- Posts: 2
- Joined: Sun Dec 28, 2014 11:15 pm
Hi Blackmagic,
We've been using Blackmagic for the last 2 years in both development and heavy production environments. We capture hundreds of 2 minute videos per day in one of the UK's biggest arena's using your hardware. We've used a variety of your hardware including.
Blackmagic, you seem to have drivers that support AVFoundation. This can't possibly be an accident. You must have taken the time to write drivers to support AVFoundation. I know, I've done kernel programming before and it's not a fun job.
Not only this, but I'm guessing that you didn't write drivers to support the massive list of applications in the tech specs section of all of your products without the use of AVFoundation. I have the list below for you.
What confuses me is that, despite the list above, none of your products work reliably with AVFoundation. For the past year we've battled with getting AVFoundation to work with your products. I've had a look around and it's not just us. Here's a list of issues that we have encountered as well as other developers.
So far, we've tolerated the inconsistencies with your hardware. You "kind of" support AVFoundation but won't say on these forums whether you actually truly support it.
We've phoned for technical support numerous times and have had to pull our equipment out of the field and bring them back into our office to do a full rig test assuming that it's an issue onsite. Turns out, it was just something wrong with Blackmagic.
The sheer mention of using Blackmagic hardware in our office sends chills down our developers spines.
Surely you'd want to place a nice big fat AVFoundation logo on your supported software page. I guarantee that this will attract more developers to your hardware as it opens the doors to using high end equipment with code that we know and love.
Blackmagic, your development community is begging for answers to some of the questions above. The most important one being, will you commit to AVFoundation? It is the gateway drug to using your SDK. If dev's stumble at the first hurdle, they won't complete the race and will resort to using webcams for apps and interactive installations.
If you're looking for test code, we can't give you ours, but we use this sample app from Apple as a last ditched resort if we can't get things working in our applications - https://developer.apple.com/library/mac ... Intro.html. I suggest that you use it.
Many Thanks,
Gav
We've been using Blackmagic for the last 2 years in both development and heavy production environments. We capture hundreds of 2 minute videos per day in one of the UK's biggest arena's using your hardware. We've used a variety of your hardware including.
- Blackmagic Intensity Extreme
- Blackmagic DeckLink Mini PCI
- Blackmagic DeckLink Mini Thunderbolt
- Blackmagic DeckLink Quad
Blackmagic, you seem to have drivers that support AVFoundation. This can't possibly be an accident. You must have taken the time to write drivers to support AVFoundation. I know, I've done kernel programming before and it's not a fun job.
Not only this, but I'm guessing that you didn't write drivers to support the massive list of applications in the tech specs section of all of your products without the use of AVFoundation. I have the list below for you.
- DaVinci Resolve
- Fusion
- Final Cut Pro X
- Premiere Pro CC
- Avid Media Composer
- After Effects CC
- Avid Pro Tools
- Steinberg Cubase
- Autodesk Smoke
- Photoshop CC
- Nuke
- Steinberg Nuendo
- Avid Symphony
- Avid News Cutter
- Tools On Air just:in & live:cut & just:play & just:live
- Softron OnTheAir
- MovieRecorder and OnTheAir CG
- Flash Media Encoder
- Wirecast
- Livestream Procaster
- Resolume Avenue 4
- Sony Vegas Pro
- Corel VideoStudio Pro X4
- CyberLink Power Director
- MAGIX Video Pro X4
- Vidblaster Pro & Studio & Broadcast
- Uniplay
- Playbox AirBox
- CasparCG
- Magicsoft CG
- Xsplit Broadcaster
- Imagine Communications Velocity
- InfoCaster.
What confuses me is that, despite the list above, none of your products work reliably with AVFoundation. For the past year we've battled with getting AVFoundation to work with your products. I've had a look around and it's not just us. Here's a list of issues that we have encountered as well as other developers.
- Audio sometimes falls out of sync with video, to get around this, we have to restart the capture session at regular intervals
- In Yosemite, your latest drivers kind of work. When I say kind of, on the DeckLink Mini PCI, the capture session opens once, if you close the session and re-open it (restart the app) you get a black screen, this is essential if you want to change the capture settings! To get around this, you need to set your settings, persist them and then I kid you not, restart your mac! Downgrading drivers to 9 kind of resolves this.
- The DeckLink Quad will change inputs when you restart OS X sometimes. This is beyond annoying, we were onsite for 4 hours trying to debug the problem until we realised that to get around it, we had to unplug the mini BNC cables and plug them into random ports until we got our picture back. Because of this, we have 2 DeckLink Quads in the office that we've taken out of service and are now using as paper weights
- Sometimes, you get a black screen in AVFoundation when you open a Capture Session, to get around it, you need to do what we call the Blackmagic dance. This involves waiting for 3 seconds after the capture session initially opens, change the resolution and frame-rate to something other than the current one, wait 5 seconds, change them back to the one that we want and voila, the picture appears
- HDMI is unreliable across all of your products... period
So far, we've tolerated the inconsistencies with your hardware. You "kind of" support AVFoundation but won't say on these forums whether you actually truly support it.
We've phoned for technical support numerous times and have had to pull our equipment out of the field and bring them back into our office to do a full rig test assuming that it's an issue onsite. Turns out, it was just something wrong with Blackmagic.
The sheer mention of using Blackmagic hardware in our office sends chills down our developers spines.
Surely you'd want to place a nice big fat AVFoundation logo on your supported software page. I guarantee that this will attract more developers to your hardware as it opens the doors to using high end equipment with code that we know and love.
Blackmagic, your development community is begging for answers to some of the questions above. The most important one being, will you commit to AVFoundation? It is the gateway drug to using your SDK. If dev's stumble at the first hurdle, they won't complete the race and will resort to using webcams for apps and interactive installations.
If you're looking for test code, we can't give you ours, but we use this sample app from Apple as a last ditched resort if we can't get things working in our applications - https://developer.apple.com/library/mac ... Intro.html. I suggest that you use it.
Many Thanks,
Gav