[Ninetto Makavejev]

sorry, the above post was intended for Joel, not Simon… but Simon’s post has really helped me further. I truly suspect that my card, “Decklink HD Extreme” cannot play 25p. I would love if someone from Blackmagic would confirm this, as the documentation for this was and is severely lacking.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks for the response Simon, I really want to get to the bottom of this. Can you please confirm that you are using “Blackmagic Playback” in the PREFERENCES/PLAYBACK settings, and that we are talking about a Decklink HD card?
Which drivers are you using for your Decklink?

I too tried letting Premiere simply generate the sequence settings automatically, Decklink will not play that sequence. Only if a set a 50i sequence it will play back as expected via Decklink, but then the sequence settings are wrong for further editing of progresssive AVC-Intra (interlaced/export, etc).

This was a confirmed problem in CS5 but I thought it had been solved in CS6.
It could very well be a software conflict specific to my system.
Thanks.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Quite simple: Premiere can output 25p to the Eizo HD Monitor, playing back the timeline thru the CUDA-assisted native graphic card, using a premiere 1080p preset for the timeline.

But the reason for having a Blackmagic card is so you have more choice and better quality for your output: SDI, HDMI, etc.

Premiere will not playback/pass-thru 25p (1080p) on a sequence with this setting (1080p) if the Blackmagic Player (card) is chosen for output. Nada. This is the problem. The sequence can only be viewed in the Premiere interface window, not on the dedicated monitor.

So: has anyone seen a 1080p (25p) sequence that plays back with Premiere CS6 and Blackmagic as the player/output? It makes no difference if I pick one of the BM-presets or the Premiere standard pre-set for 1080p.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks for the response.
But the material is nothing special: standard AVC-Intra (AVC-100 1080p) from a Panasonic HPX-250. So it certainly is not the material causing the problem.

For a long time I suspected my monitor an Eizo HD2441w was not capable of playing 1080p, but that is not the case. It can. In fact when using a Prem.Pro sequence, and setting the player preference as “ADOBE” (not Blackmagic) I get 25p output from Adobe on the Eizo monitor, it is just never as sharp/clear as the Blackmagic, which I can only get to function when setting a “wrong” sequence with “1080i (50i)”.

I am certain the Blackmagic card/driver is to blame, or some kind of software conflict. I just had hoped it would “just work” as some people had reported, when upgrading to CS6.

I would love to hear of any Decklink owners who can play 1080p in CS6, using Blackmagic as the default player in Premiere. Then I would know I have some other kind of software conflict/wrong drivers.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks much for the heads-up on this.
Have you seen this on other mts files or only from GH2 material?
Stange that it took so long for anybody to notice this, I had other oddities with GH1 100mbps-mts files way back when, but it wasn’t as serious as these artifacts.

best, n.m.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Hmmm, there are several solutions, some people apply a LUT or use TRACK instead of CLIP correction. The dumb and lazy amongst us sends the finished outputed file thru another application in FCP or AE for one-click legalization.

You might want to check out this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/277/15202

esp. the post from Kevin Cannon.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

full range 10 bit (0-1023)

“broadcast safe” 10-bit = (64-940)… or 16-235 in 8 bit

[Ninetto Makavejev]

An update after some tests: well, I am still not quite sure how Premiere handles 709 color space, but the only way I could get a 100% identical DNxHD round-trip was:

1. export from Premiere as 709 DNxHD 10-bit .mov
2. ingest in Resolve setting attribute as “DATA LEVELS”
3. Export from Resolve also with DATA LEVELS (not auto) in the output dialogue

I hope I do not run into any quirks when I finally legalize this project, but it was important to make sure no re-scaling values was occuring in this round-trip.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks. Yeah, it looks like Premiere, not RESOLVE is the culprit here. Although barely documented anywhere, it seems that Premiere works in RGB (0-255) and for anything else you have to set the levels MANUALLY on the the timeline with a levels effect, which seems a bit crazy.

At least according to these posts at the Adobe forum:
HERE https://forums.adobe.com/message/4287643
and HERE https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1138260

So it seems like the easy way to deal with round-tripping Adobe->Resolve would be to export/import with a RGB codec. Finish and legalize/export to 709 in Premiere at the very end.

Or does somebody have a better solution?

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Thanks Stig.
What you write makes perfect sense. It is just that, as I suspected, the logic of Premiere is very murky. Case in point: I can create a block of “black video” in a Premiere HD project and guess what – it creats a black video block of 0, not at 16, which one would expect in a 709 project. I will go thru all the Premiere settings and monitor levels once more and try to get a “round-trip” to RESOLVE that gives consistent results.