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Old 19th May 2021, 14:57   #1  |  Link
FranceBB
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BlackMagic HyperDeck Controller

Hi there,
I'm back alive and kicking in the office after getting the Oxford Astra Zeneca jab in Deutschland (Germany) and today I'm dealing with a BlackMagic recorder.
So, first things first, I have a BlackMagic HyperDeck Controller with some SDI inputs and two disks in Sata III that can be used to record.



I downloaded the official software from BlackMagic but it's actually pretty disappointing 'cause it only lets you pick the codec and if you want the timecode or not:





What I'd like to have is something like the BlackMagic Media Express (which is for PCI-Express Blackmagic cards) in which I can choose not just the codec, but also which name the clips are gonna have, when to start/stop the recording and most importantly WHERE to save those.



Not just that, ideally those disks that I put there and that are directly connected there in the two ports should be accessible via Ethernet like via SMB or even via an FTP etc.
I mean, there's an Ethernet port there, what the heck did they put it there otherwise?

Do you know anything that might be useful for this?

Last edited by FranceBB; 19th May 2021 at 15:00.
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Old 20th May 2021, 10:08   #2  |  Link
Blue_MiSfit
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IIRC the Ethernet port is for "future use". Maybe there's some proprietary stuff that only BMD can use this for, but it's dead as far as I can tell

I don't think you can use a basic HyperDeck as a capture device. However, I happen to have a HyperDeck Studio Pro 2 here at home (with 6G SDI ports) and it has a Thunderbolt port. This does work just fine in Media Express as a capture card.

However.. it seems this has been discontinued as I don't see any HyperDecks on their website with Thunderbolt anymore

That's BMD for you
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Old 20th May 2021, 10:25   #3  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit View Post
IIRC the Ethernet port is for "future use".
That sucks...


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Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit View Post
I happen to have a HyperDeck Studio Pro 2 here at home (with 6G SDI ports) and it has a Thunderbolt port. This does work just fine in Media Express as a capture card.
Good to know

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Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit View Post
However.. it seems this has been discontinued as I don't see any HyperDecks on their website with Thunderbolt anymore
I see...

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Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit View Post
That's BMD for you
Definitely not a good start.
I called their support and asked them to have a meeting together so that I can tell them what I need and what I wanna do and they're gonna tell me what to get and buy and eventually the price, however I'm still waiting for an email... One of my colleagues said: "If it doesn't work, I'll tell everyone to go to AJA instead" xD
The thing is that I want to scale up with the lossless capturing which is pretty nice but I want those devices to write to a local disk and then share it over the network so that FFAStrans can move it to our MAM.

Let's see what they're gonna say...

Last edited by FranceBB; 20th May 2021 at 10:40.
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Old 24th May 2021, 02:21   #4  |  Link
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I see. I imagine you could orchestrate something more cost effectively with a small PC with a PCIe card, no?

I think the HyperDeck Studio Mini has what you want, actually - the spec sheet indicates FTP support:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/pro...specs/W-HYD-07

The big daddy 8k recorder does this as well, and has a 10 gig port, naturally...
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/pro...perdeckextreme
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Old 24th May 2021, 20:40   #5  |  Link
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Be careful with BM and theirs "never implemented/working features". Price is low, but for a reason. Their products are not on level of eg. AJA (and don't even try counting on support). If they work then fine- you are happy, but quite often you end up just wasting money on BM products and after huge frustration you buy other brand.
There was a time when BM used so bad components that their sellers (silently) always suggested to buy everything x2
It may be bit better now, but for example fans in their products are still pure crap (loud and inefficient) and keep failing. Some product lines are better than others, but over all you get what you pay for

Mentioned recorders will do ProRes and DNxHD/R (as well as v210 or 10bit RGB), but I would try going different (modern) direction. Get yourself NDI encoder (there is one with 4 channels UHD for 2000$), hook it up to your local network and you have huge freedom accessing those streams. There are many free apps, including recorders which allow you save native NDI streams into storage (including TC, channels locked capturing, etc.). You can edit those captures in eg. Premiere (I assume AVID as well) during ingest. You can as well take them and change to streaming signals and push live to the internet (there are affordable tools for it as well).
It's way more productive approach than using old-fashioned recorders and quality should be easily enough for broadcast (it's around standard ProRes level).

Last edited by kolak; 24th May 2021 at 21:08.
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Old 26th May 2021, 13:16   #6  |  Link
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@Blue_MiSfit... it would, but I don't wanna put 8 workstations with 8 PCI-Express cards all not connected to the system and kind-of-standalone. That would be my last resort. About the 8K thing, I saw the FTP, but still no SMB, right? And external disks means that I have to connect some USB-C disks only? No Sata? I mean, it's not a big deal, but SMB would be better than FTP for what I have to do...
Last but not least, does it have a panel to remotely see and capture several streams at the same time? Keep in mind that I not only have to connect the SDI inputs but I also have to record them at the same time.

@kolak... Well, I contacted them last week and they haven't replied yet, so I'm still here waiting for them to reply which is a bit frustrating...

