Video monitoring with a Decklink

[donat]

Hi,

I watched throb's dvd's and tried Nuke's demo version. We're interested in Nuke, but we really need a video output because we're working in the field of broadcast commercials.

The best solution for us would be a plugin outputting the framebuffer to a Decklink card. (It would need to update the picture interactively). But maybe there are other solutions as well.

For those of you working for video, how do you deal with this ?


PS : We talked to the people from D2software but didn't get a firm answer on whether they plan to implement such a feature.

Donat Van Bellinghen
www.nozon.com

[Diogo Girondi]

Hi Donat,

Even tho Nuke is my first option when it comes to compositing I have to say that if you work mainly with interlaced stuff you should really put things on a balance. No integrated frame buffer, no way to deal with fields (the only option availabe to the public so far is my gizmo) and no audio support.

Having to deinterlace everything to frames and do twiced the amount of work isn't always a smart thing and discarding fields is not an option on most of the times, but is certainly feasible to work with interlaced sequences in Nuke.

As for the frame buffer, the Bluefish plugin that comes with Nuke isn't working according to D2 it self (at least it wasn't last time I've check, which was about a year and a half). We had a Bluefish HD Lust on the previous place where I was working but I never tested with it. But if they say it isn't working for production I do believe them.

One option would be to use a Quadro FX graphics board with an SDI output and use the built-in tool from nVidia driver that let's you select a region of your desktop to be outputed to a monitor (similar to flame), a friend of mine saw this working and according to him it works fine.

Or if you only need color consistency you could check Cinespace to see if it can help with that, for film it is a huge help, works great, can't say that about video even tho I see no reason to not to.


Cheers,

[donat]

Hi,

Even tho Nuke is my first option when it comes to compositing I have to say that if you work mainly with interlaced stuff you should really put things on a balance.

The fact that there's no real field support in Nuke will not be a problem for us. Even though we are working in video, the source footage we get is almost always shot on film, so we work with progressive frames.

No integrated frame buffer, no way to deal with fields (the only option available to the public so far is my gizmo) and no audio support.

No integrated frame buffer ? I don't understand what you mean by that. While testing the demo version I noticed that if I play some composite in a viewer after computing the images the first time it plays the frames a lot faster the second time, so I assume the images are cached in RAM like in After Effects or Combustion.

Regards

Donat
www.nozon.com

[donat]

Hi Diogo,

Thanks for the info.

Even tho Nuke is my first option when it comes to compositing I have to say that if you work mainly with interlaced stuff you should really put things on a balance.

That wouldn't be a problem for us because we almost always work with progressive material (shot on film and transferred on video).

No integrated frame buffer

No integrated framebuffer ? What do you mean by that ? While playing with Nuke's demo I had the impression that Nuke is caching frames to RAM when playing in a viewer. Or do you mean no external framebuffer ? I also see that Nuke comes with FrameCycler. I wonder why. What functionality do you get with framecycler that you wouldn't get from Nuke's own viewers ?

Regards.

Donat
www.nozon.com

[Diogo Girondi]

Hi Donat,

If you deal mostly with film then I see no reason at all to go with Nuke.

As for the frame buffer I meant an external one, a way to output what is going on in your viewer to an external reference monitor. Caching in Nuke works great, disk or RAM based they are both great.

Case you deploy Nuke I doubt you'll regret doing so, it's a kick ass application.


Cheers,