getting 10 bit 4.2.2 to fly into Vegas

I have been using my Extreme BM (aka the DL Extreme) since last fall for 10-bit 4:2:2 uncompressed SD, using a 10K SATA RAID. It always worked 100% perfectly, which I attribute to following DL's system requirements to the same percentage.

If you have any problem with the interfacing to Vegas, just use the Decklink capture utility, it works very well.

Note that the CPU utlization will be about 100% no matter what CPU you have, the capture driver runs at a low level that even takes priority over much of Windows.

Well I've tried it today and yes the BMD capture utilitty works very nicely capturing 8 bit 4.2.2, didn't try 10 bit as the tapes are production masters not camera tapes. Only problem is the BMD utility captures to Quicktime (Vegas reports the codec as 2yuv?) and for some reason I've lost the source TC.

Given that constraint I tried using VidCap. Deck control etc works just fine. I even get source TC correctly except for one real show stopper. After capturing for 25 seconds VidCap reports one frame dropped every 1 second! Dropping the captured file onto the T/L I notice that the audio is longer than the vision by an amount that precisely corresponds to the number of dropped frames. This confirms that yes, frames were dropped as does the one second jerk in the motion. Just to explain this precisely, when frames are dropped in DV capture what usually happens is a frame is duplicated, this doesn't happen, a real frame is missing from the vision stream, audio is perfect too, wierd. Capture one minute and the vision is short 35 frames, capture 5 mintues and it's short 275 frames, quite predictable.
Now I am the SECOND Vegas user with the exact same problem, the other user is using a different mobo etc, both of us can get our PCs to work just fine with the BMD capture utility, for both of us the BMD disk speed test reports we're just fine, in fact on my machine it's says I'm good for HD 4.4.4 at 37fps, wow!
The only thing we're thinking down here that might be the cause of our grief is that we're capturing PAL, this wouldn't be the first PAL only bug in Vegas. I cannot for the life of me think whay that'd be, PAL over SDI is a slightly lower bitrate unless VidCap is trying to do something really silly but the CPU utilisation on my machine is only 1% during capture.
Time to go and fill in a trouble ticket me thinks. Wonder what sort of response I'll get.
Bob.

Well I guess one should think before clicking. I was trying to use VidCap to capture over SDI and well it makes a valiant effort but fails.

Using the INTERNAL capture all works as advertised, duh.

This afternoon I captured a 48 min program from DigiBeta, no dramas at all. Switched preview monitor to 3rd device (23" HP), cranked quality upto Best, switched in the de-interlace thing and well it looks like broadcast which isn't bad for a cheap (relatively speaking) LCD. I'm only just falling short on maintaing 25fps, probably just need to tweak the machine a tad. This is pretty impressive considering that the system has to shfit data 7 times faster than it does for DV.

Yes, be warned 4.2.2 comes in at 90GB per hour.
Bob.

I encoded the truly maginificantly shot 48 minute program to mpeg-2 and cooked a DVD. Now most of the program was shot underwater, 16:9 and I suspect on HDCAM. Crystal clear tropical water. Those bright yellow striped fish look stunning against the deep blue water, well until you get a school of them swim fast past the camera and then all sorts of nasty things go wrong. Same happens with very wide pans over coral.
I suspect this is just the encoder not coping at all well and it's got it's work cutout. Not only is the image razor sharp with fine detail but the light levels throughout the frame are constantly flickering due to the waves diffracting the light. I'm going to try encoding this at CBR at the highest bitrate and see how I go.
I think if I was to take on working at such high quality I'd need to spend some serious dollars for a way better encoder and also spend a lot more time preping material prior to encoding. Before I can truly lay the blame on the encoder I'll go back through the 4.2.2 footage just to make certain nothing went wrong with the capture, a single dropped frame of source can spin an mpeg-2 encoder right out.
Bob.

Bob,
I really appreciate your reports on this. Even as an amateur, I can follow your process and am learning from yours (and others) input. Thanks for sharing and I hope to get down under to see you all one of these days.
Aloha,
Randy

Yea, this is very interesting because I'm going to jump on the Decklink train here pretty soon. Thanks for giving us your real world experience. I was wondering if you could let us know what kind of system your running, motherboard, chipset etc.

Thanks a bunch

Randy,
good to hear from you! Come on cobber, about time for a trip down under. We could throw some shimps on the barbie for you.
Bob.

SuperMicro mobo with dual Xeon 3GHz, 1 G RAM, HighPoint RAID controller with 2x 200GB 7200 RPM SATA drives. I spent up big and got the SuperMicro case, that added a lot as they're imported from the US but they're very well designed and very big.
Bob.