Thunderbolt Capture

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Conan Palmer

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  • Joined: Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:12 pm
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Thunderbolt Capture

PostWed Aug 22, 2012 11:58 pm

Greeting and thanks to Blackmagic Design for setting up these forums!

The tech specs for the Cinema Camera indicate "Thunderbolt port for capture of RAW video and audio," which I would assume means 2.5k RAW. I have received conflicting information that indicates the Thunderbolt port outputs the same format as the SDI port, which is 1920x1080 10-bit 4:2:2.

I am purchasing this camera strictly to convert (or render) the RAW footage to ProRes 4444. Footage subsampled at 4:2:2 does not work well with the chroma keying I'm doing.

Assuming the Thunderbolt capture is indeed RAW and not chroma subsampled to 4:2:2, I'd rather use the Thunderbolt stream and capture it as ProRes 4444 (using Media Express) than work with SSD cards. Does this workflow sound plausible?
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John Brawley

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Re: Thunderbolt Capture

PostThu Aug 23, 2012 12:44 am

Thunderbolt is for RAW capture only to Cinema DNG. I'm not sure you can on-the-fly transcode to ProRes over Thunderbolt. Might have to get an answer on this from BMD as I haven't done much with the TB interface.

You can ALSO get 10 bit 4:2:2 over the HDSDI.

jb
John Brawley ACS
Cinematographer
Currently - Los Angeles
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Joshua Helling

Blackmagic Design

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Re: Thunderbolt Capture

PostThu Aug 23, 2012 9:06 pm

So on the setup I have here in the office (granted we've only had a little time to play with it), I have all the normally available codec options so long as the resolution is set properly. So set to 1080p23.98 I can capture to ProRes or even Uncompressed.

So it appears to be that the Cinema DNG files should be taken directly off the SSD (not captured), and the Thunderbolt output can be captured to any of the Media Express supported formats. I'll try to get some clarification on this later on today.
Joshua Helling

Director of World Wide Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.

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