Recording the HD-SDI video data stream for debugging

This article describes a procedure for investigating a technical issue with video signals for Pomfort support.

You can use the following instructions to create a raw SDI capture which can be used by our support team to debug problems with the metadata in the SDI signal:

First, make sure that the camera does output a HUD with as much metadata as possible.

Then activate the SDI Capture by running the following command in the Terminal app:

  • For Livegrade Studio: defaults write com.pomfort.LiveGradeStudio6 showDeveloperTools -bool YES
  • For Livegrade Pro: defaults write com.pomfort.LiveGrade6 showDeveloperTools -bool YES

After restarting Livegrade, a new “Developer Tools” menu will appear in the top bar:

You can then click on the “Capture SDI Signal of current Slot…” menu item.

This will first open a save dialog where you can choose a location where the capture will be stored. Note that you need to store it on a fast disk with enough free space (typically at least 3 GB).

After clicking ‘Save’ the capture will start and a window will open where you can stop the capture.

This will only record the last 450 frames, so if your SDI signal has 30 fps, this means that it will only keep the last 15 seconds.

Therefore, if you want to record changes in the record flag, you will have to, after starting the capture, start and stop the recording on the camera and press press stop capture in Livegrade within 15 seconds. Make sure that the camera does output an image where we can see the record status of the camera.

After stopping the capture, please compress the directory created by the capture process and send it to us by uploading the ZIP to a file share service like https://transfer.pcloud.com/ or https://wetransfer.com/, or ask the Pomfort support for an FTP or Dropbox destination.