HDMI / SDI test monitor 1080p

[James Remo]

I'm touring a rig that involves a Roland V1HD and Resolume servers, with a couple of cheap HDMI preview monitors. Every now and again I get to a festival where they want me to output on SDI, so I have a blackmagic micro HDMI to SDI. Twice this year I've had the situation where the house rig has been unable to accept a 1080p 50hz signal from me over SDI, and both times the house techs have blamed my convertor, despite proving them wrong eventually. I'd like to buy a test monitor that has both HDMI and SDI, so I can prove my SDI output. I've seen the Blackmagic video assist, and the range of Atomos units, and the local video guy had one of the Chinese IPC CCTV units that are widely available on ebay, but that didn't accept a 1080p signal... which led them to blame my convertor! They brought their own convertor and - surprise surprise, same issue. So is there anything else out there to look at? Not really needing the recording side of things at the moment, but as an option for future use it's of interest

 

Requirements:

HDMI and SDI inputs

Accepts 1080p 50/60hz or better

Ranging PSU 100~250v 50/60hz

Small enough to replace a 7" monitor, as it's going into an already overflowing peli 1510

[jason5d]

another solution: output 1080 50i

it's much more acceptable, bbc, sky and itv use it

 

otherwise try a decimator md-hx it does everything

[empyfree]

Lots of test monitors on eBay, often used for CCTV installs. Just pick one with a decent spec and you’ve got a useful test tool.

 

I’d echo jason5d though, 1080i50 is much more common, and easier on the bandwidth if you’ve got a long cable run.

 

The Decimator MDHX that Jason recommends is a great bit of kit to have in your inventory. Does pretty much every type of hdmi to sdi and sdi to hdmi conversion you can think of, and has a scaler built in.

[AHYoung]

You can use a black magic video assist as both monitor and convertor. If you go in on hdmi at a suitable resolution, you get that out the sdi as well as the hdmi out. the video assist will also tell you the res of whats going in and consequently out. you can also loop a short recording of a test card and play that whilst you get everything else working. Ive got the smaller one which has the downside of needing convertor cables for the sdi, but other than that its a really usefull monitor / recorder / player/ convertor / general diagnostic tool, and its definitely worth getting some batteries.

If you need a convertor, the datavideo dac70 is pretty much a universal get out of trouble box and ours have never let us down. Like the decimator it scales and goes both sdi/ hdmi to sdi/ hdmi so pretty much sorts out any compatibility issues.

 

Id also use 1080i50 generally as its much more universal than the 3g resolutions. Im not that surprised that 1080p50 doesnt allways work as it needs proper cable to cope with the datarate, the normal workaround is to drop down to 720p then if that works up to 1080i. surprisingly few people actually understand the absolute basics of sdi transmission and claim things are broken when its actually just about setting a common resolution that all the devices are happy with over the cable between them will support.

[dosxuk]

The 1080p resolutions also have the complication of Level A and Level B formats, and BMD's defaults seem to be different to everyone else's, so as others have said, I'm not surprised you've been having issues.

 

Also, another recommendation for the Decimator, incredibly useful bit of kit, especially where you're trying to interface someone else's feed into your kit, or sending your feed to someone else.

[abbotsmike]

Yeah we use 1080i50 almost universally.

 

I have a viltrox DC-70EX test monitor, very useful bit of kit and runs on 12VDC on an xlr4, or Sony NPF batteries.