Decklink- can someone explain it to this newbie?

musman wrote on 6/22/2004, 1:53 AM

Lots of people seem to be looking forward to Vegas being compatible with decklink cards. I've been to the decklink web site a few times and still don't really understand what exactly their cards do. I understand that they communicate with decks (Beta SP, Digibeta, and HD), but I don't understand what they do as far as performance increases.
As owning decks in this league is so expensive and even renting is absurdly pricey, I wondering:
1- how many of you out there plan on getting a decklink card
2- what benefit if any would a decklink card have on an average system

Sorry for my ignorance and thanks for any information!

Comments

cyrille wrote on 6/22/2004, 2:51 AM

a decklink card just allows you to connect one of these decks and use uncompressed video which is useful for heavy graphics or keying purposes, needs a fast computer and 1GB storage per minute of video

musman wrote on 6/22/2004, 3:18 AM

Thanks for the help. Would one of these cards still help if the XP rumor is true and things like HD will be transferable via firewire? What if you went directly from film to hard drive (say to 4:2:2 if that's possible), any benefit there?
Maybe I'm missing something, but unless these cards provide some kind of significant performance boosts, they seem like very expensive middle men whose time is limited.

farss wrote on 6/22/2004, 4:30 AM

These cards provide the means of getting SD video in and out of a computer, the top end cards give you the ability to ingest and PTT HD video hence the hefty price tag. Technically DV25 does not meet broadcast specs, to do that you need one of those cards and until they're available the pros can, with some justification, treat Vegas as striclty non pro.
I'm not saying any of that is correct, you might call it elitism or whatever but the brutal fact is that DigiBetacam is the standard medium in television today, sure you can make stuff on DV but you can be certain if you want to get it put to air on anything outside of community stations then it's going to have to be in that format.
If you ever get the chance try putting DV25 into a studio monitor and then SD, you'll see the difference. Most TVs today are still so bad it gets much harder to pick after it's been broadcast but this is changing and changing quickly, DVB and cable are delivering much superior signals to TVs and people are spending up on home theatre systems.
So unfortunately it could well be DV25 whose days are numbered, apart from the push from the top there will soon be the push from the side by HDV.

musman wrote on 6/22/2004, 12:05 PM

Interesting, thanks for the help. I wasn't suggesting that Digibeta and others were on their way out yet, but was wondering if that the possibility of using firewire (400 or 800) would remove the need for decklink et al cards for digibeta and HD use.
It just seems to me that with HD on a firewire that unless these cards add some kind of real time performance then we'd be better off spending the money on faster storage and the like.
Am I wrong?