firmware version is...
1.0.0.0

so, one would assume thats what all cams have.
*shrug*

terence

In HDLink select the "Prefs" button, then select "Remove 3-2 Pulldown ...". If you are only getting 480i/p from the camera, that is the issue this thread is actually about. I recommend testing with a Sony V1U until the Intensity/HV20 issue is resolved.

we get 1920x1080 from the cam no problem. ill get him to check again tonight, i think he just wasnt looking in the right place.

thanks
terence

ok, got it working.. sort of. the first several frames are messed up, not de-interlaced properly, after about 20 frames though, its perfect 24p.

hes going to shoot another clip later today. any thoughts on why its "confused" for the first second of capture?

if that can be fixed, or we can predictably discard the first 20 frames, then id say this is a good setup. sadly, my 1.86ghz pentium M cant handly the codec for playback (it cant to the BM codec either). time for a new lappy.


terence.

For playback on old laptops, go into the start menu and find CineForm/tools then select "Decktop Playback -- Fast."

Within first 10-frames the IVT is still trying to determine the pulldown. Remember this is a live ITV algorithm, the alternative is to buffer a 100-200MB for data then determine the cadence than try and catch up which can lead to audio sync and performance implications. We under most shooting conditions (particular slated) this is not an issue.

sweet, i figured it was "guessing" the pulldown. so thats predictable, and i guess that means this all works :)

yay.

we made a sample clip, will see if we can upload in a bit, its 160mb.

terence

heres a short (11 second) clip for those who want to see.
http://www.loloproductions.com/24P_Cineform.html (160mb)

terence

I can't get anythig to play it.
WMP, VLC, Quicktime, Vegas...nothing

hi, you need to download the cineform neohd player to see it (its free).
http://www.cineform.com/products/NeoHD.htm

terence

File works great, nice little promo. :)

Ian, You will need a decoder. Download NEO Player from www.cineform.com to install the needed decoder(s) for free.

Thanks Terence, Plays great on my computer... brought it into PP2 and it edits fine also..

Terence,

I noticed you only used Medium quality, while still very good, it is the second lowest setting of five. High was the old "best" of Aspect HD and Connect HD, now there is Filmscan 1 & 2. High is the recommended setting for live capture -- Filmscan1 for extreme keying projects -- Filmscan 2 for playing tricks on friends and asking them to point out which is uncomressed and which is compressed. Don't every use Filmscan 2 for real projects you will be just wasting diskspace. :)

oh, he told me he recorded to high quality. ill have to go kick his a** now :)

terence

and offline?

offline?

if you mean the video, it should still be up.

terence

No P2k has an Offline option under FilmScan 2

"I noticed you only used Medium quality, while still very good"

he confirmed that he used the setting labeled "best". if "best" is 4th from the actual best quality, perhaps you need to do some renaming of the settings :)

in my initial observations though, at the setting used, its roughly the same datarate as the black magic, and id rate it as notably inferior quality. large flat colour areas, like the plant leaves and even his face seem blotchy, the bm codec does not have this artifacting. (dont have a sample clip, sorry)

knowing a good bit about compression and codecs, i think each one will excell in different areas, though cineform has as you say, higher quality setting with the sacrifice of datarate while the black magic codec is rather fixed.

anyway, i think this discussion has served its purpose, the canon hv20 works with the black magic intensity, and cineform neoHD can remove 3:2 pulldown on the fly. so people have (at least) 3 choices when using the hv20 and intensity together. choice is good.

terence

Thanks for posting that video. Could you tell us what your hv20 settings were? cine? contrast? i assume the sharpening is in camera not somewhere else down the line? could you do some moving footage? i mean mpeg2 can do still tripod footage of someone talking, how about some high motion or rippling water or something :)

This is exciting, I've been waiting for intensity to support the hv20. Looks like it might be about time to build that portable capture computer ive been wanting to build...

Terence has Blackmagic attempted to contact you at all? I am still very confused as to why your setup seems to be the only one in the world that is currently working. Obviously you are getting good results, the video looks fantastic. I also know that the BM people are on this thread so I wonder if your working setup could give them any clues on how to get the rest of us up and running with a HV20/Intensity combo.

Umm...That's an overstatement. You could say that YOUR HV20 works with the Intensity.

I don't think there has been a single other report anywhere of another HV20 working with the Intensity. At least from the standpoint of firmware version (thank you for posting yours), you would appear to have the same camcorder as everyone else. You would have to have the same Intensity card and drivers as everyone else.

