Hi,
New VMIX-HD setup streaming 3 HD-SDI PTZ cameras.

These cameras have a dual output capability, so we are using the SD output through the conventional analogue switcher and sending the HD-SDI to the computer running VMIX. We are capturing analog sound and SD video using a Hauppauge USB-Live capture device (unsupported) for now, but that is a temporary measure.

The hope is to go with VMIX HD and eliminate the analogue stuff alltogether.

My question is about an issue we see where the HD-SDI signals are "blinking out" on two of the three cameras coming through the BMD Decklink Quad card. I updated all the software this weekend, latest download of vmix 14.0.0.x and Windows Desktop Media from BMD.

The computer was spec'd out using the VMIX recommended hardware page and the BMD supported hardware page.
Asus z87 with i5 3.4 GHz quad core processor and 16GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX750 in PCI 16x slot 1
BMD Decklink Quad in PCI 16x slot 2 (because 16x slots 1 and 3 have shared IRQ)
(2) 500GB 7,200 RPM SATA drives

<edit - model number updated>

We are not capturing the video at this point, just streaming.

Checking the statistics panel, I can see that two of the three cameras are dropping frames in the Source Dropped column, and one of them is consistently worse than the other. The third camera shows no dropped frames and is quite stable, so we decided to move the good performing camera to each of the other two stations to validate the power and wiring is good, and were able to stream with no dropped frames for a couple of hours at 720p60 using the "good" performing camera, and the other two were showing the dropped frame symptoms in the same proportions as stated above.

Tonight, we upped the quality to 1080p30 to see if the good performing camera would remain error free, but near the end of a 2 hour run, there was a burst of dropped frames.... so now we have seen blinking and dropped frame statistics for all three of our new HD-SDI cameras.

These are HD PTZ cameras that use SMTPE 292M and uncompressed video (I think it may be 8 bit uyuv (something like that), These are HDCCTV 1.0 compliant and should have no audio capability (no mics), but I notice there are dropped audio statistics... about 1.5x more than the dropped video frames. Also noticed there is no way to de-select the audio portion of the signal when defining the camera input.

I also see blinking when using BMD Media Express to capture on 2 of the 3 cameras (one at a time though), but see no audio channels present in Media Express.

Any thoughts, ideas on how to stabilize the HD-SDI portion of this setup is greatly appreciated.

Update: The good folks at BMD tested the DeckLink card and helped with some ideas for ironing out this configuration. The card tested good, so we are suspecting the frame rate settings. The PTZ camera setup screen says 30p and 60i, but they may really be sending 29.97p and 59.94i...

This particular camera seems to be marketed with a couple of brand names, and maybee more than one model number...
I see our tech support calls it a XPT-1330W but the box it shipped in says Eyemax Model HC-N30SWS . Got ours from e-digital deals..

CAMERA PART (30S Model)
Image Sensor 1/2.8'' Exmor CMOS Sensor
Pixels 3,270K pixels
Zoom ×30 Optical Zoom, ×12 Digital Zoom
...
Video Ouptut 2×BNC (HD-SDI and CVBS)
HD-SDI HDcctv v1.0, 1.485Gb/s, SMPTE 292M standard
Resolution : 1080p/30/25, 1080i/60/50, 720p/60/50/30/25

We tested again this weekend and one camera seems to be OK at 720p60, but the other two are blinking.
I tried 720 p59.94, but vMix reported the resolution is not supported.

We also followed the suggestions from BMD support and see blinking when using their Desktop Video capture utility. (Media Express)

We have tried using the DeckLink card in different slots and none seem to perform as well as the 16x slot 2.
We moved the camera ball units around a few weeks ago and the one camera seemed to do better then the other two (so that "kinda" proved the cabling was OK ?).

Any suggestions are welcome.