HDMI from HD110
 

I just bought a small converter from Hall Research, called VHD-HDMI. This converter takes either RGB or YPbPr input(via a 15 pin vga), along with an analog audio input; and, outputs HDMI. It does the conversion to digital without rescaling, so that the scale size in equals the scale size out. The box, itself, is very small, about the size of two packs of cigarettes, and it takes 5 volts input. The converter will allow display of a VGA signal on an HDMI monitor.

So, I connected the component output of my HD110 to the box's input and then connected the output to my HDTV HDMI input. The picture produced seems sharper than the picture available directly from the component out. Focus becomes very precise using this monitor. And the best is that I can now feed an HDMI signal to a BMD Intensity card.

Hi Bill,

Sounds very interesting. Do you have any more info on the item i.e. brand, cost where to get one etc, etc ?

Cheers Greg.

do a google search for Hall research. I bought mine at Markertek, $325

Thanks Bill

Bill, where do you get a component out to 15pin connector cable?
And is all the resolution, aspect ratios, etc., still maintained? And what kind of monitor are you judging this by if I may ask? Interesting idea!

Thanks for the ideas,
Lonnie

A cable comes with the box. I also ordered a spare cable from
http://store.a2zcable.com/

As far as I know, complete resolution is maintained. This is, basically, a straight across analog to digital conversion. I am feeding a 32 inch Sony HD television.

Hi Bill-
Be aware that you'll take a hit in the quality by adding this analog conversion. Take a look at post on analog vs digital quality out of the BR-HD50 deck. This difference also holds true for this device.

Mike Schell
Convergent Design

Mike...

By the time you're playing back on a BR-HD50 deck, you're already playing back material that's been encoded to HDV. I'm taking a data stream straight off of the camera analog component outs and converting to digital before the data stream has been converted to m2t(HDV). No compression, no loss....it's 4:2:2 uncompressed, analog going into the box, getting digitized, so I assume it's 4:2:2 uncompressed 12 bit digital coming out. If you know this to be untrue, tell me. The image I get is much better than the image produced by the HDV encoded data.

Hi Bill-
Thanks for the explanation. For the JVC camera w/o HD-SDI, this is probably the best quality video possible. A lot depends on the quality of the A/D converters in the external box. With any analog conversion, you will, of course, see some quality loss, but then again, you also get a quality loss with the MPEG2 compression.

The video quality from HDV camcorders with HDMI output (in live-mode) is absolutely incredible, especially when you consider the price (many are in the $1000 to $1500 range). In this mode, you do get the absolute best possible video quality: no compression, no analog conversion losses.

Mike Schell

Would you need a hard drive array of some kind to record footage this way? Could a laptop record via this converter?

Hi Brian-
You need a desktop system to record this video, there are no laptops that capture uncompressed HD video. You can capture into a DVCProHD CODEC or the new Apple ProRes CODEC. You won't need a particularly high performance RAID as the data rates are below 20 MBytes/sec.

Mike Schell
Convergent Design

Thanks for the info. What type of capture board is necessary for a PC?

I would recommend an AJA Xena card or a Blackmagic HD Extreme.

..and for the Mac people Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme also works, and AJA's Kona cards.

I've also been looking very closely at AJA's new io HD box, which encodes into FCS2's ProRes422 or ProRes 422 HQ codec. PDF white paper for ProRes 422.

I'm thinking that an ioHD combined with a MacbookPro and a Firewire800 drive would provide the ideal portable "lossless 4:2:2" capture solution.

Very true.... but before you dismiss it entirely I'd like to mention how awesome the HDMI output from the BR-HD50U actually looks. Bypassing the D-A converter in the deck has an obvious improvement.

I've also been using the Convergent-Design HDConnect-MI as a HDMI to HD-SDI converter from the BR-HD50 and the improvement over standard component out is spectacular. I've also been using it with a DVI to HDMI converter ($15 Belkin) to monitor HD-SDI out of a Macbook. An awesome solution for those who want HD-SDI review on the set.

What about recording to the DR-HD harddrive???