About the NDI encoder, ideally it should have 4 or 8 SDI input, it should be able to record them at the same time in lossless (any kind of lossless, I don't care about the codec as long as it's lossless and at least 4:2:2 10bit) and it should be able to be connected to the network via Ethernet and have an HDD or SSD shared via SMB so that we can access to those files and I can move them to our MAM in RAID6.
Do you have a specific product you can suggest?
I mean, you mentioned AJA, I would be totally fine with them.
I opened the topic with Blackmagic, but I don't really have to buy any of their product, anything will do and budget is not a problem.

Last edited by FranceBB; 26th May 2021 at 13:20.
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Old 26th May 2021, 15:22   #7  |  Link
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NDI is not lossless- there is no such an option (typical bitrate is from 100-200Mbit for HD).
1st time I hear broadcast needs lossless files. They are mostly crappy 8bit XDCAM 50mbit, so anything ProRes alike quality is already huge jump.

If you need 8 channels then you buy 2x BirdDog Quad boxes, 2K$ each (https://bird-dog.tv/4k-techspecs/). Then you connect them both into your (best 10gig) network and done. You add recorder (eg. https://livemind.tv/recorder) and you can record 16xNDI inputs (locked if needed) as native NDI streams into any chosen storage (any machine will do as recorder just copies native NDI stream). That's it. Not only you have files (which can be editing during ingest) but also you have in your whole network live NDI streams which you can access with any tool which supports NDI.

For 8 inputs other solution is dedicated box like Cinedek:
https://cinedeck.com/cinedeck-ingest/
but this will be in 10s of K (40K$ for 8 channels I think).

HyperDeck Extreme 8K HDR has 4 SDI inputs, but does it support recording all of them at the same time?

Last edited by kolak; 26th May 2021 at 16:28.
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Old 26th May 2021, 16:51   #8  |  Link
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Quote:
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NDI is not lossless- there is no such an option (typical bitrate is from 100-200Mbit for HD).
I see... so very good files but still lossy, I see...


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1st time I hear broadcast needs lossless files. They are mostly crappy 8bit XDCAM 50mbit,
Yeah, our final mezzanine file is gonna be either an AVC Intra Class 100 or an XDCAM-50 according to the region, but the reason why I want the lossless file in the first place is that I have a Digital Supply Chain which takes the input file, indexes it, brings it to 16bit planar, filters it in Avisynth, dithers it down to 8bit planar, encodes it in FFMpeg in MPEG-2 to make the XDCAM-50 and then checks it in AVID Interplay Access.
I already have the AVID Airspeed Capture and EVS Ingest Scheduler but none of them is able to capture as lossless. Sure, we capture live feeds directly in XDCAM-50 or AVC Intra Class 100 via EVS or AVID Airspeed Capture, but we're not talking about live feeds here, we're talking about our archive that goes through a huge series of filters to remove noise, spots, scratches, stabilize the reels etc, which is why I wanted to give Avisynth the less lossy possible file and ideally a v210 lossless.

This is Avisynth_Remaster as a workflow doing its magic to some old reels:



each node (I mean each box) is a custom made piece of code that does something or something else according to the source and different parameters.

If you're curious: Link Website - Link Doom9



Quote:
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so anything ProRes alike quality is already huge jump.
Yep, but I would very much like to have it lossless before encoding it.


That being said, the proposal look interesting; I'm gonna have to make a few tests to see if something like DNX185x or AppleProRes 444 XQ achieve something significantly different in terms of SSIM/PSNR or if I can just go ahead with those, feed Avisynth and get the AVC Intra Class 100 or XDCAM-50 back with no consequences.
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Old 26th May 2021, 19:40   #9  |  Link
kolak
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Test NDI directly- there is decoder for Windows, so it should work fine in avisynth.
Just install free Premiere plugin (or use AVID which has NDI output built in), play timeline and capture NDI stream with trial version of the capture tool which I mentioned. Then you can transcode it using your tools and compare against source.
I don't really think you will ever be able to tell any difference (by eye) in final XDCAM stream. PSRN will definitely show some, but these are just numbers.

For lossless captures (unless it's uncompressed) you need something custom and it will cost you more and also will require way more work. I don't know how much data will be coming but knowing broadcast it will be quite a lot. You will have to get a lot of storage and UHD case will be very difficult ( I assume you do just SD/HD).
This https://metus.com/technical-specifications-of-ingest tool could be used with "cheap" BM Quad channels cards. If you talk to METUS (they are quite responsive) they may add support for MagicYUV etc codecs, so you will have best possible intermediate format. You may also want to look at https://www.drastic.tv tools.
I still think it's just waste fo time and effort for no real (or tiny) gain. NDI is so simple, PnP and should work well.

Recently I actually moved to Python (+any encoder) which allows for another level of "automation". I can do way more than in Vantage, which now I use as a 'simple transcoder'.

Actually with NDI SDK you could probably "hide" all your processing in the chain and get cleaned up NDI output, but I assume this is not "live" workflow but offline files processing one.

Last edited by kolak; 27th May 2021 at 14:42.
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