Grass Valley ADVC-HD50

davidtirosh

I am looking into the best way to input HDMI using mac for my live feed.

The show I am working on is moving to a bigger space and SD would not look good.

The ADVC-HD50 should be able to drive HD using Fire-wire in.

Did anyone use this device before?

I remember something about Izzy using a certain compression for live feed regardless of any settings. Would that drive the resolution down?

Many thanks

David

mark

Dear David,

I do not know specifically about the ADVC-HD50, but I can tell you that Isadora only uses the compression settings associated with the device. You can actually change this if desired (click the Video Settings... button) but it is not recommended, as you'll end up with extra, unnecessary CPU overhead.

For sure, others have brought live feed HD in via the Blackmagic cards. I'm pretty confident you'll be able to do this with the HD50 as well, as Isadora itself will not force you to a smaller resolution.

Best Wishes,

Mark

Fred

I have used HDV (the ADVC-HD50 is an HDV device) in live input but some versions ago with Isadora. It did work but it was a cpu hog and had a very big delay. For me it was not really useable, you can have a look at the performance if you have access to an HDV camera, just plug it in and see what it is like.

Blackmagic cards are really good, I am using a thunderbolt model with HDMI and it is great, I have used their PCI and PCIe cards a lot and they are also very reliable. Make sure you will have the cpu power to replicate your patch at the higher resolution, also make sure you can get a real HD beamer- they are still not so common in venues- If it is not native HD then it is not really doing anything for your picture. I found that I had a huge increase in quality just by getting out of DV and USB convertors. The difference in quality I got just from a digital camera connection (SDI or HDMI) was huge, again if you can connect digitally to the beamer (DVI or HDMI) it also makes a huge difference. Although it is tempting to just go HD, pro/digital connectivity even at SD can look way better than you imagined. Are you on mac or PC? Do you have a tower or laptop or mini?

Fred

davidtirosh

Thank you for all the info.

I got the device and was not able to connect to Izzy.

It was able to get it to the computer, say I movie HD for example, but the delay was of about 3 seconds.

I am using a Mac laptop i7 with Thunderbolt.

Fred, Black magic is true magic.

I got an active 100ft HD extender and connecting directly to the HD projector gave me an amazing quality.

Next step, Blackmagic.