Decklink capture not working in Vegas 6

FMP wrote on 7/20/2005, 6:26 AM
Just received my new system with a Declink Extreme card in it. I tried hooking up our Beta deck to try and capture some video through Vegas 6 but get an error, something like, no deck connected. The Blackmagic deck control app seems to be working ok although at first i had some deck connection problems that have since seemed to have cleared themselves up.
Any trick to getting deck control and capture to work in Vegas?

Comments

farss wrote on 7/20/2005, 6:42 AM
You do have a RS422 cable from the card to the deck?
You did use the correct capture app?
VidCap looks like it'll work but we've found it to drop frames like crazy, use the 'internal capture' option.

I'm still not 100% certain all is well, several of us down here are finding some really wierd things going on, at some point it looks like we're getting random field order reversals, but heck we're probably the PAL crash test dummies.
I need to retest this using the Decklink capture utility to be sure that it's not something else going haywire. Nothing wrong with doing it that way BTW.

Bob.
FMP wrote on 7/20/2005, 8:06 AM
For some reason I never even considered using the internal capture app. That seems to work fine. At least I have deck control and it captures. I'll have to run some tests to see how reliable the quality and sync is. Thanks.
Spot|DSE wrote on 7/20/2005, 10:06 AM
The internal is what you should be (only can) use in Vegas for the Decklink. I dunno about PAL, but the NTSC seems to be working as it should.
ForumAdmin wrote on 7/20/2005, 1:45 PM
Using the official Decklink Windows drivers (4.8.1, not the beta 5.0 drivers) PAL from a Digibeta works well in Vegas 6.0b. I've been capturing and printing to tape all morning.

Sometimes a re-install of the Decklink drivers is needed, especially if you mysteriously lose serial control on the card when invoking capture. Error message is somthing like "Serial port not available"
farss wrote on 7/20/2005, 3:30 PM
We're having no problems capturing it seems and when I say we I mean myself and another local post house. Both of us are working with 16:9 PAL DB footage, both using either J30 decks.
Captured material looks fine. Encoding to mpeg-2 at CBR 8 MB some very wierd problems are occuring. Capturing the same material via 1394, no porblem. What we're both seeing happening is what lloks like screwed up field ordering but only on difficult to encode scenes. The material I'm working with is from the BBCs Blue Planet so the source is just fantastic.
However in the underwater scenes panning across schools of tropical fish things can suddenly go really haywire, the motion suddenly starts to judder, like either the field or even whole frames are out of sequence. However at first I thought the problem was just the encoder running out of bandwidth but there's no sign of macro blocking. THe 'effect' may only last for a few seconds and then all is fine but needless to say this is causing us major grief.
What I'll try doing is going through the encoded mpeg-2 file using Vegas, frame by frame to see if I can see just what's going on and I'm going to capture again from the J30 but have it burn in TC, that may reveal something.

Bob.
Marco. wrote on 7/20/2005, 4:03 PM
>> What we're both seeing happening is what lloks like screwed up field ordering

What format are you capturing to? - Uncompressed AVI and PAL?

In this case Vegas actually screws up the field order. This is a long known problem. You have to edit a line in the "vegas profile.ini"-file to correct this.

(BTW - I think I reported this problem three times now - for V4, V5 and V6 ...)

Marco
farss wrote on 7/21/2005, 1:28 AM
Well I think Vegas correctly reports the media as being UFF, we're capturing to the BMD 4.2.2 10 bit codec. The problem only occurs at certain place in the encoded file, I cannot see anything wrong with the captured file so I don't think it's that problem. Furthermore the problem is affected by the bitrate of the encoded mpeg-2 stream.
Bob.