Decklink - No Signal

[logan_mcnay]

I purchased a decklink 4K extreme 12G and own a Flanders DM 241 monitor connected via SDI to the decklink card. Any timelines in PrPro or AE above 2k resolution, IE, any 4k timelines have "No Signal" to my 1080p monitor. 

Blackmagic Desktop video setup is installed and working properly. 

I've talked to support from FSI & blackmagic. Both have said I have done everything correct.  Blackmagic support said "It would appear that everything is set accordingly, so most likely the issue you are having is coming from Premiere and not the card itself. I would suggest contacting Adobe to see if they are able to help you set up the proper settings for outputting the lower resolution output."

In Edit - Preferences - Playback - Video Device - Blackmagic Playback = Checked 

Under setup - For output of unsupported frame sizes - Scale Down = Checked

Enable mercury Transmit = Checked

SDI cable is good. 

The decklink 4K extreme 12G also has the ability to natively downscale UHD footage into HD through the desktop Video setup card, yet Premiere over rides this, yet the buttons "For output of unsupported frame sizes - Scale Down" appear to be just dead buttons and don't work 

The decklink card plays fine in HD timelines & in Davinci where you can have the native timeline resolution & output a downscaled HD resolution to reference monitor.

There's a lot of forum posts of this not working, Adobe help, I've bought 3 decklink cards now trying to get this to work, asking for a friend

[Bruce Bullis]

According to Mitch's analysis above, it's a (Flanders) hardware problem, not a (Blackmagic or Adobe) software problem.

The issue is likely with your Flanders DM 241 monitor. The Flanders DM 241 will support an input of 2048x1080 but only in 30, 29.97, and 23.98 flavors (no 59.94). See Flanders Scientific DM241 tech-specs If you're ouputting a 4K signal, it's definitely not going to see it.

Are you seeing results, that contradict that guidance?

[logan_mcnay]

Hi Bruce, I agree with his above message. Adobe doesn't seperately output HD to reference monitors on timelines with different resolutions. Davinci can do this & Adobe doesn't

The button Scale down for unsupported frame sizes appears to be a dead button that does nothing. 

[Bruce Bullis]

> Adobe doesn't seperately output HD to reference monitors on timelines with different resolutions.

I don't understand the use of 'seperately', in the sentence above...? PPro sends frames and audio from the currently active Source, Program, or Reference monitor, to a selected Transmit device, along with the current settings of that monitor. What different or 'seperate' thing does Resolve do, that PPro doesn't? [I suspect you'll tell me that Resolve can enable additional outputs with different dimensions...]

>The button Scale down for unsupported frame sizes appears to be a dead button that does nothing.

Confirming: That button is within the Blackmagic prefs, right? If so, perhaps it does something, when the Blackmagic device is connected to a different (hardware) monitor...?

[Sorry to end so many sentences with question marks; Not having a Flanders monitor laying around means I'm extrapolating, from my perfectly functional UltraStudio 4k mini setup. :)]

[Warren Heaton]

The issue here is that broadcast reference monitors typically ignore out-of-spec signals.  

[tristansummers]

Stumbled on this ancient thread and wondered why nobody suggested using output B from the decklink to downsize to hd for the hd monitor. 

The only issue is you don't get audio on the down res feed in resolve, which is an undocumented annoyance. 

Hope this helps other people who stumble onto this thread. 

Having to choose scale up/scale down doesn't seem like a modern solution so we need to make friends with the dev team at BMD.