I have a customer who is capturing from Sony PDW-F70 XDCAM HD Player/Recorder into the DS Nitris in a SD 2997 project.

The material was captured at 23.97 and the deck is outputting 2997.  Every two minutes, the DS stops capture with a "signal lost" error.  It appears the deck inserts a black frame every two minutes and this is when the DS stops capture.  Obviously, the deck is outputting a video signal that is not entirely stable.  There is only one sync input on the deck.  So we can only send tri-level or BB but not both at the same time. 

Anyone have a good alternative workflow?

Thanks!

Can your Tri-level sync can be genlocked to your SD BB or vice-versa - have your SD BB genlocked to your tri-level?

Would that be a menu option on the deck?

I know some decks, in this type of downconvert, require both tri-level and BB.  i just do not think this deck is professional enough to handle both sync sources.

If it's such a deck, you might be forced to duplicate the 29.97 signal to a truly 29.97 tape (and another deck) in order to properly capture in DS next... 

We tried going to another deck, for example a dvcam deck,  from the PDW F70.  The problem is the signal coming out of the PDW F70 does not appear to be stable.  To go from 23.976 to 29.97, the PDW F70 does a 3:2 downconvert on the fly.  Every two minutes, there is a black frame in this downconverted signal.  Both the DS and the dvcam deck, choke on this black frame.  So the issue is clearly the PDW F70 deck.

I think the best workflow would be going out of the PDW F70 deck via HD SDI at the native 1080p 23976fps format to a video converter such as Terranex.

Thank you!

Are you feeding proper sync to both?

Like I said, you should be feeding 1080/23.976p tri-level sync to the deck. That tri-level sync should either generate another NTSC signal (assuming it has more than 1 port and capable of multi format out) to feed the Avid

OR

that tri-level can be sync'd (aka genlocked) to another sync generator. If it can be, use a standard NTSC sync generator to genlock the tri-level. With the same NTSC sync generator, feed the Avid with SD black ref signal.

This will result your VTR and Avid be sync together even though they are using 2 different frame rates.

Let me know...