When I first got it, I figured it would work great for 4K timelines – that it would simply downscale it upon output without requiring project settings to be anything special.
I was a bit concerned at first when I connected it up to a Mac running Resolve, that it was doing a centre crop of all footage. This was due to the fact that my timeline was 4K.
Whilst downscaling was not an advertised feature of this, one would expect it to work that way as getting a centre crop of your timeline (or source footage) is not very useful, and I was ready to return it.
However, Resolve allows you to configure Output and Monitoring settings separately from Timeline resolution. Whilst I was not able to fix it by changing Monitoring settings, it does downscale the footage and display correctly when you change output to 1080p.
This gets quite annoying when your deliverable is above 1080p, as you need to manually toggle back the resolution of Output in Timeline Settings.
The build quality of the device is great – just like other BlackMagic devices with a similar form factor.
You will also need to provide your own Thunderbolt 3 or 4 cable to connect it up to your computer – one is not provided. This tends to be expected with BlackMagic gear, as none of my other Blackmagic products came with either Thunderbolt nor USB-C cabling.
This was fine, I already had a couple of Thunderbolt cables lying around, but it *is* an extra expense that you will need to take into account if on a shoestring budget.
Note: My grading display takes in HDMI, I do not know whether the downscale/settings issue is any different for SDI, though I have no reason to think it would be. Additionally, I only tried this on Resolve Studio 18.x versions, I do not know about 19 Beta which is out at time of writing nor about non-Studio version of Resolve nor any other supported NLE.
Conclusion: this is great - as long as your Timeline is 1080p or you are fine toggling Timeline settings in Resolve down to 1080p.
It would be a 5/5 product, but it loses one star for this issue, as well as for needing to restart Resolve to get it working after connecting it up and selecting it as the output device (and also the minor issue of the lack of cable provided).
