Blackmagic HDLink & Video Hub

Besides their Mac and PC compatible I/O components, Blackmagic makes a couple of utility devices that greatly increase the options available to a small post facility in using SDI video gear.  Technically, the Multibridge used to fall into this category as well, until they added PCIe support to it, totally extending its functionality.

The HDLink is a small box that converts HD-SDI video signal to DVI or HDMI, for monitoring video signals at full resolution with a computer LCD screen or projector.  It supports regular 1080 and 720 in most variations, and RGB 444 over dual link SDI.  It also has stereo sound output for audio monitoring.

These HDLinks are in widespread use at a number of the facilities I work at, and at under $500, they are within the reach of independent editors or anyone else who needs an economical solution for monitoring SDI.  They do get hot though, so they should be powered down when not in use, and they don’t last forever.

The new HDLink Pro adds 3Gb/s SDI for 2K support on a single SDI cable, but lacks dual link support, which is still the most popular RGB standard.  It also adds 6 Channel Audio de-embedding to analog RCA ports for 5.1 surround sound monitoring.  I have not yet had the opportunity to try one of these out yet, but I look forward to doing so as I find myself doing more 2K work, especially now that I have a 30″ LCD to connect it to.

 Separately but related, Blackmagic’s Workgroup Video Hub is a 12×24 SDI router.  It supports SD and HD, but currently not the 3Gb/s SDI standard that Blackmagic has been rolling out this year.  With a bit of creativity, it can easily support dual link connections, but that lowers the number of devices you can connect by half.  All patching is controlled in software via USB, which is connected to a single system, that hosts a network utility to share control with all users.  Their utility for patching as well designed and fleshed out at this point.  You can also patch through a built-in downconverter to SD, and it has a Still Store, ideal for color bars or logos.

We use these at three facilities I work at, and they bring a dramatic increase to the flexability and efficiency of your workflow.  They are not economical for use by a single individual, but will be well worth it in work areas shared by 3-10 people.  They greatly ease the sharing of high end video equipment.  For example, I can output any edit workstation’s SDI playout to either: a projector on an HDLink, an LCD on an HDLink, an HD CRT, our vectorscope, or any combination thereof.  Using a Video Hub can have a significant effect on your environment if you frequently find yourself reconfiguring your peripherals when switching between different projects.

Matrox Axio LE

Matrox’s Axio line of Premiere Pro based hardware solutions rewrite the application’s features much more so than most of the competing products.  With a focus on broadcast television output, as opposed to feature films or other less standardized workflows, Axio is highly optimized and accelerated for SD and HD, but supports no other frame sizes.  Axio LE is their newest  product, positioned at the mid level between the Axio SD and Axio HD.  The Axio LE also has a recent firmware upgrade that allows 10 bit capture and processing of SD and HD uncompressed footage.

The one Axio feature that I use the most, is Matrox’s somewhat proprietary HD compression format, MPEG I-Frame HD.  It supports full size and frame rate HD files at a constant bitrate, between 50 and 300Mb/s, depending on your needs.  I use 100 or 150Mb/s for projects going directly to broadcast video, and 50Mb/s is useful for offline edits that will be reconformed uncompressed.

Matrox also allows native editing of many different formats that Premiere does not otherwise support, including DVCProHD, P2 MXFs, XDCam MXFs, and HDV including 24fps.  In theory these all play in real time on the same timeline.  Real world results are a bit different, and I have experienced many performance problems when mixing these formats, but individually they all play back great.  My usually solution to this mirrors the Cineform workflow, to convert everything into one high performance codec, specifically Matrox’s MPEG I-Frame HD codec.  Matrox’s wide file support allows me to make all of these conversions without leaving Premiere, although using a separate project for asset preparation is highly recommended.  This conversion process is also accelerated by Matrox’s faster than realtime exports of all supported formats.
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Cineform ProspectHD

Cineform was one of the earliest companies to create solutions catering to the emerging HDV workflows, lowering the budget requirements for projects desiring to produce higher resolution images.  Their solution AspectHD involved a separate high quality wavelet compression format that is scalable to even higher resolutions than HDV.  Combining this compressed format with a realtime rendering and effects engine in Adobe Premiere created a very efficient workflow.  By adding support for the AJA Xena HD-SDI cards, they had a professional-level I/O solution in ProspectHD.

The original ProspectHD supported compression of 1080p/i 10bit 422 data into a variable bitrate codec that only required around 15MB/s or 1GB/min.  Lowering the datarate had two significant benefits, both related to lowering the cost of disk storage.  Data rates at that level can be supported by a single hard disk drive, removing the need for expensive arrays, and much more HD content can be stored on a given drive.  The catch was that the amount of processing power needed to compress the data required the fastest CPUs, which at the time, meant dual processor AMD Opteron systems.  In the two years since then, processing power has greatly increased, and many more capable options are available.

Capture and playback over HD-SDI is supported in realtime using Premiere Pro.  Motion and opacity effects are realtime, as well as limited color correction and transitions.  The performance of these features scale with the power of the system, with many tasks being multithreaded to utilize multi-core CPUs.

The Cineform codec itself has many inherent advantages.  Wavelet codecs can easily be viewed at lower resolutions in an efficient manner.  As far as quality goes, Cineform is hard to beat, especially for their file size.  Another advantage I find significant is that their files perform well in After Effects, unlike many other compressed formats I have tried.
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AJA Xena Cards

AJA currently has three main HD I/O cards for use in a PC, the Xena HS, the Xena LHe and the Xena 2Ke.  The LH and 2K come in PCIe and PCI-X varients, which are otherwise identical to my knowledge.  All of these AJA cards support 10bit color and 23.976/24p frame rates.  (The Xena HD was AJA’s first HD card for PC, and was identical to the HS except that the HS now includes Standard Def SDI support)
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Blackmagic Multibridge

I was never all that impressed with original Multibridge from Blackmagic Design.  It was not an I/O interface for your computer, it was just a Analog to SDI convertor, both ways.  When the Multibridge Extreme was released, and with every major revision since then, computer I/O was added in a brilliant way.  Basically they embeding their Decklink electronics within the breakout box, and then devised a way to tap directly into the PCIe bus.  I don’t believe they created the original concept of External PCIe, but they were the first by a long shot to market a product utilizing the concept.  Caldigit and Ciprico, among others, have recently developed drive arrays with an external RAID controller that uses the same basic connection.
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Welcome to my Tech Blog

This is a site where I intend to publish information about high-tech media post-production.  I will focus on new developments in applications for PCs, and the accompanying hardware to support them.  There will be everything from recent tech news, to general workflow outlines, to very specific step by step how-to guides, depending on the topic.

There are many other places on the internet where you can find information on these topics, and I am not trying to replace any of them.  Mike Curtis has a great blog over at HD For Indies but he is very Mac and OSX oriented.  He also focuses on the artistic and cultural side of independent filmmaking, with film festivals and distribution contracts and the like.  As noted above, I am a PC guy, and currently, my interests are purely technical.  I have been onlining a movie for the last month that I have never even seen, I just know that I need to start with a stack of tapes, and end with a stack of DPX files for film out.  David Newman also has great detailed information at Cineform Insider but his scope is usually limited to solutions he has created with his Cineform products.  Cineform is great, but there are other options that bear inspection and comparison.  I plan to offer information on a wider variety of products and solution for the post-production workflow.