I have a strong personal preference towards using Windows PCs over Macs running OSX.\u00c2\u00a0 That said, Adobe’s release of\u00c2\u00a0an OSX of their CS3 suite of video products has recently\u00c2\u00a0brought me into more frequent contact with Apple’s products.\u00c2\u00a0 I currently have a MacPro tower in my office, primarily for testing purposes.\u00c2\u00a0 Until last week, the Mac version of Premiere Pro had no hardware I\/O support, limiting its usefulness in professional environments.<\/p>\n
Blackmagic has become the first company to support the Mac version of\u00c2\u00a0CS3 with their line of hardware products, with the version 6.6 release of their drivers on Oct 26.\u00c2\u00a0 I was aware of this at the time, but didn’t report it here until I had a chance to experiment with them myself.\u00c2\u00a0 I have installed a Multibridge Extreme in my MacPro and done some quick tests.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything seems to be in order, and most of the issues I encountered can be attributed with my lack of familiarity with the Apple way of doing things.
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\nThe only real advantage I see Mac offering over the equivalent PC system, is that the Quicktime engine allows a greater variety of compression formats to be played in realtime through the hardware output. (For example DVCProHD)\u00c2\u00a0 I am hoping that this more open approach to compression support will allow Cineform compressed MOV files to be output in realtime sometime in the future, maybe even at 2K with the MultibridgePro.\u00c2\u00a0 I also hope to see this on PC, but the Mac Quicktime architecture currently seems one step closer to achieving this\u00c2\u00a0than the eventual PC solution.<\/p>\n
I plan to do a more full fledged test of the HD-SDI I\/O options in the near future.\u00c2\u00a0 So far, the only thing I have been unable to do, is\u00c2\u00a0get a realtime down-converted SD output\u00c2\u00a0of my HD timeline.\u00c2\u00a0 Does anyone know if this is supported, and if so, how to configure it?\u00c2\u00a0 I will need it to add pulldown, since most of my HD work is 23.976fps.\u00c2\u00a0 Since I only have an internal SATA array on the MacPro, I will not be able to push the Blackmagic hardware to its limits.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0My three disks will be struggling to provide the data-rate required\u00c2\u00a0for\u00c2\u00a01080p 4:2:2, let alone 4:4:4 RGB or 2K.<\/p>\n
UPDATE: I found the settings for downconverting, and it seems to automatically add pulldown for SD output, but I don’t see a way to add pulldown to HD output.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately my system is currently doing a center cut to SD even when I have anamorpic or letterbox selected.\u00c2\u00a0 I have also been having many other playback issues, so it seems there are still a few things to be worked out.<\/p>\n
One other benefit that the Blackmagic solutions provide, is that\u00c2\u00a0the same hardware can be used by PC applications in Windows.\u00c2\u00a0 This will be a significant advantage to those of you out there who are using Bootcamp to run Windows and OSX\u00c2\u00a0on a MacPro.\u00c2\u00a0 Currently Blackmagic\u00c2\u00a0offers the only hardware solution that publicly supports this dual environment\u00c2\u00a0compatibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a strong personal preference towards using Windows PCs over Macs running OSX.\u00c2\u00a0 That said, Adobe’s release of\u00c2\u00a0an OSX of their CS3 suite of video products has recently\u00c2\u00a0brought me into more frequent contact with Apple’s products.\u00c2\u00a0 I currently have a MacPro tower in my office, primarily for testing purposes.\u00c2\u00a0 Until last week, the Mac […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12,15,24,13,14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}