Video Transcript
The NEW Decklink 8k Pro G2 is here, this tutorial shows how to hook up input and output to Unreal
Greg Corson · 13,507 views 4 Aug 2024 #niagara #unrealengine #virtualproduction · Duration 9:56 · youtu.be/aS2IhbBj5G0
The NEW Blackmagic 8k Pro G2 card is available. This tutorial shows how to hook up video in and out to Unreal using this card. The method in the tutorial should work with most other Blackmagic DeckLink cards too, though this is the only one I have to test on. The new version of the card adds some features like HDMI in and out to what the original card could do. There are additional video formats available too. Check the Blackmagic website for more details. A lot of the devices I use are on my amazon page at https://www.amazon.com/shop/gregcorson #virtualproduction #niagara #unrealengine
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so Blackmagic has brought out a new version of the decklink 8K Pro called the G2 and I've got one I'm Greg Corson and this means that I can finally do a tutorial on how to hook up the Blackmagic card with Unreal Engine and use it for both input and output so what's new on this card the main thing is the daughter card that takes up another slot and has an rs422 deck control an HDMI in and an HDMI out plug on it Blackmagic is also improved the specs of the card in so many ways I can't list them all you'll just have to go to their website and read the revised specs here's what the new card looks like with the daughter attached and everything assembled the daughter card hangs a bit below the PCI slot and
doesn't actually have to be plugged in so if you've got room at the very bottom of your motherboard you may be able to use only one slot one common question a lot of people ask is why get this instead of a less expensive USB card the main reason is quality most USB cards record compressed video which adds noise and other things to the image that can make it harder to chrom key this card records uncompressed video so the video is sharp and clear the other advantage of this card is that each of the four ports can be used as either an input or an output so you can easily bring in multiple cameras or direct video to monitors or recorders here's the setup for today's tutorial I've connected my camera into input number three three
through an SDI cable and I've connected my ninja 5 monitor recorder to the HDMI output now you need to make sure the decklink is properly set up to bring in the video and audio and send it out in the correct format you'll probably see it looking something like this at first where everything is set to ntsc so for this setup I'm going to use the decklink pro channel one to output and I'm going to Output to HDMI so I'm going to click this box here uh and I'm going to tell it that my video in and out is HDMI and save that and then I'm going to click this box again and I'm going to click this popup for the video format which unfortunately for some reason isn't being recorded by OBS so I'm just going
to spin down here to to 2160p 29.97 which is what I want and select it and then save that and now you can see the outputs here are set up to that format then I'll jump over to input number three which is where my camera is I'm going to come up here select my connections sti2 in or out which is the way it should be and then I'm also going to go to the popup here and scroll down to 2160 at 29.97 Herz same as the input output and save that and now you can see it's seeing my camera and now I've jumped into unreal 5.4.3 that's the latest version as of this filming and I've got a real simple project setup here I'm not going to explain this in too much detail because
this is about hooking up the black magic card and not about generating the project but what I have is a very simple augmented reality project where I have a CG element that's this like ring in this character overlaid on top of a media plate uh from my camera which isn't hooked up yet so first let's set up the input we'll go up here and I've already got a little folder made named Blackmagic video with nothing in it and that's where I'll put everything so you rightclick go down to media and select media bundle and name it something useful like like Black Magic Camera and when you click away you'll see it creates these
in this inner assets folder also for you automatically so double click the Blackmagic camera thing you just created and you should get a screen like this you may have to move it into the dock to get it to be full size but that's something you should be used to by now um first thing we do is we come up to Media source and we say Blackmagic media source and this changes things a little we open up this Blackmagic Tab and go to the first item here and my video from my camera is on number three and I'm going to take it off of Auto at the moment just to make it real clear what I'm doing the camera is running 4K UHD Progressive
29.97 and then I'll just hit apply as far as audio I'm not going to mess with that too much um I'm going to tell it I want a capture video in 10 bit and I don't want to override the source encoding I'm going to leave it as it is and that'll keep the colors correct and that should be about all we need for the moment so I'll hit save and then I'll close this now to actually see if it's working we drag it out into the world and you can see my video is coming through it's kind of pointed at my desk right now and my uh record is sitting right here now that we can see our video coming in we want to get it onto the media plate that's already part of the composure composite right now you can see there's nothing there at all so to do that we just have to connect up to
texture and the easiest way to hook up the video texture is to go back to the content drawer go into this inner assets folder you can see the texture here just select that then go back to the media plate and use selected asset from the content browser and now everything's hooked up you can see and I can take this and move it out of the way where it won't be seen so now we have the media plate hooked up and we have the CG element and if I look at the comp you can see the two with the CG element composited over top top of the video now this isn't meant to be an exhaustive example but this shows you
just how to get the video input connected pretty simple now let's talk about the part I wasn't ever able to show you before because the card I used to use didn't support output that's how to get live output from unreal directly from the decklink card you can use this to record what's going on in unreal put it to a monitor or any number of other things in my case like I told you earlier I have a ninja 5 recorder you see this here on my desk uh that's connected to the output Port of the black magic card uh through HDMI and as you can see sort of here in this image it's black right now that's because the output hasn't been set up so here's how we set up that
output again we go to the content drawer and I'm going into my Blackmagic video folder and I'm going to go into media and create a Blackmagic media output and I'll just call it Blackmagic out and we double click that to open it and we get this rather imposing screen that you don't have to do too much to first I set up the output my decklink 8k Pro channel one is set up for HDMI so that's where I I'm going to Output I'm going to Output 4K UHD at 29.97 and I'm going to let it free run and I'm going to come down here a little further and just set up a couple of
other things I'm going to say I want High dynamic range Rec 709 and that's really all I need to do for now so I'll save this and close it now you can see there's still nothing on the screen here that's because it hasn't been connected to the comp yet so like I said I have this simple comp set up uh that overlays CG on top of the video from my camera and you can see the comp results down here now to get that to come out on to my recorder I'm going to go down into the comp come to the output
section and at the moment you can see it's doing a player view port compositing output I'm going to change this to compositing Media capture output then I'm going to say to capture the output to Blackmagic out and hopefully you saw that my monitor down here on the desk just lit up with the output and that's really all there is to it now to be honest I got to tell you if you're doing this really seriously you're probably going to want to set up a lot of color information and other ways to make sure that the video coming out has the correct color frame rate and sync with all the other parts of the video that are in your comp
that's uh generally pretty complicated so I'm going to save that for a different tutorial this one was just the basic setup of input and output from the deck Link Card and now just to give you an idea what the whole thing looks like when we're done I brought it up full screen and I'll play the animation that goes with it and with this setup I can record this whole animation directly onto my ninja recorder if I want to in high resolution with very high color depth which is great that's all for now please remember to like comment and subscribe if you like the content and I'll be doing some more soon
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