Video Ministry: Part 1

Here is part two of my approach to developing a HD video playback campus for our church.

Here’s what we purchased:

1-Mac Pro

1-Decklink Studio Card (black magic)

1-Pro Presenter 4 (upgrade)

1-Extron DVI Da Plus

1-Extron 1508

1-Datavideo HDR

We needed to go from our Canon Xah1 via the HD component to YUV to the Blackmagic card and some additional cabling to make this all work out.  In a nut shell, Pro Presenter 4 will allow you to feed a live HD video input in.  Using Pro Presenter 4, you can also drop overlays (without utilizing a switcher).  This essentially gives you the ability to produce points and overlay them on top of a video (allowing Pro Presenter to act as a title generator).  We outputted the signal on the secondary display port of the Mac Pro into the DVI-Da Plus utilizing the DVI -I cable.  The DVI-Da then sent the signal to the Extron 1508 where it was converted from computer scan to a video scan.  The result was dumped onto the Datavideo recorder.

Now we did have some issues with audio alignment.  We compensated by delaying the audio out of the board.  This is not the best way to handle this problem, but it worked non-the-less.  A second issue we had was that when the resulting file was played back via a HDMI connection the picture was flawless.  When we played back via a Mac ( you can drag the resulting .m2t file that the Datavideo produced onto your computer) we got some strange interlacing errors.  We suspect it was because the Mac was not quite setup to playback a 1080i file.  We could have fixed this system to work, however with most projects, time was running out…so we opted for an additional piece of equipment.  I will post that update in my next update.