Blackmagic Design DeckLink SDI 10 Bit SD/HD-SDI PCI Express Capture Card

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Price: $280.25    

Product Feature

• Editing on Mac OS X with Final Cut Pro: Edit in Final Cut Pro while using the highest quality 10 bit HD-SDI video connection to HD decks including, HDCAM, HD-D5 and DVCPRO HD, as well as SD decks such as Digital Betacam
• DeckLink SDI is qualified by Apple for Final Cut Pro compatibility. Blackmagic Design works closely with Apple on developing the QuickTime drivers, so you know you're getting the best combination for high end editing
• Move between Standard Definition and HDTV: DeckLink SDI supports dual rate SDI so you can instantly switch between SD and HD. This is ideal for modern workflows where HD may be a smaller part of the market for most people
• Input and output 10-bit SD/HD SDI video
• Hardware downconversion of HD video

Product Description

The Blackmagic Design DeckLink SDI gives you incredible quality SD/HD-SDI capture and playback on any PCI Express Windows or Intel-based Mac Pro computer. It is perfect for use with SDI decks, or in large facilities with SDI routers. The world's smallest and most affordable 10 bit SDI video card works in both SD and HD and includes blackburst, tri-sync reference input, 8 channels of SDI embedded audio and RS422 deck control. DeckLink SDI is perfect when combined with routers such as Broadcast Videohub, SDI monitoring such as HDLink and video converters such as Blackmagic Design's Mini Converter range.

Blackmagic Design DeckLink SDI 10 Bit SD/HD-SDI PCI Express Capture Card Review

This card is a fantastic buy at the price point which they provide it. For a fraction of what competitor cards cost, this card is an ideal ingest device able to capture SDI and HD-SDI signals at full rate on just about any modern PC. I've been a user of Blackmagic for the past 4 years and have been every pleased with their products. If you're a using this card to capture from a Digibeta deck or a HDCAM (not SR, that requires dual-link) for the purpose of producing file based formats or for DVD and Bluray production, this card is nothing short of great.

It's able to capture video and audio from a source with little effort.

There are a few gripes I have with the card.

1) Reference clock.
It doesn't always do a great job without having access to house clock. This is silly on a PC capture device since a PC can derive the source clock from the SDI signal. Reference clock should only be necessary for play-out, to synchronize with other sources. For a single point to point connection reference clock should not be needed.

2) Drop frames requires full recapture.
SDI and HD-SDI are amazing in the fact that audio is synchronized to a specific line of video. Since Blackmagic's devices demultiplex audio and video while capturing, sync isn't guaranteed to be perfect. The only way to ensure a perfect capture is to capture from start to end. If Blackmagic wanted to do this job better, when they detect frame drops, they would rewind the source media and recapture from the drop. Alternatively, it would work to capture the individual dropped frames with audio afterwards. The way they have done it means that if you dropped a frame an hour into a capture, the entire hour has been wasted. Time to start over again.

3) Play-out does not follow SDI spec and is spectacularly bad for broadcast.
As an engineer that designed hardware CODECs for SDI, HD-SDI and 3G-SDI sources, I spend hours a day decoding streams sample for sample and producing valid streams to play out as well. SDI and HD-SDI are extremely hard to get right and Blackmagic simply doesn't. The Blackmagic card ALWAYS outputs 16 channels of audio, whether it is present or not. This is wasteful and confusing. Additionally, the Blackmagic card does not implementing the switching line of the signal. This means that audio is transmitted on the switching line which by definition should be clear. This will trigger alarms up and down the production pipeline if any resyncing needs to occur. I generally work in a PAL environment, but this is catastrophic in a NTSC environment. Blackmagic also does not implement ECC for HD-SDI audio. This is probably a good thing since during testing, I've learned there are way too many interpretations of the spec and the only safe thing to do is to just leave it out. Blackmagic however should at least implement Sony's implementation of ECC on HD-SDI audio since ECC is extremely important on tape based media. Bit rot over time can be somewhat avoided using ECC. The correct solution would be to implement Sony's interpretation of the spec and make it an option in the driver whether to enable it or not.

So overall, while this card is clearly unsuitable in a professional broadcast environment and probably should never be used for printing to tape, it is an amazingly good solution for ingest of SDI and HD-SDI signals.

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