[Rob Alexander]

Hi Johnny,

got an email from tech support apologising for the delay and saying they were looking into it. Don’t bother downloading the update for the dv problem because it’s still there. Although I believe it fixes some other issues causing crashes, but if your machine isn’t suffering then I’d stay where you are.

Strange thing is, this is an Aussie company and they work in PAL!!

All the best,

Rob.

[Rob Alexander]

…. unless you’re going firewire in/out, then I’d guess it’ll be OK because the decklink’s not actually having to do any conversion – but you’d have to try it to find out.

Rob

[Rob Alexander]

Don’t output to tape with the green line as it will show up. If you’re staying in the DV realm I’d go back to 4.5 (although I thought sequences aren’t backwards compatible) else put the media into an uncompressed timeline and render (zzzzzz) or conform it Uncompressed.

lets hope BM are on the case.

Rob

[Rob Alexander]

Hi, yes I’m seeing it too – I sent a note to Blackmagic tech support last night but haven’t had a reply yet. The reason you’re not seeing it in 4:3 is that you’re probably not viewing the underscanned image, if you have the option on your monitor try it, I’ll bet the line’s there. Whereas 16:9 on a 4:3 screen you alway see the full vertical resolution and that’s why it’s there.

I think this is a PAL specific issue, as DV (+DV50 for that matter) doesn’t conform to the normal PAL field priority, prioritising the lower field rather than the upper one. Thus the decklink has to compensate for this to get a correct video signal out.

As I understand it, the PAL video gets dropped by a line to make it work in DV, but when output through the card gets shifted up a line to put it back in the correct PAL sequence. The problem is that in doing this the video signal is then missing 1 line at the bottom, and in the digital domain no video shows up green, hence the line at the bottom of the screen. I’m guessing that BM need to write something into the driver to fill this line up.

Do please correct me if I’m wrong anybody – and BM, please can we have a fix.

Ta,
Rob

[Rob Alexander]

Hi Bjorn,
sorry to hear you’re struggling. 4.5 does seem to slow down as projects get bigger and digitising shorter clips probably would help. However a couple of things to try – turn off dupe frame detection if you’ve got it on.
– save a copy of your project and delete all the older versions of your sequences so that you’re just working on the current one.
OR
-create a new project and drag your current sequence into it along with anything else you might need (rushes etc.) but bear in mind this breaks the link to clips in the bins so you won’t be able to use the ‘find clip in bin’ command.

Close the old version of the project.
That will probably speed things up.
FWIW I edited on AVID for 10 years then moved to Final Cut and have recently had to go back to doing AVID editing, even allowing for the sluggish timeline I still think it’s faster to edit on FCP.

Good luck,
Rob.

[Rob Alexander]

well I’ve got my software firewall turned off but I have a netgear adsl router with hardware firewall – so I guess this is doing the same job or better?

[Rob Alexander]

so spyware’s not going to get me on mac?

[Rob Alexander]

Over here in the UK, lacie drives have a 2 year warranty. Might be a silver lining.

[Rob Alexander]

Why not stick a UL3D/4D in the G5 and hook up your AVID drives?