Grass Valley TURBO iDDR
Since the offset, the TURBO has output an unusual signal over DVI which tends to confuse a lot of pro video switchers and scalers – I’ve had issues interfacing the TURBO with Vista Systems Montage, Spyder, Barco Encore, ScreenPRO II, ImagePRO HD, and other Barco / Folsom switchers and scaling mixers.
Grass Valley did release a software revision for the TURBO in order to fix the issue, however, I’ve still experienced issues since – maybe because I’m in PAL land here in Australia.
I’ve found the composite and SDI outputs from the TURBO to be standard and reliable, however the SDI only outputs PAL/NTSC, not HD formats. The DVI output can output analog YUV/RGB with some success using a break-out cable, when running 1080i format, however for best results so far, I prefer to stick with setting the TURBO to output 1536×768 for HD material, and putting up with the slight effect on resolution, as, in my experience, this output format tends to work best with the switchers I’ve mentioned above.
You might notice that even when the TURBO is set to output 1536×768, various scalers and switchers might interpret the signal differently, however I have found that regardless, they will tend to lock onto the signal with success, with the expection of sometimes needing to manually set the aspect ratio to 16:9.
#1 by Stefan Reck on March 23, 2009 - 6:21 am
1536×786 is a POS resolution when using the iDDR as a HD BG source for 3:1 panoramic projection in a a two projector configuration (e.g. 2x FLM14 on an 11m wide screen, a fairly common format for higher end “business” applications these days). Most of the time the BG content will have been generated in AE, C4D or Motion 1080px high, which scales really badly to 786px afterwards. Add in the fact that true HD Projectors like the FLM HD series will have to re-scale the output again in real time to match their 1920×1080 panels and you get the (ugly…) picture, don’t you?
I complained about this to Barco NV a while back, and finally they seem to have gotten their act together: Encore Firmware 1.23 is out, and according to them it will display 1920×1080@50i without squashing the screen content to half its original height. Hoorray! I’ll be setting up a few big-ass LCD’s and doing a test next week…
#2 by Steven Wylie on March 23, 2009 - 8:15 am
I agree, the TURBO has never made a decent wide screen background source because of these issues… I haven’t seen 1.23 on the Folsom FTP server – I’ll have to drop them a line and find out where it is!
#3 by Stefan Reck on April 26, 2009 - 10:22 pm
Grr… Yes, Barco have added full 50i/59.94i support to Encore with FW 1.23. Yes, the PC backup software finally works. Yes, all that is nice, thank you.
NO, throwing two 1080i files into an iDDR and using that as a HD BG source still won’t work out of the box. Neither digital nor analog. It does when you put Imagepro HD or DCS-200 in between – even if these do nothing more than regenerate the signal to proper DVI standards.
GV, it’s about time you guys got your act together! There are specifications and white papers for a reason…
And while you’re at it you might as well eliminate that annoying white one-pixel column down the right side of the picture. Yes, it goes unnoticed on regular HDTV; but it is a major PITA for widescreen applications that are normally done with edge-butted graphics. Creating overlapped BG content in PP (for static slides via Matrox TH to go in between the animated sections) is NOT fun :- ((