RS-232 device control with Premiere Pro and Windows XP
Can I use RS-232 device control with Premiere Pro and Windows XP?
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 offers the following choices for device control: "DV" or "None". We wrote a special device control plug-in to Premiere Pro 1.5 to provide device control via our RS-422 port using the RS-422 hardware port on the DeckLink card. All DeckLink cards support RS-422 but not RS-232. RS-232 uses different hardware so we cannot directly support that protocol.
Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 now includes built-in RS-422 device control which is used by the DeckLink drivers to control a deck. Accordingly the DeckLink drivers no longer install a device control plug-in for Premiere Pro 2.0 as there is no need.
On the Mac platform, Final Cut Pro includes direct support for both RS-422 and RS-232 in addition to Firewire (DV). If you have a suitable Mac, you could use your DeckLink Extreme on the Mac platform in conjunction with a Keyspan High Speed USB Serial Adapter to control some decks via RS-232, eg Sony UVW-1400a.
Premiere Pro 1.5.1 and 2.0 for Windows does not provide direct support for RS-232 and you need to use a plug-in for these functions. The free RS-422 plug-in, for Premiere Pro 1.5.1, with DeckLink cards is great for decks which support RS-422. If your deck only supports RS-232, you should be able to use a commercial product named ProVTR as this offers device control in a number of different formats including RS-232. There is no specific mention of support for use with DeckLink cards but in reality you would be bypassing the DeckLink card for device control so that probably makes sense. Before we offered device control in the DeckLink drivers, some DeckLink users reported good results using ProVTR with DeckLink cards but we don't know if that was with RS-232 or RS-422. The ProVTR plug-in plus cable retails for US$249.
We have not tried the ProVTR solution, as we don't have a deck which uses RS-232. However our belief is that it could work very well.
