Tom.Wong
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Ok, so the BM card has been brought up a lot, and the company has a miserable reputation for be the "cheap product" and pretty much being that. I've used older BM before when I was still an an assistant for FCP and Avid, so we did a lot of capture, and laying off to tape. Had to be timecode, frame accurate and I dabbled in using it in conjunction with Apple Color. The card was everything everybody says it was. It sucked, told management to get a kona 3 over it, never looked back.
Fast forward to now, and the new card is out, technology has changed, software has changed, and this is a integral piece for the upcoming Resolve. There isn't a lot of info on the Extreme card, and a lot of people are still questioning it's functionality.
So this is just a small write up with what I've experienced with it, and I hope it helps at least one person. First and foremost, if you need to do deck control, capture, and framerate/resolution conversions. Go Kona, don't look anywhere else for your Apple workflow. AJA has prided itself in that market for a reason, it works, it works great.
Now my purpose of picking up the BM, is that I really wanted to offer up a accurate Color Grading solution on top of my freelance edit suite. So I didn't need all the bells and whistles of a kona, and the decisions were down to the LHI and BM. BM was chosen for it's 2k playback, and the fact that it was a few hundred dollars cheaper. I wanted to give it a chance, and wanted to pay off some bills that month
My current setup,
Mac Pro 2.93 ghz, 2009 Nehalem
Snow Leopard
16 gb ram
ATI 4870
Firmtek 4 port ESATA
BM Decklink Extreme 3d
AJA hpd2
HP DREAMCOLOR
First thing, hdmi from decklink to dreamcolor doesn't work, you'll get a picture but it will stay on the monitors native resolution which is a 16:10 aspect, and will stretch your footage. And it doesn't feel like the HDMI out of the BM is a true RGB progressive signal, as the colors were WAY off too, even after calibration.
So if you want just direct from HDMI I suggest going LHI or the new kona coming out.
If somebody else has that working please chime in. I couldn't.
720p signal is a little wonky, doesn't put out 23.98 has to convert to 59.94, which is fine and expected, it's not an official broadcast signal.
720p 29.97 kept me on a frozen frame, still trying to figure that one out... It's annoying.
all flavors of 1080 working great, apple color with it, working great. set my hdp2 to put out smpte 0-255, and to deep color.
the picture look great, love the monitor, graded on several projects already without a hitch, all 1080 stuff, and r3d native stuff in color. Follow your whitepapers, keep up to date on firmware, calibrate your monitor. Threw up some of my projects on blu ray on my Samsung 55 LED TV. Looks great, looks right. I don't feel like there are any color inconstancies other than what the television is incapable of doing when it came to the shadows, but saturation and color was spot on.
I'll probably try some HDMI capture later on and will update this every now and then the more I use the card. As for color inconstancies like the old card, I'm not seeing it. As for it being the most rock solid thing, well it isn't, but it's doing what I want it to do just fine, and for a very reasonable price. My 2 cents.
Fast forward to now, and the new card is out, technology has changed, software has changed, and this is a integral piece for the upcoming Resolve. There isn't a lot of info on the Extreme card, and a lot of people are still questioning it's functionality.
So this is just a small write up with what I've experienced with it, and I hope it helps at least one person. First and foremost, if you need to do deck control, capture, and framerate/resolution conversions. Go Kona, don't look anywhere else for your Apple workflow. AJA has prided itself in that market for a reason, it works, it works great.
Now my purpose of picking up the BM, is that I really wanted to offer up a accurate Color Grading solution on top of my freelance edit suite. So I didn't need all the bells and whistles of a kona, and the decisions were down to the LHI and BM. BM was chosen for it's 2k playback, and the fact that it was a few hundred dollars cheaper. I wanted to give it a chance, and wanted to pay off some bills that month
My current setup,
Mac Pro 2.93 ghz, 2009 Nehalem
Snow Leopard
16 gb ram
ATI 4870
Firmtek 4 port ESATA
BM Decklink Extreme 3d
AJA hpd2
HP DREAMCOLOR
First thing, hdmi from decklink to dreamcolor doesn't work, you'll get a picture but it will stay on the monitors native resolution which is a 16:10 aspect, and will stretch your footage. And it doesn't feel like the HDMI out of the BM is a true RGB progressive signal, as the colors were WAY off too, even after calibration.
So if you want just direct from HDMI I suggest going LHI or the new kona coming out.
If somebody else has that working please chime in. I couldn't.
720p signal is a little wonky, doesn't put out 23.98 has to convert to 59.94, which is fine and expected, it's not an official broadcast signal.
720p 29.97 kept me on a frozen frame, still trying to figure that one out... It's annoying.
all flavors of 1080 working great, apple color with it, working great. set my hdp2 to put out smpte 0-255, and to deep color.
the picture look great, love the monitor, graded on several projects already without a hitch, all 1080 stuff, and r3d native stuff in color. Follow your whitepapers, keep up to date on firmware, calibrate your monitor. Threw up some of my projects on blu ray on my Samsung 55 LED TV. Looks great, looks right. I don't feel like there are any color inconstancies other than what the television is incapable of doing when it came to the shadows, but saturation and color was spot on.
I'll probably try some HDMI capture later on and will update this every now and then the more I use the card. As for color inconstancies like the old card, I'm not seeing it. As for it being the most rock solid thing, well it isn't, but it's doing what I want it to do just fine, and for a very reasonable price. My 2 cents.
