Blackmagic Intensity Pro.............
 

Hi Guys, I just have to share this, If I had of known about this I would have got one ages ago.
I capture a lot of stuff from the TV, for family and forums I belong to.
Installed my new Blackmagic card yesterday and I am blown away.
It can capture in Vegas (massive bonus, previous card had to use its own software)
It will capture at any resolution you want it too ( I know some will argue this, but IMO it means you can capture twice the size of what you re receiving which equates to lossless at a much lower bit rate)
Capture uncompressed or MXF (50Mbps MPEG2).
The MXF codec is sooooooooooooo good, preview in best quality.
Check out this one min clip of the 576i footy last night.....
YouTube - Blackmagic Intensity Pro test 2

I know this sounds like a corny ad, fact is , I wish I had known about this a long time ago.
Please guys, if there are things that you think are amazing that people may not know about, share it.

I bought one of these about 6 months ago and haven't been able to use it because it requires about a 3-drive raid array. They don't seem to point this out in their advertising.

Trying to understand
 

From your post, you are suggesting that you have 576i footage but capture at 1080i. Is this correct. Is it possible to take DV footage and capture to 1080i to be edited in Vegas?

Sorry Paul, I dont have a 3 drive raid, and Im going great guns. the default is to capture to the system drive ( my documents- Blackmagic design- capture-1 ). If you tell whats going wrong for you I may be able to help, maybe, Im a Blackmagic newb, lol.

Troy, that is exactly what Im saying, its so good. I think of it like this, The Input is analog 576i, you tell the the Blackmagic card to 'take pictures' of it at 1080i (or progressive if you want) IMO it means you lose nothing in the capture.

Which Model Do You Have?
 

I will start researching this immediately...

Intensity Pro.

And yes, you capture in Vegas and it appears in your project media.

Oh and I forgot to mention, it works in Vegas 64bit Windows 7, my capture has NEVER worked before in any Vegas 64bit, XP , Vista or 7, 8.1 or 9.

And another biggy as well, for HDV, you no longer have to capture to MPEG2, with this card you can capture it uncompressed if you like.

Wow thanks for this info...
 

One more question. When you say uncompressed you are talking .avi right? We all know Vegas loves .avi files. Man o man you made my day with this info. I think I gonna order one today!

8 bit yuv avi or MXF in Vegas
other options in the Blackmagic software.
have a good one.

Footage was phenomenal...very nice.

and another thing, and I think this may be the best yet.
Had my sons christening today, took along my handy little canon HF10 avchd cam.
Got home and went to load the footage on the PC, and thought, hang on, I wonder......
HF10 has HDMI out- plugged the HDMI into the blackmagic and .......
how good is this!!!!
Captured MXF 50Mbps MPEG2 from a AVCHD camcorder.
Now my formally AVCHD footage previews in best quality.
This thing really is the best thing since sliced bread.
:)

.....of course this turns up when I'm halfway thru converting my Hi8 tape thru a Sony DV handy!

Looks like a nice card.

HDMI/Composite HD/HD-SDI DIY portable capture station tutorial by Henry Olonga.

Wow Gerald, I may have to give the Intensity another chance. I thought the instructions said I needed a minimum hard drive speed that translated to a raid. As a result, I stuck the card in a drawer and never looked at it again.

Are you saying that a RAID not only is not needed, but I don't even need a dedicated drive? I've got an HMC150 and a Sanyo HD2000 and both have HDMI so this would be great news.

Paul,
when capturing in Vegas, you can choose to save the capture to any part of your PC, the same as capturing any HDV.
I havent tried an external HD via USB cable yet, this may be a problem as the data transfer is prob too fast for USB. Ill give it a go though and post back.
Any of my single Sata drives works like a charm.

I wanted to capture the output from my camera's HDMI port. Anyone have experience with this?

After reading your post, I dig deeper into this card. What you are saying, you use HDMI out from the HF10 to HDMI in and hit record/capture (black magic screen) that will transfer all the video file from cam m2t to a new MXF 50mbps mpeg2. The whole HD thing is to much tricks and catches to learn in order to get what is truly HD.

Best card for the money....hands down.

Paul Hudson
Lizardlandvideo.com
Phoenix Video Production

That sounds like a rather complicated way of capturing stuff from TV. Personally, I use the HDHomeRun to capture anything I want, directly as transmitted over the air waves. No need to have the TV decompress it: It captures the original MPEG transport stream that the TV station sends out. Every single bit of it.

I agree Adam.
if ALL you wanted to do is capture from TV, this is probably a bit of overkill, however, Its not that much more expensive than a standard TV capture card, maybe $40-50 more. I never would have bought my previous ASUS TV card had I known this was out there.
And, the difference in quality between capturing 576i MPEG 2 @ DVD quality
or
Capturing a 1080i 50mbps 'image' of that stream is absolutely massive.

The real advantage of the card is being able to capture any type of camera's streams in uncompressed or MXF.
If you have edited AVCHD you know how hard it is on your NLE.

