Blackmagic Design DeckLink 4K Extreme

ok. No support from Blackmagic as usual

I was able to capture HDMI 3D frame packed stereo at [email protected] and [email protected], along with 1080p@60 without difficulty. Sometimes the card fails to initialize properly on boot up, but a shutdown/restart cycle of the PC seems to do it. Using the SDK I experienced occasional crashes (blue screens). I wish the card/SDK had a way to tell you what HDMI video signal the card is seeing, so the code can adjust accordingly.

I'm using several of these cards for capture of stereo HDMI and stereo SDI. I originally bought the DeckLink Extreme 3D+ cards, and they performed (mostly) as expected. I was able to capture side-by-side stereo HDMI, and dual link stereo SDI. That card was then discontinued which forced me to move to a DeckLink 4K Extreme. The 4K is supposed to have the exact same capabilities as the 3D+ (and more), but it flat out doesn't work right. 1. Stereo HDMI capture no longer works, in frame packed or side-by-side format. I'm testing this with a Sony HXR-NX3D1U camera, which outputs in both of the formats I mentioned. Capture of 3D HDMI is one of the major features of this card, and for that not to work is extremely frustrating. 2. In 2D HDMI mode, which normally works, I've placed a DVI to fiber converter in between my video source and the capture card. Once again, this works flawlessly on the 3D+ card, but somehow messes up the 4K extreme and all I see is a black screen. 3. Frame packing mode cannot be selected in their settings application. So this locks me down to side-by-side (which no longer works) or standard 2D capture. I've been talking with customer support about these issues for several months, and none of them have been addressed. Not only that, they say they cannot tell me the status of any of the issues because all they do is log the bug and engineering never gives them any updates on when they'll be fixed. This card just doesn't seem ready for production. They've clearly not done enough testing, and I'd recommend waiting until some of these issues are fixed before going with this card.

I just used this card on a 3D Feature Film and it preformed flawlessly. I was able to watch 2 streams of footage simultaneously and it worked great.

Card gets really hot in my case. And the HDMI cables could be much more flexible they hard so hard to bend that it actually moves the hdmi component connections on the card when bending the cables just a bit. I am selling this card and I went with a Datapath VisionDVI-DL instead.

I bought into the all the slick website design and graphics and youtube (Promotional people at the Expos) videos on how great this card was years back but it was a nightmare to get operating on Windows 7. The company would come out with driver updates for it and they would fix my inability to capture video correctly - black screen. When I'd call tech-support and complain about it, they would recommend using a "legacy driver." How do you keep putting out new driver versions ( not have them work) and then keep telling people to use a legacy driver? I feel that I threw my money away on this one. Now, you won't find any legacy drivers to down load for this model on Blackmagic's website. In fact they eliminated this high-end model from their selection and kept lower grade models. This one supposedly handled formats that are still very popular today but obviously they want to "push new product" off the shelves - so now they're pushing the 4K version of this one. I hope the new batch of customers who buy that one don't run into the same issues.