standard D1 specs; 720 X 486, lower fields first. The problem clip though was DV rez (720 X 480) and digitized with upper fields first. In AE, I’d set interpretation for upper but was rendering to lower to conform with the edit timeline.

When selecting a time source in AE to clone from, my normal routine is to find the glitch, position the clone brush cursor over it, hit page up to back up to 1 frame earlier, ALT click the clean spot, then page down and start painting.

As it turns out, the tape dropouts are occurring on one field, not on a full frame. If you think about how video tape is recorded, this makes prefect sense. So, with the source clip interpreting upper and the project set to render lower and backing up to an earlier time point in the AE project to clone, I was essentially canceling my efforts out. Even though it looked like it was working in the project window, the render reality was otherwise.

I eventually resolved the problem by cloning from a later time point but got to thinking how there must be a more elegant, accurate way to do what I wanted. I had a thought and dug back into an older Trish & Chris Meyer book and indirectly found a solution.

I left the source interpretation as it was but then changed the Comp settings to 2X the frame rate, namely 59.94 fps. Now when I page up or down I’m seeing each field and when I double click the source layer, it’s window also reflects this higher frame rate setting. Now when I page up and select my clone source time, I’m actually selecting from just the previous field.

When sending the comp to the render queue, I had to make sure the frame rate settings were at 29.97, but this time the rendered results were what I was expecting. Whew!

M. Whitney

[Mark Whitney]

Matrox was horrible. They dropped full support for the full DigiSuite less than a year after it was introduced.

Boot Camp also won’t allow XP to see more than 2 GB of system RAM on a Mac Pro either. I couldn’t find anything definitive about that either until I spoke with Apple tech support.

At least I’m not dead in the water yet but will have start planning the next move I guess. It can either be migrate to Final Cut Studio, or make the next box a real Windows system. I’ve more invested into the Adobe products learning & plug-in wise at this point though.

Thanks,

M.

[Mark Whitney]

As a last note to this subject, I spoke with Black Magic Designs tech support today.

The short answer is that they don’t officially support Windows XP running via Boot Camp. I’ve Boot Camp 2.2 on the system.

I’ve been running my Multibridge system in that mode for 2 years now so it’s a bit disheartening to run into this problem now with the 7.x updates. I asked for them to put in a feature request to support it, but of course can’t really expect that to happen.

I thought I’d post this in case someone else runs into the same problem and wonders why.

Mark W.

[Mark Whitney]

As a follow-up test, I re-installed the 6.8.3 drivers and had no install error problems. The Premier project opened and played. AE gave me the option again to use the BlackMagic video output under Video preferences and it does in fact send video to the 2nd monitor. So at least I’m back to where I was & not dead in the water.

So, the issue actually seems to be when trying to install the 7.x drivers for some reason. I tried several previous 7.x versions back to 7.3.2 then gave up. I checked the error message last try and it’s specific to msiexec. exe and more particularly to DeckInst.dll.

If I don’t hear back from Tech Support in a few days I’ll try contacting them directly.

M.

[Mark Whitney]

I was hoping NOT to have to resort to that, but …

I did forget to turn off AV software and I’ll give that a try first as I’m having the same issues with the earlier 7.x driver versions.

For both Premiere and After Effects, they’re the CS3 versions with the last updates either had available.

Specifically: AE CS3 Pro 8.0.2.27 dva 2.0.0.127845
and Premiere Pro CS3 3.2.0 (374)

I’ll keep ya posted.

Mark

[Mark Whitney]

I turned off Zone Alarm (firewall app) and performed a Repair from the Multibridge_7.5.msi file. As with the first time yesterday, I get a Windows Installer error message after several Continue Anyway messages. I OK that error to close, but the installer continues anyway.

With Premiere, attempting to open the older project still crashes it. If I create a new, blank project and import the older project, everything does in fact import, but when I try to open the sequence, the timeline builds then crashes Premiere w/o a warning message.

Nor do I have any 2nd monitor output still in After Effects, also CS3.

As I mentioned earlier, fortunately the project is finished but there’s a possibility that I’ll have to create a textless version later on. I guess if that comes about I’ll need to drop back to the BMD drivers I used with it.

In the meantime, perhaps I’ll see if I can get any of the earlier 7.x drivers to work and get everything working fully. Hopefully I’ll hear back from BMD’s tech support as well.

Thanks again,

Mark

[Mark Whitney]

Thanks. I’ll give that a try or perhaps see if the Repair option does the trick.

Poking around last night I did notice under the Program Files/ BlackMagic… folder that there were presets in a ZIP file. I manually copied those to the appropriate spot under Premiere and that did give me the presets back. I’m also able to get Capture to work under Premiere. There’s still something amiss though as the older project still won’t open directly. Nor do I have 2nd monitor output in After Effects.

mark

[Mark Whitney]

Thanks for the reply. I was hopeful, but alas the setting changes didn’t improve the levels increase problem.

Yes, I have QT Pro but I’m exporting out of Premiere CS3 via the Adobe Media Encoder. Although I’ve specifically selected the Black Magic 10-bit codec, QT Pro reports the file as using the Aja Kona v210 codec. This is where the issue first arose (using the Aja Kona codecs) so now I’m not sure what to believe.

In any case, I’ll have to avoid exporting out to Quicktime until I find the solution I guess. Luckily the AVI option worked fine. I’ve avoided updating to the latest BM drivers until this project was finished so perhaps I’ll try that soon.

Mark