I think this discussion has had a mystery added to it.

No, the HV20 does not work with the Intensity

Just as Rob here, I have to wonder if anyone from Blackmagic has taken notice of and interest in your claim.

Sorry, that doesn't make sense. Please do your own tests if you can, rather than rely on a third party who doesn't know what setting he used. We have no quality mode called "best" and we have never used those terms as would lead people astray. We have quality names Low, Medium, High, Filmscan1 and Filmscan2, so that user will not automatic click FS2, they mostly use High. Even at "Medium" quality we out perform MJPEG is all measurable characters, visual quality, PSNR, reduced ringing etc. Wavelet is a superior compression technology than DCT, particularly at these datarates. Please re-read and observe the MJPEG compression artifacts here http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost....7&postcount=59. Also I must point while some might like the ringing look of MJPEG at 10:1 compression, as it adds a dithering noise not in the source, others will benefit from choosing quality other than our second lowest and capture more of the information delivered by the camera. I haven't used Medium for any project in years -- it was handy for really slow systems. At Filmscan 1 (around 5:1 or 6:1) we are have quality than exceeds a Sony SRW1, pretty much the industry standard for digital acquisition. The whole point of using live HMDI capture is to get a great looking image, so please do some experiments that try to do that.

"We have no quality mode called "best" and we have never used those terms as would lead people astray"

indeed, you are right :) but he said he didnt use medium, he used high. at this point i dont care really, the test was to see if the pulldown worked.

anyhow, i find it odd that we are the only people using the hv20 and intensity together. i also find it odd that people adamantly believe it doesnt work and that my setup is something special, yet no other person with this actual setup has said boo, here or anywhere else ive seen (not that ive scoured the net).

if the black magic people are watching this, some sort of comment is in order maybe to reassure potential customers there will be no issues.

anyway, i gotta get back to my pci express box. "i wants" are stacking up :)

terence

Please don't think that we are ganging up on you Terence! I certainly am not at any rate, but within these forums several people have tried and failed with an HV20/intensity setup and indeed the people at Blackmagic have come out very openly and honestly to say that the pair do not work together and that they are working on a fix. I certainly have nothing against your success but like a person cured of an uncurable disease I wonder if the intricacies of your setup hold the answer to getting this to work for everyone.

So that others are not confused: this bit-stream is medium. The quality control settings are embedded in the bit-stream so I can determine what settings where used -- this is a handy debugging tool. Have your tester post a clip at High or better Filmscan 1 -- in front of a greenscreen if he has one. People want to know how well you can pull a key from an HV20.

Hi all,
very interesting thread !
as many others here, we'd like to capture from our HV20 "plugged" to one of our computers (mobile studio like) :
- getting the highest Resolution (High Def)
- if possible in 4:2:2 uncompressed

As long as I have understood, so far, the "best setup" would be to :
- capture in HDMI
- have a BM Intensity (assuming it will work soon with the HV20) inside a powerfull workstation (with a Raid 0 - 4 disks, 16 MB cache,BM says with 8 disks it would be better...)
As we have no computer like this one, it means we would have to spend at least $2000 to have one.

A "cheaper" way (easier to manipulate too), might be to plug one MagmaPCIe+Intensity box to one of our laptop ?
Black Magic says that :
- for a compressed JPEG stream in 1920x1080 : the data rate is 13,19 MB/s
- for an uncompressed 4:2:2 stream in 1920x1080 : the data rate is 120 MB/s
Magma says :
- that the stream between their box and a laptop can reach 200 MB/s
BUT my laptop says (Dell Inspiron) :
- Disk test, Linear speed test : 21,4 MB/s
Please tell me if we can capture uncompressed 4:2:2 with this setup ? I guess we cannot !
maybe it can capture compressed JPEG in HD ?
but is there any real interest to spend 800 $$ for this quality ?

Then, I see that the CineForm apps could help, David please could you explain me where they could be "positioned" in our workflow ?
do they change anything in the acquisition data rate which seems to be the Critical parameter ?

