[Ninetto Makavejev]

I know that it neither helpful nor proper entiquette to simply complain about a product, but after years of struggling with a Decklink HD-extreme cards on various systems, I would be very cautious about recommending BMD-products until I see the proof that they reliably work.

Really, for VERY simple tasks, the Decklink card would do its job, e.g. capturing from DigiBeta, etc. but as soon as it had to play ball with Premiere ( I have used various versions of the Decklink cards since Premiere CS3) it was touch-and-go, tons of illogical glitches that never really went away. Such simple stuff like the presets for 25p / 1080 just never worked. Why on earth are the presets there then?

Maybe some of the other BMD-products fare better, but I am very skeptical. If I didn’t still have to deal with DigiBeta I would have long got rid of the Decklink card.

The problem with pixel-ratios you mention is pretty common with Quicktime/OSX, so that one cannot be blamed on BMD at least…
Anyway I wish you better luck and thanks at least for a chance to blow off some steam! best, ninetto

[Ninetto Makavejev]

To be more in-your-face: “several times a week” = once per day. Assuming 7 days equals a week… One post “answered” per day.

Is that a benchmark BMD is proud of?

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Patrick Sproule, with all due respect even if statistically your claim of “several times a week” pans out (even “several” seems a bit pithy for an international company) it is the QUALITY of the answers/reponses that is truly lacking.

Rare indeed are the threads where active help and follow-ups are offered. More often than not the thread dies a quiet death, with very little concrete info indeed. I myself have had BM-reps react to a post/problem with a question, but when I promptly replied there was no follow up.

Why bother to ask a question if you are not really interested in responding to the answer?

Sorry, really low marks for this forum from my experience.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Audition will work fine, and the BM inputs too, if you have selected them correctly.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

I also had a very “un-smooth” start with BM-HD Extreme and Premiere 5.5
Same problem you describe with playback.

It seems to me, that often Adobe and BM drivers want to interpret the material differently. E.G. I could never get 1080p material from my DSLR to play with BM. UNTIL rather than using the sequence pre-set that Adobe would “automatically” select (you describe this procedure of dropping the material on the “new sequence” icon), ich set up a 50i sequence manually (new item>sequence>50i) and dropped the DSLR material in the sequence. Violá. End of problem. Adobe had somehow been setting up some sort of 25p sequence that BM did not like.

Have you tried setting up a different sequnce/project that what Adobe “expects”?

best regards, ninetto

[Ninetto Makavejev]

OK, played around with all combinations of sequence settings/presets, and this is what I have discovered:

For some reason when displaying previews BM Decklink can always interpret the material in the correct way, irregardless whether the material is 25p, 50i, etc. It is almost as if Decklink is just grabbing the stream from the adobe player.

HOWEVER, as soon as you create a sequence, unless the sequence has exactly the same format as the original material you (or at least I) ran into problems. Strange thing is, Premiere was interpreting the footage as 25p and BM Decklink would only play the edited material when I placed the shots in a 50i sequence. Then all was fine.

Yes I know some cameras pack 25p into 50i containers, but why should this conflict between Adobe/BM Decklink interpretation occur?

Anyway I am very happy now that I have solved the problem, it took only 4 hrs!

[Ninetto Makavejev]

I believe this is a windows 7 permissions issue.

Sometimes Windows 7 will create folders that are automatically “write-protected”. This problem also pops up if your scratch disk is the root of the drive, and not in a sub-folder.

Try either checking the permissions of the folder you are using or create a new folder. I assume your scratch drive is an internal and not an external drive, because for external drives such as USB this bug is even more common.

good luck, ninetto

[Ninetto Makavejev]

Blackmagic has a “drive-speed” app that tells you what your drive-speed and bandwidth can handle. Are you talking SD or HD, that makes a huge difference… but in the end this is a system problem not necessarily PremPro.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

My understanding on “maximum render”, was this is only necessary to tick if you are up/down-scaling. Otherwise the cycles slow down the export with no effect.

Frame-blending, would be necessary if you are change fps. i.e. the fps of the export is different than that of your sequence.
But this knowledge is just at a dusty part of my memory, maybe someone can explain/verify.

[Ninetto Makavejev]

OP has a P4, not quite the same.
Dan’s methode is meant for getting a HDV timeline to SD dvd.
Downconverting in the camera will give you good quality footage.
I have the same camera.

Pentium P4: some even have 4 cores and fit into 775 Boards, so it depends on the model + motherboard.

Dan’s hd2sd method can render out to any codec, not just DVD-mpeg2.