It started with this thread on the Adobe forums.  And then Mike Nichols (@TheEditDoctor) did this video showing the issue he was having with his Blackmagic card and CS6…and how it wouldn’t act like it does in FCP.

Basically the issue is this:  In FCP, if we were using a 1080p 23.98…or 720p 23.98 sequence, and we wanted to view this on a monitor that might not be able to do 23.98…all we had to do is set our VIDEO PLAYBACK to be 1080i29.97 (for 1080), or 720p 59.94 (for 720p), and FCP would add the proper pulldown and send out a 29.97 or 59.94 signal.  Playing back our 23.98 sequences at 29.97.  The issue that cropped up is that with CS6 you couldn’t do that.  At least with a Blackmagic Design card.

I wanted to verify this for myself, because I find this to be an important feature…and I just couldn’t believe that this was the case. There had to be some way to do it.  I have the AJA Kona 3 card, so I have different drivers…and it turns out that it works for me.

First I looked at the AJA Control Panel. And just like with FCP, The sequence setting and video output control what the FRAME BUFFER is. This was set to 1080sf23.98. When I changed the secondary to 1080i 29.97, and switched the output to match…my monitor freaked out. OK, so that wouldn’t work. So then I looked into the settings in PPro CS6.

I went into the PREFERENCES and looked at PLAYBACK. Note that my video device is the AJA Kona 3. I noticed a SETUP option. I clicked on that…and got this:

Hmmm…VIDEO FORMAT. This looks promising. So I clicked on that and VIOLA! A list of options appeared.

I chose 1080i29.97, clicked OK and my monitor flickered…then registered that it was getting a 1080i 29.97 signal. I looked at the AJA Control Panel and the FRAME BUFFER did indeed register a 1080i 29.97 signal.

I mentioned this on Twitter, and Mike said that he didn’t see that with his BMD card. Is this an AJA only thing at the moment? Can no other IO devices from other makers do this?