blackmagic ultrastudio questions..

[Ron Peer]

Dear all,
I'm fairly new to qlab. i use it to controll corporate events and starting to get along with it.
I would appreciate your knowlegde before spending allot of $$ for no reason or worst, wrong reason.
is any of you connected HD SDI cameras through the Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K? (I suppose you did). and my questions are:
1. can you tell me the latency of the camera live feed (frames, msec)?
2. is there a way to trim egdes from the feed comming from the HD SDI camera? (think of a medium shot of a keynote speaker where you really want to see only the squere contains head and shoulders without the rest of the image).
3. will the HDMI and SDI outputs of the ultrastudio act as another display output where i will able to connect a projector to?
4. what is the cheapest way to stream a pc VGA/HDMI feed into qLab (think of a podium laptop with PowerPoint presentation that needs to be fed into the program).

sorry for the messy post, really appreciate your help and experience.

Best Regards,
Ron Peer.

[Pim]

Hi Ron, 

I have been looking at the 4K but since I wasn't going to use 4K resolutions, I ended up buying one UltraStudio express and a bunch of UltraStudio Mini Recorders to get multiple inputs at the same price of one 4K ;-) Some people get confused with the SDI-A and SDI-B port on the 4K, assuming it will support two independent video streams, which it doesn't. A and B are necessary to get enough bandwidth for 4K resolutions. All those BM devices that work with the Decklink protocol work similarly in Qlab, just consider the kind of physical input and resolution/framerate you need and just choose the cheapest one that will do the job ;-)

1. can you tell me the latency of the camera live feed (frames, msec)?

I don't have any figures here, but obviously there is some latency. Having said that, I think in most situations, this is hardly noticeable for the audience. Maybe you've worked with FireWire DV interfaces before? - compared to that, BM thunderbolt interfaces have close to zero latency ;-) (If you really want to reduce latency to a minimum, avoid using software and use dedicated hardware.)

 

2. is there a way to trim egdes from the feed comming from the HD SDI camera? (think of a medium shot of a keynote speaker where you really want to see only the squere contains head and shoulders without the rest of the image).

Yes, you can do this in Qlab. You can even program a zoom, no problem. Just realize that you're cutting away pixels.

 

3. will the HDMI and SDI outputs of the ultrastudio act as another display output where i will able to connect a projector to?

No. (but I think this is something on many peoples wishlists and if it's technically possible, I'm quite sure it will be added in future releases.)

 

4. what is the cheapest way to stream a pc VGA/HDMI feed into qLab (think of a podium laptop with PowerPoint presentation that needs to be fed into the program).

For HDMI I'd say the Blackmagic Ultrastudio Mini Recorder. (can also input SDI) VGA I don't know...

 

sorry for the messy post, really appreciate your help and experience.

No worries, hope this is helpful.

 

Best Regards,
Ron Peer.

Cheers!

Pim 

 

[Ron Peer]

hey buddy.

thank you so much  for the info! it was very helpful.

i played around with the geometry of the live cam input. cant seem to find a way to trim edges thou. i can zoom in or out, can change the position of the layer can cannot trim it.

am i missing something?

בתאריך יום חמישי, 26 ביוני 2014 12:09:42 UTC+3, מאת Pim:

[Pim]

Hi Ron,

Aha. What you're describing is indeed not possible in Qlab (nice feature request though) but maybe there's a workaround if you create a second surface in the video preferences and display the zoomed (and thus trimmed) image on top of the other surface? If you could describe what you're trying to achieve, I'd be glad to help you find a solution!

Cheers, Pim

Op vrijdag 27 juni 2014 09:54:50 UTC+2 schreef Ron Peer:

[Lucas Krech]

Add a masking layer. 

-L

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[Chris Ashworth]

You can pull in the edges of a surface; it’s not easy to find in the current version since you have to hover over the edge in the surface to pull it in.

The interface for this will be more clear in 3.1

You can also add a mask.

[Pim]

Come to think about it... It would be extremely useful to be able to trim the edges of a video or camera cue. Especially if you were able to animate (even rotate) them. Think of it as the shutters of a profile spot. This could of course be achieved by animating black images and have them sliding in, but you wouldn't have the possibility to have another movie or picture to be playing in the background layer. 

It would even be very very valuable to have the shutters and partial screens options available in the Camera patch settings. A quite common way of using multiple camera's on one input is through a quad-splitter. I used this recently in a show with two HD cams and four CCTV cams. The four CCTV cams were connected to a BM Ultrastudio mini recorder through a quad camera splitter (composite in - SDI out). Programming that show would have been a hell of a lot easier if I had the possibility to trim the quad signal into four separate camera's. This sort of feature would also solve Ron's problem. You could just patch two camera's with the same source but with different trimming.

I have not a clue whether this is technically anywhere near possible so please forgive my ignorance, just thinking out loud!

Have a great day!

Pim, NL

Op dinsdag 1 juli 2014 16:29:22 UTC+2 schreef Christopher Ashworth: