One of the highlights of this past week was the installation of a new piece of gear for our video system.  Since we’ve moved into the new control room,  we haven’t had a way to record our productions straight off the switcher (which runs un 1080i), and instead have had to resort to loading tapes into the cameras when we wanted to capture something on tape.

Enter the Blackmagic Design Multibridge Extreme.  When it’s connected to your Mac or PC (via a 4-lane PCI-e connector disguised as a DVI cable), it serves as a capture/playback device that can take in just about any signal you throw at it.  We set this unit up in the editing room alongside a Mac Pro with a fat RAID 0 array in it, and were able to record this past weekend’s services straight off our production switcher in 8-bit uncompressed HD with no dropped frames.  As much as I like the idea of recording uncompressed, there’s no way we can use 1.3 TB of disk space every week, so next weekend we will definitely be moving to a compressed format.

Another cool thing about the MBE is that if you disconnect the PCI-e cable, it becomes an conversion tool and will up/down-convert just about any signal between NTSC and HD-SDI.  If you’ve got an audio source and are upconverting to HD-SDI, the system will also embed the audio signal for you if you choose.  This is EXTREMELY handy for when you need to route a signal with audio to another location in the building.  The only drawback regarding the upconversion process is that the unit will not up-scale to HD, you will need a separate piece for that.  (We’re using AJA’s HDP to convert HD-SDI to DVI and extract the audio)

The only other thing I would caution would-be buyers on this unit (specifically Mac users) is that while it CAN act as another monitor on OS X, it does NOT support Core Image, so don’t think you’re going to get Keynote to work in HD without turning on software rendering (which, I might add, is PAINFUL at 1920×1080).  This rules out using software like ProPresenter 3 as well.  However, we ARE using an earlier version of Pro Presenter in a very similar setup with no issues (we’re using a DeckLink HD instead of a Multibridge for that machine).

On a side-note, the only way I’ve found so far to get a DVI output into our HD-SDI switcher is to use Gefen’s DVI to HD-SDI scaler and then run it through an HD-SDI frame sync.  Has anyone found a cheaper solution?  I’d love to know about it.

I’m very excited about the opportunities that this is going to open up for us.  With the right people, we would be able to offer a whole message series on DVD with some kickin’ menus and packaging.  We’ll also be able to provide podcasts of the service as well.  Cool stuff!  I’m already thinking about snagging another one of these units so that we can downconvert to NTSC on the fly and offer it as a live stream.  We’ll see how that goes.