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Filed under: Hardware •Post Production •

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).

WHAT YOU GET & INSTALLATION

As I stated in the introduction, Blackmagic’s DeckLink HD Extreme (DLHDE) is a capture card, but to say that it is just a capture card would be an understatement.  What you are getting is an SD/HD/2K capture card that can handle just about any job that is thrown at it.  Obviously, the most important feature when choosing a capture card is the formats available for you to work in, and the DLHDE handles all the formats you will come up against in your daily editorial work including:

• 2K-     2048 x 1556 at 24fps and 23.98fps capture and playback via SDI.
• HD-    1080PsF23.98/24, 1080i48, 1080i50, 1080i59.94, 720p59.94, 720p60 and 720p50.
• SD-     625/25 PAL, 525/29.97 NTSC and 525/23.98 NTSC.

Now, obviously, within these formats you also have a wide range of options as to what codec you want to use, such as Uncompressed 8 & 10-bit, ProRes, DVCPro HD and HDV to name a few.  As for connections to the card, it has two SD/HD-SDI I/O’s, as the card supports Dual Link 4:4:4 capture and playback (for HD-Cam SR and 2K), as well as HDMI I/O and a breakout cable with RS-422 deck control, analog audio I/O, AES/EBU audio I/O, analog video I/O (Composite/S-Video and Component) and finally a reference input for syncing your system to house reference.  As you can see, you have just about any type of connection for any job you might be working on.

As well as the I/O’s the DLHDE has some other great features that can’t be overlooked.  First, the card supports real-time Up/Down and Cross Conversion.  Unless you are working in Dual-Link mode, the card is hardwired to always output SD on SDI-2 when outputting HD on SDI-1 which is very handy.  You also have control over whether you want an anamorphic, letterboxed or edge cropped SD image while downconverting you footage to SD.  The DLHDE also supports real-time cross conversion from 720HD to 1080HD as well as SD to 720HD or 1080HD.  Secondly, the card features brand new 3Gb/second SDI connections.  What does that mean you ask?  Well, it allows 4:4:4 RGB and 2K film connection with a single BNC connection.  No Dual-Link needed!  Very handy to have, and finally, the card can be used on both Windows (XP and Vista) as well as Mac OS X, and it supports many of the applications you use on a daily basis including Final Cut Pro, Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Adobe’s After Effects and Adobe’s Photoshop.  So now that we’ve covered what you are getting, let’s take a look at how you install the card.

The first, and probably the most important thing that you need to keep in mind is that the DLHDE is a PCI-E based capture card.  What does that mean if you just purchased a brand new Mac Pro?  Nothing really, as you have the card slot needed to install the card, but for users of older Mac’s (and even PC’s), you need to make sure that your computer has a PCI-E card slot, and not a PCI-X card slot, and how you can tell is that if your computer is a G5 Dual-Core, your computer should have a PCI-E card slot(s), if it is a Dual-Processor, you are unfortunately out of luck.  Now, believe it or not, this was one of the easiest card installation’s I have ever done, and in all, it took me longer to put the screws in to hold the card in place, than it did to install the card itself.  There are two connections on the inside tip of the card that you will take the included HDMI I/O cables, and attach them to an included metal bracket so that the DLHDE and the HDMI I/O connections sit beside each other.  I installed the card into slot one, with the HDMI I/O bracket in slot two, and in about two minutes, I was plugging my computer back in and getting it ready to fire back up.  So, let’s see what we get!

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For the benefit of people new to post production I’d like to add a few things.

Be aware that Black Magic Design’s cards are CODEC-agnostic I/O cards made for ingest and monitoring. They don’t accelerate video or effects rendering with onboard processing. Such processing will be handled by the capacity of your system CPU and GPU (to the extent that your NLE is optimized to use GPU for processing).

Don’t confuse BM cards with Matrox cards, for example, which do accelerate video and effects rendering - by virtue of their own proprietary CODECS powered by onboard processing muscle.

While BMD cards can capture using any CODEC your NLE has, BMD’s big selling point is uncompressed capture and monitoring. Uncompressed video isn’t a CODEC and doesn’t require acceleration to simply display it since the usual constant backround decompression/recompression is not needed. CPU load is zero for the same reason.

However, even when working with uncompressed, any transitions, effects rendering, color correction etc. will be performed by and constrained by your system’s processing power.

Posted by wsmith  on  12/06  at  05:38 PM

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Kevin,
Have you had any experience making playing out to tape on a high end deck like an HDCam or D-5?
I have always found Kona cards to be a bit flaky when attempting to do insert edits on high end decks.
—TM.

Posted by Techmanager  on  12/13  at  06:00 AM

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