Paul, yes, did this last night, HDMI out of cam, straight into Vegas as MXF. giddy up baby. :)

Well, the HDHomeRun is not a TV card. It is a networked device that receives the digital TV signal from the antenna (or from the cable, but only if it is not encrypted) and sends it to any computer on the (local) network, where it can be saved to a file without going through any kind of device drivers.

It makes no sense to decompress the MPEG data sent over the air and then recompress it. If you recompress it at a higher bit rate than what came over the air, you are wasting bandwidth because you cannot make it any better than its source (TV signal), and you probably lose some of the quality unless you are using a lossless codec.

Yes, I understand it can capture any camera data, I was just commenting on the TV comment.

What!?!? Footage was phenomenal...in bizarro world!!!!

unless i missed some sort of "view in HD" button (cuz i'm on a proxy) then:

- Footage was atrocious
- This work-flow of capturing SD TV signals as HD to preserve the image is just plain weird!

I know this isn't a HomeTheater Forum but there is a TON of inexpensive hardware specifically designed for capturing TV signals AS IS, no com/decompression!

weird thread!

weird!

I have no use for Gerald's specific workflow originating with broadcast TV, but, that the Intensity Pro operates from HDMI or Component HD input direct to MXF, an HD editing codec that Vegas can actually support on the timeline reasonably well... I find that part pretty interesting.

For tape-based workflows, we've been on Firewire capture of DV and HDV for a long time. $200 USD isn't much money to get to a new capture method, with MXF in Vegas Pro 9. I'll sure be checking this out.

Previously, the only method to get 4:2:2 in was via Cineform applications (which Intensity also works with). I've wondered why Sony didn't update their Cineform version, and finally dropped it in V9. Maybe MXF is the reason.

I know what your saying Adam, Ive argued the exact same thing,
"Its 576i and it doesnt matter how large you capture it, its still 576i".
But, IMO, ( and it is just an opinion, and im not going to argue it out with decimal points and data )
it looks at least 10 times better captured this way, than it did with my standard ASUS capture card.
But really, the TV stuff is just the icing, the card stands up in so many other ways.

If you watched 640x360 flv file that is standard youtube display, then it may not have looked so good. Maybe try the 'Watch in 1080p button'.

But regarding the tone of your post, It was rude to Jeff and Myself, and I suggest that if you walked into a bar and approached some people having a conversation with exactly what you just said, you would be knocked out in 10 seconds.

I dont care how much you know about this stuff,
Its no excuse to act like a tool.
Learn some manners.

Hey guys, keep it polite and civil, please!

Gerald, never once did i attack Jeff, or you personally... no need for name calling. People don't call each other names on THIS forum.

Mike, I did not and would not "call names", I just felt that your post was rude, maybe I overreacted. I always try to look at posting like a face to face conversation.
Anyway, no hard feelings and lets move on.

In regards to the capture card, This thread was not meant to be about TV capture, I was just trying to let people know about the advantages it can provide for capturing your footage.
If it helps someone out, thats great. If not, its just pointless banter.

The MXF it delivers is very good on the Vegas timeline, that alone makes it worthwhile to me.

no worries Gerald, after i read my post again, although i didn't mean to offend, i realized it added NOTHING to the conversation. My apologies to you and the rest of the DVinfo net forumites:)

You're right about sony's MXF files on Vegas though, as Sony's MXF format seems like Vegas' native format. Even on my lowly netbook Sony's MXF do pretty good!

What about previewing using the Intensity's output??

Now that would make Vegas users salivate as outputting HD has been a thorn in Vegas users side for a long time. AJA Xena boards have seemed to be the only viable, reliable yet expensive solution in years past.

Any way you could hook up your computer/intensity to your HD tv to check preview-out?

All good Mike :)

Yes, the Intensity Pro has HDMI out as well, so you could preview on a big flat panel.

This link that Serge posted has me interested in its usability out in the field, that would be huge.

Was the TV signal analog or digital? If analog, there can be a big difference between the methods used to stretch the image to full 1080. Especially if the TV uses a dedicated hardware circuit and the ASUS card uses software. Hardware can do a much better job, especially in real time (the software just may not have enough time to use a good algorithm).

Adam,
It is labeled HD component out of the back of the pay tv box , but it only sends a 576i image unless its on a HD channel.
But yes I was wondering the same thing about the difference if it was digital, unfortunately I cant check because my PC is 25mts away from the box and HDMI, as far as i'm aware, wont go that far.
The ASUS was just lower quality all over i think.

This card has been mentioned elsewhere on this site before, but it's good to see it pop up for those who missed it. One guy was doing some high end ads using a Canon XH-A1 and bypassing its HDV compression by feeding the component out directly to his workstation. That's what I want it for. The other features are just icing on the cake.
Their website does talk about hardware requirements and transfer rates needed for each format, but you kind of have to search for it.

