Stewart Mayer
Forum Replies Created
-
The audio out of sync issue only occurs after a few minutes from within a blackmagic hd project, audio sync works fine from within a HDV project. The issue is that in a Blackmagic project the image needs to be resized to 1920 from 1440 by the CPUs so that the output card can provide realtime monitoring. It isn’t really an issue though since I render out a master file when finished.
Generation loss is a problem in HDV projects, but not in Blackmagic projects, as far as I can tell. Although the source footage is HDV, anytime something is rendered in a Blackmagic project the rendering is done uncompressed. I think this is better than cineform since your source footage is exactly what the camera captured, and your rendering is all uncompressed. Kind of the best of both worlds.
Hopefully Blackmagic will release an update to the drivers soon to fix the little problems they’ve got, and maybe increase performance.
-
I just saw this post, and a little late, but thought I’d answer. I just finished a project like this. Shot with Z1, and then just started a 1080i Black Magic project in Premier Pro 2.0 and was able to batch capture the native hdv files just like i was in a HDV project.
Actually, my first time I had captured footage in a HDV project, and then imported that project into a new Blackmagic project, that worked too.
It is great because you get real monitoring of the HDV footage. But there are a couple bugs, although the HDV footage plays back in real time on the timeline, there is still a red “render me” line above all the footage, so if you want to render a disolve or an effect you have to make sure only that area is selected for rendering or you’d be needlessly rendering everything. Also, 24p footage on a 24p timeline plays back funny (I had shot it with my XL-H1), the fields are reversed on output when the “introduce 3:2 pulldown on playback” option is selected in the control panel for support of HDTVs that only support 1080i. Also, my audio looses sync with realtime playback after a while, I think my machine is borderline able to support the realtime playback, I’ve got a dual 3ghz zeon nocona system. It takes a lot of horsepower to stretch the 1440 to 1080 in realtime.
I think it would be great if blackmagic could take advantage of Nvidia’s pure-video processing technology, offload the MPEG-2 decoding to the video card, that would be great. I mentioned this to tech support once, and they responded that HDV was actually Mpeg4, but I did more research and that was incorrect, it is mpeg2, and indeed the Nvidia purevideo is made to decode HD.
Anyway, hope this gives you some info you needed.
My HD project was an hour and a half long and the biggest problem was outputting and down converting. I ended up outputting the whole thing to a master file at 1440×1080 using Huf lossless compression which is free to download off the internet. Then I used virtualdub (also free to download) to downconvert to SD size and did a little vertical blurring to get rid of interlace flicer. Then used that outputted file to convert to DVD. I’m adding this info because it took me about two weeks of frustration to find the best method. After effects 7.0 would crash after about 16 hours of downconverting, and I wasn’t pleased with the quality of Premiere Pro’s downconvert. Virtualdub is awesome.
stewart
-
Just one thought, it sounds like you want to do a lot of SD with the HD. The HD Pro Single Link card lacks some hardware that assists with realtime downconversion, the dual link card has the extra hardware. They don’t make this distinction on their site, even though I only use single link, i wish I has gotten the higher end card.
stewart
-
I’m not doing anything special in the bios. Have you made sure that the speed of the PCI-X slot is at 100 or 133mhz? If you have it in the wrong slot, and a slower pci-x card is using the same “bus” then the whole bus slows down. I had a firewire 800 card that slowed my hd card slot down to 33mhz, but changing the slots around fixed the problem. You can check the manual to find out which slots are dependent on each other.
Other than that, I don’t know.
Good luck,
stewart
-
I’ve got the same motherboard and the hd pro single link card and am having no bios related problems with the latest 2.0 bios.
stewart
-
I have just gotten the playback to work from the source monitor, although it still doesn’t monitor out of the decklink, only on the desktop.
I disabled the “Desktop Preview Acceleration” in the project settings/playback settings of the project. Perhaps there is a compatability problem with the 7800GS video card?
-
Ok, here is the system config.
Dual 3ghz xeon on a supermicro x6dae-g2 mobo with 2gigs ram and a 8 drive sata Highpoint raid, using the DecklinkHD Pro (single link) card with a nvidia 7800GS display card. I had captured the entire project with the premiere 2.0 preset for HDV editing, and then imported the project into a decklink 1080i project. The clips are between two and twenty minutes long.
Hope this info helps.
Andrew, can you tell me, should we be seeing the render line over the hdv footage on the timeline? Should the source monitor, when played, have decklink monitoring?
Thanks,
Stewart -
I just went through something like this. Premiere pro 2.o won’t take VOB files directly on the timeline, but that is just because the audio and video are multiplexed (interwoven) into the same file.
You can download and use the program TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to de-multiplex the VOB file into it’s mpeg-2 video stream and separate audio stream using the program’s MPEG Tools. These separated files should work on the timeline.
Hopefully this will work for you, I’d say about 10% of the dvds i’ve tried won’t work, but most do. Also, if the audio is encoded into AC3 you’ll need to download a conveter, I found a free one the other day that worked great.
stewart
-
Ok, sounds like i’ll have to do it just like before. Capture everything at 60fps and then start a new 30fp project and import the clips into it. Unfortunately this makes all the 30fps footage take up twice the disk space.
Is there not a way to force the decklink to capture the frame rate I want it to capture?
-
it is likely an Open GL issue. Try turning off Open GL, or the adaptive resolution under Edit/Preferences/Previews