DeckLink HD Extreme Review

My wife will tell you that I am a creature of habit.  That definitely can be said about the breakfast cereal that I eat, and the type of video games I like to play, but it is also true of computer hardware as well.  To be perfectly honest, I was an Avid purist for many years, until I had a very strict budget to work with, and I decided to purchase a Final Cut System.  Now, I have both, and use the one that suits the job I’m working on the best.  Well, that is also true of video capture cards.  Since I started using Final Cut Pro, I have been an AJA user (Kona 3/IoHD), but one of the benefits of being a writer is that I can tread out into uncharted waters (for me) and look at new products, that will hopefully, change my opinion of them.  I thought for this article I would look at Blackmagic’s DeckLink HD Extreme (2009 release).

Controlling HDV when capturing HDMI or HD-SDI

Most HDV editors are ecstatic when they hear about all of the many benefits of using HDMI capture in post-production, as explained in the two prior articles Why capture HDV via HDMI? and Universal HDV Deck. The next question is how to control when capturing via HDMI or HD-SDI, in order to retain timecode and recapture capability.

The rest of this article has been moved to Allan’s PVC channel. Click here to view it.

Universal HDV deck (almost)

Up until now, post-production facilities that accept HDV footage have confronted a major dilemma: If they bought a JVC BR-HD50 deck (US$3,399 list), the only HD recordings they could play were HDV 720p from JVC (none of the HDV 1080i tapes from Canon or Sony). On the other hand, if they bought one of the professional Sony HDV decks (currently between US$2,480 and US$8,290 list), they could play any HDV 1080i tape, but as soon as they tried to play an HDV 720p tape, the IEEE-1394’s video output would mysteriously go blank. Out of desperation, some facilities went to the extreme of buying two HDV decks: one JVC and one Sony. In other cases, people bought a Sony HDV deck only, and then settled for an analog capture from HDV 720p recordings, with its noticeable D>A>D conversion as shown in this breathtaking video (courtesy of Convergent Design and JVC Italy), and in some cases (as with the HVR-M15 and HVR-M15A when playing HDV 720p tapes), a forced, undesired cross-conversion from 720p to 1080i. This is a nightmare for a purist! But hold on…

The rest of this article has been moved to Allan’s PVC channel. Click here to view it.

Why capture HDV via HDMI?

For many reasons explained in my recent article, it makes a lot of sense to capture your HDV footage directly to an editing i-frame códec like ProRes422. One of the best way to do that nowadays from HDV is via HDMI. Editing directly from ProRes422 files (as opposed to hybrid editing or native editing, as explained in the prior article,) offers you visually frame-accurate editing, which is critical whenever your project includes:

• Critical multilayer editing
• Independently recorded 48 KHz audio which needs to be lip-synced

If you try to do either of those two things from your raw long-GOP HDV footage directly, you’ll find that what you see is rarely what you eventually get. This has nothing to do with choosing to shoot in HDV or not; but it has everything to do with how to post-produce your HDV footage, especially when your production will include either of those two demanding facets mentioned above. (If your production includes neither of those facets, and you are very short on space, then hybrid editing or native editing would work, but you would miss out on some of the other advantages you’re about to discover.)



Advantages of capturing via HDMI directly (or via HD-SDI) as opposed to other methods include:

• Avoiding unnecessary D>A (digital>analog) and A>D (analog>digital) conversions by keeping your HD signal as digital (as opposed to capturing via component analog). Click here to see a breathtaking comparison video, courtesy of Convergent Design and JVC Italy. The same HDV 720p25 footage was captured from the same HDV tape both via component analog HD and via HDMI>HD-SDI, and compared. This video is in 1280x720 in WMV. If you are on a Mac and have not done so yet, please download Flip4Mac’s free WMV component for QuickTime here, which will allow you to see WMV in your QuickTime Player.
• Taking advantage of the HDV deck’s correction circuit (which is unfortunately bypassed via IEEE-1394).
• You can get a more universal HDV player (see details later in the next article, Universal HDV deck, coming January 8th).
• You can save time and space (as opposed to capturing via 1394 and converting later)
• You retain Log & Capture, deck control, original timecode, and (as a result) recapture capability (as opposed to using FCP’s HDV-ProRes422 capture preset via 1394, where you sadly lose all of these four features)

The rest of this article has been moved to Allan’s PVC channel. Click here to view it.

Best NAB find

With Avid and Apple missing from the convention floor, I was hoping this would be a good year to hunt through the little booths and find something new. While I did stumble upon several cool new products, one impressed me more than anything else on the floor. This was a new monitor from a company I had never heard of.

If you have been following the “Death of the CRT” and “What are going to replace it with” threads over the last few years, you are aware of the problem we face. If not, here is a quick summary. LCDs suck for critical monitoring of video! Plasmas are a close call but don’t come in any size smaller than about 40”. So that leaves us with a poor substitute. One company, eCinema has created a monitor that actually solves the lack of blacks in an LCD. But it costs a LOT!

So imagine my surprise when I walked into a little draped off room and spotted three nice looking monitors in a row. The catch was, only the one in the center was a CRT. The other two were examples of a coming technology called Field Emission Technology, or FED for short. This is a variation of the SED technology that we have been waiting for since at least 2004.

The blacks were so black that I couldn’t discern where the letterboxing ended and the black frame began. Looking off-axis, the picture held up all the way to the edge of the screen. That’s 90 degrees off axis! The depth of the monitor was a little more than a standard LCD. And it wasn’t generating any significant heat. Wow!!

Of course trying to get pricing and release date information from the poor guy who seemed to know 25 words of English was an exercise in futility. But I was able to learn from later research that this company is a spin off from Sony who started the work with this technology. I don’t know if this is Sony’s way of trying to avoid getting caught up in the huge lawsuit surrounding the SED technology. And I don’t care. What’s important is that I’ve seen the technology in action and it works!

You can check out the sparse website at Fe-tech-co.

I’ve seen the future, and I finally have hope for monitoring in my world.

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