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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

BLACK MAGIC thunderbolt cards are SHIT!

Mark Toia

Mark Toia

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DELETED... Sorry Black Magic.. I'm a DICK! I Found a hidden button deep in the system that gives me what I needed. Not in your manual, not anywhere obvious... Just buried in the system preferences. I was clicking everything and anything trying to get rid of these FIELDS! And I found a 25p Function box un ticked. !!! To everyone that emailed me because they have the same issue.... Ill send you the notes. I'm a happy camper now... PS.. BLACK MAGIC, You should have sort of online support that you
actually answer or reply too.

If there is a moderator out there.. Delete this thread please.

closed2ur0.gif
 
Mark Toia said:
One of my visits to NAB this year was to Black Magic design to chat about Thunderbolt video cards.
Ive been a AJA user for years, but Black magic have impressed me there flash marketing that I thought I'd go see what they have...
I speak to the guys there and they say everything I want to hear.. LIARS!!! So pissed off... And this vent is not about the money, this is about bullshit sales crap.

So after listening to sales spiel (not knowing that it was bullshit at the time) I come home and buy there product. A BLACK MAGIC ULTRA STUDIO 3d EXTREME. They tell me it will plays 1080p 25p projects. Great! I open the box, it looks slick, it plugs straight into the laptop via thunderbolt, great! , nice... software loads up, nice.. good good.. I then search for 1080p though FCP / BLACKMAGIC settings which Ive just loaded up.. and its' NOT FRICKEN THERE !!! Like what they hell !!!!! Do these people not know that the rest of the world (other the the US and JAPAN) are is 25 frames per second... That's 75% of the planet is 25FPS... do they not know that ARRI ALEXA AND RED EPIC SHOOTS 25P not some interlaced 501 shit ! We all left interlaced Video land years ago! I cannot stand fields ! Who the hell shoots with fields.. ! DV cameras???

AJA Cards don't give me fields, they give me true 25p So why the hell doesn't this stupid box give me it as well. It offers everything else... but 1080 25p.

So I search hi and low through the net... this must be some bug.. they cannot be this stupid... finally I find a complete opposite to what the guys at the black magic booth tell me... "We only support 50i - 25p or 25 hertz is to confusing. ?????" What the hell does that mean.

So here I am stuck with the worthless bloody thing. Only giving me a Interlaced SHIT!!! feed.

I'm paused on a shot and all I see is giant interlaced field lines... Half a shot! Looks bloody terrible.
I'm projecting onto a 20 foot screen and the jagged field lines look like saw teeth that that bad.

So I get int ouch with the dealer.... DRRRRRRR... sorry we don't make these !!!!! we just sell em.
So I get on line with Blackmagic.. No answer, no body home..

I'm so angry when people rip me off !!! Black Magic... I'm so unimpressed.

Hello AJA... Sorry for looking at the other girl.

PS.. if there is someone out there that can share some sort of fix for this thing, it would be greatly appreciated.

blackmagic_ripoff.jpg
Click to expand...

WOW.......how stupid!! How about the black magic cinema camera.....25P or......
 
you'll probably have to run it through a converter box to remove the pulldown. or get something like a thunderbolt pci expander and throw a aja card in there. either way it's not gonna get your ultrastudio the way you want it to. I say just keep bugging them to fix it...
 
Mark,
funny, i was minutes away from pulling the trigger on this SAME T-bolt station....NOW, after reading your post...I'm OUT---until there IS a 25p solution...i'm ALWAYS having to send 25p; 50i as well to the other side of the world---and you are correct--the US is not the center of the world....in fact only a tiny fraction. I'm continually getting requests to convert all my 29.97 & 23.98 material to 50i and 25p.....

I would be out of my mind if i was lied to like this as well and good to call them out on that.....very silly these days....too many beta releases that are worthless and my guess is they told you YES 25p...but what they did not tell you is that 25p is on the plate and coming soon......which just means nothing.....and pure sales rhetoric!

I'm also looking for a t-bolt station and Matrox has been my baby for a long time....but i also wanted to use Davinci.....so there card is only one i know of.....Anyway, if no 25p and coming in the future won't do it for me.....then i'm out of BM till then......AND you are correct. Try to talk to someone over there has been a nightmare for me....i can call Matrox, AJA but not BM....i tried them over past two weeks to get the lowdown on some products used in a mobile way via red and there are only a few folks there ---and i think only one or two---that can actually talk to anyone about such advanced setups....was strike 2 for me and haven't tried since.....not knocking the products etc....but sleazy sales tactics is just sloppy biz and gets around these days....
 
probably already tried.. probably stupid suggestion this but if not..

since it's video-output, not project settings.. did you try outputting the 1080p50 [1080p25 over 1080p50 kinda] thought i saw it listed in the output options? if your projector accepts that; it might just do the trick until there is 25p? hopefully that will do something like doubling the frames something like my TV's '400HZ oversampling'
 
For what it's worth, BM are an Australian company, not American. They also have European support based in the UK, which I've always found very helpful. Both these countries are 25fps.

Hope you get this sorted.

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

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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 !!
 
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.
 
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 ?
 
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.
 
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...
 
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.
 
Björn Benckert said:
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...
Click to expand...

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