Denis

hi denis

the magma box is basically the same as what im making. with a black magic card plugged into it, you will be able to stream back uncompressed 4:2:2 at 30fps (60i) to a notebook. this is approximately 150megabytes per second.

the next problem is what the heck to do with that stream. the fastest notebook drive (seagate momentus 7200.2 160gb sata) has a sustained write speed of a bit over 30 megabytes per second. obviously theres no way that this can save the uncompressed stream.

so you have 2 options:
1: compressed the stream, either with the blackmagic on card codec, or a third party real time compressor like cineform. both can get you to a bit rate that will fit within a fast notebook drive's ability.
2: raid. raid on a notebook is fairly simple. an E-SATA express card and a silicon image "steelvine" transparent raid 0 box will do the trick. a customized casing for 5 seagate notebook drives and the raid controller ($130 off the shelf part) would bring you to a little over 150mb/s and able to store full uncompressed 4:2:2 or any form of compressed stream while still being very light and portable.

there is one hitch with this system i havent found a suitable solution for. you need 2 expresscard slots. one for the black magic card, one for the raid card. ive not found a notebook, big or small, with 2 slots. the chipset specifications on most notebooks allow 2 (usually 4 actually) express cards in theory, but noones bothered implementing more than one.

there are however a few (usually larger) notebooks that support 2 sata ports. in this case it may be possible to have one of the ports wired out to the raid card. because the raid in this case is transparent (the host pc sees it as one drive) it doesnt matter if the notebook natively supports raid.

so, uncompressed is in theory possible on a notebook, but at this point, rather cumbersome, so using a good compression method will be much more feasible.

terence

rob, i had only read a few threads where people speculated that it didnt work due to hdcp, but none that had first hand experiene. guess i didnt read enough :)

anoyhow, our system isnt special i dont think... its a basic amd X2 machine, 2gb ram, windows xp64. were ran both adobe premiere 1.5 and cs3, both were just fine. black magic drives as we said were v1.3, canon firmware 1.0.0.0

i can only imagine that either the other people has older bm drivers, or they something screwed up (i cant imagine what, theres not much too screw up). did these same people try hooking the camera up to an hdtv as well?

im at a loss, we didnt do anything the least bit magical here. just plugged it in.

terence

Thks Terence !
very useful your answer.
I'm interested in the "box" you would build !! keep me updated
To conclude : it sounds that with your box (or Magma's one) + an intensity +
a CineForm codec we would be able to get a nice stream ?
not uncompressed 4:2:2 but maybe not so far ?

We position our products for more quality and more editing performance below 20MB/s data rates. While this acquisition to laptop isn't concerned the editing characteristics like multi-generation, which we excel, it is still import that the first compression generation be as high quality as possible for the available data rate. We have a range of quality levels to adapt to the recording conditions.

Hey Terence, thanks for posting that footage.

It's great that you got the Intensity working with the HV20. If it's not a canon firmware issue (since we all have the same cam), or black magic driver issue (I've tried v1.3) then it must be something else in your pipeline that is allowing it to work. Strange... yet, one thing I've learned is PCs are very quirky to say the least.

You say you're using XP64 with AMD chips? I wonder if the operating system would have something to do with it as I've only tried XP32 on a Intel... anyone else tried XP64bit or AMD processor?

Also, if you don't mind answering a few questions, maybe it'll help the community here figure out what is going on...

1. Do you know what brand of HDMI cable you are using?
2. What graphics card are you guys using?
3. What kind of monitor? Is it a DVI connection?
4. Have you tried putting the Intensity card in another computer and testing that or trying another HV20?

hi derek,

1. Do you know what brand of HDMI cable you are using?
not a clue, ill ask later. cables are cables, theres nothing that should prevent it from working other than a faulty cable.

2. What graphics card are you guys using?
xfx geforce 6600gt, pci express.

3. What kind of monitor? Is it a DVI connection?
its a cheap 17" widescreen lcd, i believe its analogue, ill ask again later.

4. Have you tried putting the Intensity card in another computer and testing that or trying another HV20?
nope, havent tried in another pc. im getting another card wednesday (so they say) which will go into my pc here, which is a dual amd opteron, 4gb ram, dual geforece 6800 ultras, xp64.

the black magic drivers are different for xp64. different meaning 64 bit drivers have to be recompiled. that would be a highly unlikely, but i guess possible answer to this issue. we have no 32 bit system to test on though. wheres them black magic people when you need em :)

terence

oh, and we have another peron we know that got the hv20 and intensity a few days before us, and its fine as well. ill have to find out what his system specs are.

terence

Terence, thanks for getting back about that... hmmm, I'm going to try installing xp64 and see what happens. It's worth a shot anyways. It's got to be something if you, and you say your friend now also, has it working. The only other thing I can think of is, it's a firmware thing with the HV20. My HV20 is from the very first shipment to BC. I noticed there's a missing feature-the demo mode-small thing, yes, but indicative of maybe an early firmware. Maybe they 'tweaked' the firmware after this first batch of cameras shipped but didn't bother to change the number from 1.0. If you guys don't mind, check if your HV20 has the demo mode. That might be telling. Maybe trading in my unit would be the answer then.

