Hello all,

I'm close to purchasing Blackmagic Intensity Pro for uncompressed HD work. i like the ability to preview live HDMI output in premiere, after effect, encore etc.
However uncompressed mean serious HD Raid setup which costs more than the cineform codec!

Should I just stick with Cineform, Is the realtime performance good enough to work simply in Premiere preview window?

How much HD space does the Cineform codec consume anyway?

Hi Deniz,

I think most individuals would assert that in most all settings you'll never tell the difference between CineForm compressed files and uncompressed originals. We have done lots of quality tests, including this one against HDCam SR which is often used for high-end ingest (Genesis for instance) and CineForm compression exceeds the visual fidelity of SR: http://www.cineform.com/technology/12Bit-RGB-QualityAnalysis/12Bit-RGB-QualityAnalysis.htm. I suspect you'll be happy with the visual fidelity of the CineForm workflow.

Regarding drive requirements, depending on your source content you can expect 10-bit 1920x1080 YCbCr CineForm files to range from about 15MB/sec - 20 MB/sec (~60 GB/hour) depending on scene compexity. So you only need a single drive for capture. But in an editing environment where you need to pull multiple streams simultaneously we usually recommend a two-drive RAID 0. Two 750 GB drives will give you over 20 hours of CineForm storage.

Some comments about Intensity - CineForm software captures with Intensity but without deck control using CineForm's external software utility called HD LInk (I know - we had the name first....). We're finishing up support for timeline monitoring within PPro. Probably soon after NAB.

If you need to get started right away, AJA cards work pefectly right now - Xena LH or LHe.