i am having some problems getting my xl-h1 to connect to my pc, i have a dual link decklink card and i connect it to the camera with a bnc cable but all i get is poor quality video that is flashing on and off, i am using premiere pro2 my question is, do i need a deck to capture uncompressed hd? or can i just connect the camera to the pc via a bnc cable and record? i am pulling my hair out trying to get this to work so any help would be appreciated

regards, anthony

Anthony,

Sorry for the delay in response. Welcome to DVINFO.NET. I hope you enjoy your stay.

The reason you're having troubles with your DECLINK is because you apparently do not have the harddrive speed to accomodate an uncompressed stream. You do NOT need a deck per sey, but you do need a few hard drives setup in a raid configuration to be able to handle all that data. A single drive won't do it.

When you raid 2 or more drives, you effecively split the load between the two. A drive by itself is fast with little load, but when you put some load on it, it slows down. Think of it like carrying a brand new HUGE BIG SCREEN television you just bought from Circuit City. I'm sure you can run fast with nothing in your hands. But if you try and run with that TV by yourself from your truck to your living room to hurry and watch the game, you're gonna have some troubles, aren't ya? Well, what if your buddy comes and gives you a hand? And both of you are in unison. His left foot is working with your right foot. You effectively become faster together? Like a 4 legged animal running. Like a Cheetah. Now what if a thrid buddy comes...or even a fourth buddy comes....all working together in perfect syncopation to run this big screen tv to the living room. Oh man...that TV will be setup in no time!

Well, kinda like that. You want to have a few hard drives all working together in a Raid configuration to handle that uncompressed HD footage.

- ShannonRawls.com

I use a decklink card with my H1 and it works great for me. I have 4x 200Gb SATA drives in Raid 0 on an adaptec controller. We need to know more about your system before we can make any more suggestions.

I presume you have the HDSDI turned "on" on the H1 and you are using good quality BNC cable.

thanks for the response,

i was trying to get the camera to connect to my std pc, and yes it has a single hardrive, i have a new pc arriving on tuesday it is a dual 3.8ghz zeon, 2gb ram, 5x ultra 320 (10k) hdd in raid 0 and a geforce 7800gtx vc, and the decklink card.
i was just confirming what was required to connect the h1 to a pc, i thought that maybe the camera should connect to a standard pc o.k but would obviously fall over if i tried to capture footage, i will try on tuesday when the new pc arrives.

thank you for your help

anthony mcfadden

The only thing I don't like about the AJA and the DECKLINK type cards for your computer is they don't take Linear TimeCode in or Analog Audio in. *sad face*
They get their timecode & audio from the HD-SDI stream, timecode may come from RS422. The problem is, the XL-H1 doesn't give timecode or audio in its HD-SDI stream. You have to use TIMECODE OUT on the bnc to get timecode and RCA out for audio.

What to do?

Probably easier to just shoot straight to an HDCAM deck.

*sigh*

- ShannonRawls.com

A shot in the dark:

Maybe you have the Decklink set to look for reference in the wrong place. Reference can either come in via HD-SDI, or via reference/blackburst/sync (on another BNC connection).

2- HDCAM records compressed footage. And you'd need some way of capturing off HDCAM... i.e. exactly what you're trying to do now.

3- Set your Decklink not to do dual link. That kind of signal requires 2 BNC cables.

I'm just extrapolating from what I've seen on Final Cut.

I'm certain someone makes the right box to convert LTC to 422.
You might even find a box that'll mux the TC and audio into the HD SDI stream although anything that works with HD SDI is probably going to be expensive.
Probably the Decklink Extreme card would do the whole job, from memory it has just about every in and out known to man, of course it ain't cheap and a PCI-E slot is sort of needed.