You could put two 15k rpm Seagate Savvio drives in dual drive laptop. Should be 160MBs or faster. Then magma breakout box w/ intensity. No external drives or anything crazy like that.

"You could put two 15k rpm Seagate Savvio drives in dual drive laptop"

unfortunately ive not seen any laptops that support SAS, let alone dual SAS.
but you also have the issue of your OS. recording to your system drive will cause it to be inconsistent, and as 2 savvios just barely meet the speed needs you may run into issues, particularly in the last half of the disk array.

then theres the fact that they are only 146gb combined, which gives you barely 15 mins recording time (20 with pulldown removed if that was possible on uncompressed in realtime).

there theres the cost of about $550 each and the heat they produce.

fun fun :)

terence.

Dude, I. Can't. Believe. It.

It WAS the HDMI cable! It wouldn't allow a 1080 signal, just a 480.

ENERGY HDMI CABLE = BAD
VELOCITY HDMI CABLE = GOOD

Terence, you are a rock star! If you hadn't of joined this thread saying how yours was working, I would never have given it another shot, especially since Black Magic confirmed their HV20 wasn't working with the Intensity either.

So everyone who's having problems, time to pony up for some new HDMI cables. I'm staring at a glorious 1920x1080 HDMI signal on my monitor right now. COOL!

I thought SAS and SATA were compatible. Guess not! :(

What about those new laptops with three drive bays? Apparently the new king of speed is the new "Travelstar 7K200" which claims 22% faster than the Seagate Momentus

3 x Travelstar 7K200 @ 50-60MB/s sustained = 150-180MB/s

" thought SAS and SATA were compatible. Guess not! :(

What about those new laptops with three drive bays? Apparently the new king of speed is the new "Travelstar 7K200" which claims 22% faster than the Seagate Momentus

3 x Travelstar 7K200 @ 60-75MB/s sustained = 180-225MB/s"

sas controllers can run sata drives, but sata controllers cant run sas drives.

3 drive bays in a notebook, ive never seen that. theyd have to support raid too (windows software raid may or may not work well).

i think youve confused maximum write speed and sustained write speed though. because a drive is a disk spinning at a constant speed, the begining of the writing and the end can have wildly different speeds. plus due to the controller etc it will fluctuate. for something like real time capture you need to look at the minimum write speed, which for the seagate 7200.2 160gb is a tiny bit over 30mB/s(http://images.tomshardware.com/2007/...e/image030.png) making 5 drives in raid 0 barely adequate (theres overhead in the raid too of course). the savvio can sustain 73mB/s. you can stick a partition on the slow end of the disk to keep speeds up, but you eat away your precious little disk space.

theres a few other quirks in this as well. sata in many notebooks chipsets is actually on the legacy pci bus, limited to 133mb's tops. most notebooks only support sata 150mb/s as well, making an external raid like the steelvine unusable because one sata port wont handle the bandwidth needed after overhead. the steelvine raid can sustain over 220mB/s on a single sata 300 port provided you have drives capable of this. the trick is getting a sata 300 port onto a notebook AND still be able to connect the black magic card.

theres a number of machines it seems with a spare pci express lane in the docking port. there may be a way to expolit this connection, but it would be notebook model dependent solution as they all have different connectors.

computers are your fun.. no, really :)

terence

derek.. what!?

thats nutty. i wonder what could be wrong with that cable that it would trigger the low res output.

good to know its working though and its something super simple for other people to check if they have issues.

terence

Less than $10 HDMI cables
 

I think you may have stumbled onto why there is such a broad price range in HDMI cables. When I bought mine at Best Buy they went from one brand at about $60 to a Monster at $120 for a basic 6 foot I think. Guess I won't bother adding any to my toolkit with the off brand Internet HDMI's for under $20. Guess the old adage - "You get what you pay for" is pretty true in the long run.