In a recent installation project for a church, I learned a very valuable lesson about the Blackmagic Design Television Studio video switcher (BMD TVS) and how it interacts with scalers and other equipment.
The TVS expects either 720p or 1080i/p video content and it’s extremely specific about what it accepts or doesn’t accept. For example, if you are trying to feed a 1366×720 signal from a scaler to the TVS, it will not be able to compensate for the difference (720p HD is 1280×720). It will simply display a black screen. Likewise, if you are feeding a 1920x108060p signal, it won’t be able to compensate because it’s expecting 1920×1080/59.94p.
My original intent in spec’ing these two pieces together was that the scaler would handle switching between a Blu-Ray player and two computer inputs and would simply output an HDMI signal to the TVS while simultaneously outputting a VGA signal to the projector. However, the projector could not handle HD video content without a green tint to the images. Otherwise, the system would have worked as designed. But, I felt strongly enough about this particular situation that I thought it might be a good idea to let other like-minded peers and techs know about the potential conflict between the TVS operating only in video space and the scalers wanting to operate in the computer resolution domain.
I do want to make it clear that the weak point in the system was the projector and I’m still working on figuring out how to get around that in the future because the TVS on its own is a pretty good product and would have worked very well if not for this one issue…but it’s a pretty big issue and one that I could not find a workaround for.
I’m sure with a bit of research and perhaps some plain old trial and error, you will find a way to make this kind of a system work… if you do, let me know as I’m always looking to learn more and see how others are succeeding where I have struggled.
How do you approach scaling video and images for your churches so that it comes out well?
David Heys says
Thanks for posting this Tim. We’re looking to move to BMD equipment and knowing about constraints such as these is invaluable.