Yep, a lot of people have been doing this for while... HDV cameras take some killer footage prior to encoding!

if you want to capture uncompressed you need a RAID setup that can handle Approx 120-150MB/s

But you can also capture to other compressed visually lossless codecs that can use off the shelf Harddrives and newish CPUs. AVID's DnxHD, Apple's ProRes and Cineform to name a few. There are also some freeware codecs.

Scour the forums and the answers are there. On the COW (sorry Chris) they have a dedicated blackmagic forum, helmed by lazy-forum-mods from the tech department of the company... so you have to badger them until they or someone answers.... but there's lot of Intensity discussions here and around the net but versions/drivers change all the time so some of the info might be out of date

For example, every few months i ask:

"DOES CINEFORM IN VEGAS PLAY OUT OF THE INTENSITY (or DECKLINK) CARD?"

An alternative to a RAID is a OCZ Colossus 3.5'' Solid State Drive. 240MB/s Sequencial Write from 1 drive that has the equivalent of 4 2.5'' Solid State Drives in RAID. Not cheap though, 120GB goes for $400 at Newegg

Or you can wait for the Sandforce powered Solid State Drives that also gets blazing fast write speeds except it doesn't use RAID and is 2.5''.

That's very impressive!

I really REALLY want to use the Intensity, but i'm a Cineform/Vegas guy - these three don't work well together for timeline monitoring. Using aja for that now!

BUT BMD has their uncompressed codec and that will work with Vegas and the intensity.

I do short form stuff, commercials bascially. I usually get about 40-50 minutes of footage, so a hard drive that size would be more than sufficient for that amount of uncompressed video.

This might be my no-raid-solution!!!!

I'm think i'll start another thread on this topic!

Mike, would you say more on the timeline monitoring issues you see? I use the BMI, but, don't usually have it hooked up for timeline monitoring - my brief tests a few months ago seemed to suggest that performance was equivalent to any secondary monitor? But, I didn't spend much time on Cineform content.

The capture side - my understanding is that you can cap from the BMI directly into the Cineform encoding codec, if you have purchased Neo, for example.

Not so much issues, but just, as usual, in Vegas, we can't use a lot of codecs with third party hardware. Like the Cineform codec on Premeire Pro's time line monitoring out of the Intensity works, but not in vegas. And support by BMD for vegas has been hit or miss, and i only say this from internet chatter and my experience with BMD designs support, which on a few occasions in past, was told by them(nicely), "Vegas V.xx isn't supported".

I had an intensity, bought ASAP upon release, kept it for a year, then sold it. It worked, but at that time just with BMD's own mjpeg codec which i found didn't hold up well during colour correction.

I found the outputted image quality was fine, better than secondary monitor to an actual computer monitor, but i never trusted colour on secondary monitor output to a computer monitor or even through a graphic cards output to a TV. Too manu colour issues - - unless its through firewire out, and using a codec that has translatable colour space i.e: Cineform timeline monitoring output over firewire gives me accurate colour. There are some other codecs that work well, colour space wise when monitoring via firewire OR using an AJA SDI board, buts AJA is too expensive for what i use it for, and i don't want to buy another.

I trusted colour on the Intensity BUT i didn't/don't want to use the mjpeg codec.

I just want to be able to monitor on an HD display, with a codec i like, and know that the colour is see are true!

cineform on vegas via intensity would be a god send for me. But if uncompressed is viable solution then i'd try that as well.

BTW i did start another thread about uncompressed on SSD

Everyone can easily monitor HD on LCD now with many cheap graphics cards but the colour is lying to us.

I said it before - i wish pro video was more like pro audio, where there are only a few formats and they are easily interchangeable!

sorry for rambling, been watching Olympic hockey all night/morning, and i can't keep my eyes open:) yay Canada!

mike,

I was considering this intensity pro sense I got an hdv camera with hdmi. My work flow is cineform/vegas as well.

What other option is there? Aja card, which one?



dale

Cineform doesn't work on Intensity in Vegas. For YEARS the CFO and CEO have been on the forums saying, "we are working on it" but i think Sony is the one holding everyone back...i assume its a business decision but it still sucks!

Any Aja Xena card will work with Cineform on Vegas. But they are expensive, and most of what they can do is what i don't need. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/439543-REG/AJA_XENA_LSE_XENA_LSe_12_Bit_SD_Video.html This is the cheapest card for Windows. It's not HD, only SD.

The HD version is 1300$

ONCE AGAIN My workflow is shaped by what i CAN'T DO in Vegas. IMHO don't pay money for an AJA card if you don't need all the extra features. Use Vegas's DV/firewire out to a professional broadcast monitor, which you can buy with all that money you saved. you can pick up a JVC TMH150CGU CRT monitor. Its SD but has great colour and widespread use in the industry. OR you can pick up an JVC DT-V100CGU HD monitor,(its a CRT so it still looks good with SD signals, lcds and plasmas don't look too good in SD) and you can monitor in SD now and when you can afford to get an AJA, or Intensity works, with Vegas using Cineform you already have a upgrade path to monitoring in HD.