BLACK MAGIC thunderbolt cards are SHIT!

[Oliver Peters]

There is no 25p just as there is no 30p (actually 29.97p), because neither is an actual broadcast standard or monitor standard. That's what the card is based on. The settings for the Decklinks are the same. 25p and 29.97/30p exist in the camera, because the frame is being captured progressively. But the output is always either 25PsF / 29.97PsF or 50i / 59.94i to a deck or via a capture card.

Although the card itself can be set to 1080p/25 in the system settings, the NLE is based on broadcasting criteria, hence the issue.

- Oliver

[Nick Shaw]

Have you tried setting 50i, then checking the "use 1080p not 1080psf" check box in the Blackmagic pane of system prefs?

[Anderson Boyd]

The cards are not shit, don't perpetuate FUD. I'm a professional editor and have had nothing but a smooth run with it, update your Blackmagic Desktop Video to the latest iteration: 9.5.2

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/sup...3967&leg=false

Image attached.

[Manuel Wenger]

not true, 1080/25p is a standard written down in EBU TECH 3299 System 3 and SMPTE 274M System 9.
PsF is nowhere mentioned neither in EBU nor in SMPTE, there´s just P or I nothing else.
For PsF we have to thank Sony, that they where to lazy to built a true progressive pipeline, and split the original P frame into 2 halves and forced them on an Interlaced Format.
PsF Formats suck big !!

[Nick Shaw]

Just tested with my own Blackmagic Thunderbolt UltraStudio 3D, and it would appear to be an FCP7 issue, not an UltraStudio issue. You can get true 25p out of the box from desktop video, and you can playback 25p ProRes clips as true 25p from the Blackmagic Media Express application. However FCP7 will only output 50i, even if the "Use 1080p" checkbox is ticked.

However a 1080p25 timeline in FCP plays back fine as true progressive if the UltraStudio output is set to 1080p50. That's a perfectly acceptable solution as far as I'm concerned.

For what it's worth, I have owned a number of BlackMagic and AJA products over the years, although I have never owned a Kona card. However when I have worked on other people's setups with Kona 3 cards, I have experienced far more problems than I have ever experienced with my own Decklink based systems. It must be said though that this is just my own personal experience with a limited number of systems, not in any way a rigorous comparison of the two products.

[Dave Blackham]

We used FCP 7 with 1080 25P and 1080 PSf and 1080 50i all the time with other cards so I don't see why these new cards are any different for Thunderbolt. I even see the intensity extreme supports 1080/50P too. Any one know what the specific issue is ?

[Brian Pascale]

Surely you can return the card and get your money back. It doesn't get back the time you wasted, but sometimes you have to let that go. Also the sales guys might not have known as it seems to work with some setups.

[Björn Benckert]

Mark, there are a few things to understand here... it's actually not so that 50i needs to be any different than 25p.....

It's just the container, in other words you could fit 25p inside a 50i signal... but and there is a big but... so far RED has not turned on 25p just yet. RED for now output in 25pfs which might be a bit more of a future standard but to me there is 80% or so of the equipment out there that are 50i with embedded 25p and not working with the pfs standard so it's actually RED that as jumped to a standard that is far from begin a working standard.... how ever you could buy another box from BM and I think that is the up down cross converter it convert the 25fps to 25p and that could be sucked into you computer as a 50i signal holding your precious frame based material... But that box is rather expansive and red has announced 25p in a short / near future...

[Nick Shaw]

May be worth noting that Resolve can also play true 1080p25 out through the UltraStudio 3D (I'm looking at it right now) and I believe FCP-X v10.0.4 or later (for what that's worth) can also do it. So the issue is only with FCP7.

[ericyoung]

Mark, there are a few things to understand here... it's actually not so that 50i needs to be any different than 25p.....

It's just the container, in other words you could fit 25p inside a 50i signal... but and there is a big but... so far RED has not turned on 25p just yet. RED for now output in 25pfs which might be a bit more of a future standard but to me there is 80% or so of the equipment out there that are 50i with embedded 25p and not working with the pfs standard so it's actually RED that as jumped to a standard that is far from begin a working standard.... how ever you could buy another box from BM and I think that is the up down cross converter it convert the 25fps to 25p and that could be sucked into you computer as a 50i signal holding your precious frame based material... But that box is rather expansive and red has announced 25p in a short / near future...

RED has stated many times that everything they do is 100% progressive - no interlaced or PsF (except maybe on exports, as an option).