Decklink cards and Cineform AHD
 

(hoping that David Newman will answer)

Supposedly, capturing Component out of Sony HDV cams (FX1/Z1) eliminates MPEG compression artifacts.

1. From your experience, does capturing Component out of FX1/Z1 solve blockiness of the MPEG footage? How is it for compositing (green screen)?

2. Decklink HD card seems to be a capture solution du jour (after Component->HD-SDI conversion by AJA or DEcklink Multibridge). Can Decklink HD record in Cineform Aspect HD codec, or will the card have only Uncompressed option to save the footage?

1) Yes the MPEG artifacts can be bypassed using the analog output of the Sony FX1/Z1 during acquistion. This would likely help green-screening but we haven't down those tests. We haven't focused on analog output of the Z1.

2) We don't directly support the BlackMagic cards. Something may be worked out using their DirectShow capture components with a Prospect HD encoder, however the Aspect HD encoder is limited to 1440x1080 so will need to scale the feed from the HDSDI. I don't believe the BM card has a hardware scaler. With Prospect HD the 1920x1080 image can be directly encoded. Prospect HD has direct integration with the AJA Xena line of HD-SDI cards.

Will Aspect HD work with the AJA Xena line of HD-SDI cards?

Best,
Christopher

Aspect HD doesn't support the Xena cards. We introducted Propect HD Edit to fill the product gap between a full Prospect HD and Aspect HD, the Edit version doesn't support HDSDI ingest but it supports all the HDSDI outputs on the Xena cards, including 1920x1080 10bit.