Intensity Capture Station
 

Just wanted to post up some pics of my Portable Intensity Capture Station.

I am running it through some paces, but do plan to make them available to interested parties.

Here are the specs

Intensity Capture Station

Portable Case w/ handle
Silent Power Supply 500 Watt
Micro ATX Motherboard (Intel)
Intel Core 2 E6600 2.4 Ghz
Geforce 8500
Processor Cooler
2 Gig Ram
DVD Burner
2 500 Gig Seagate Drives
Intensity HDMI Capture
Keyboard / Mouse
Win XP Pro SP2
7 Inch LCD

Let me know if you have any questions.

Out of curiosity, why the floppy drive? Was it just for initial set-up (i.e. BIOS upgrades) and you're going to swap in a x-in-1 flash device reader or something similar?

I needed to install Intel RAID drivers so I needed a floppy. The drives are on a RAID 0 right now, but could be on a RAID 1 or whatever was needed.

I get about 130 MB/s read and write at raid 0.

Chris

Floppy is old school!

Wow, they need to make an Intensity ExpressCard or something, that setup is ridiculous! Although I don't know how you'd hook up drives to handle 4:2:2 video unless you can convert to something like ProRes on the fly.

It captures to 4:2:2 video as is. You can capture HD video to one drive if you like. Your options are what come with the Intensity which is a motion jpeg compression, or buy cineform. And yes you're right that an express card setup on a laptop would be nice, but there isn't one yet so here's what we get. BTW laptop HD would be pretty slow, they usually only spin at 4500 to 5300 RPM so you're data rates are lower. So ESATA would probably be in order.

The nice thing about the computer is once you're done capturing just sit it down at your desk and start editing. BTW you could add HD-SDI instead of HDMI.

Chris

On the high end Alienware machines you can get dual 200GB RAID 0 7200rpm drives.
http://www.alienware.com/Configurato...de=SKU-DEFAULT

And any notebook can take a normal 2.5" 7200rpm drive.

I want one!
M

Yes James you're right about the HD's in laptops, just no laptop that I know of right now, can take an Intensity card. Ahh there's the rub.

Chris

Except by way of a Magma ExpressBox, of course. But then it's not as self-contained/rugged a package.

Andrew.

Does the motherboard you are using have a PCI Express x4 slot? The HD-SDI boards need a x4 slot to work and not just a x1 slot. I know Asus has a few micro-atx boards that actually do have a x4 slot.

As for the pci-e 4x slot, it has a 1x and a 16x slot. I'm using the 1x slot for the Intensity and nothing as of now for the 16x slot. I'm using the onboard video for all the test right now. Onboard video works ok for now, but the Decklink apps don't like the overlay with the intel chip, although it seems to work fine in Premiere, After Effects, and Avid.

One solution would be to use the 16x slot for AJA Xena or Decklink Multibridge and use the 1x slot for a Quadro NVS for the overlay preview if the Intel onboard didn't quite work out.

So many options. If you are interested in Uncompressed HD then one more drive should suffice, I've only got 2 in a raid 0 right now, but the case could possibly hold 2 more minus the floppy and the DVD Burner. 4 drives on raid 0 should be fast enough for Uncompressed 10 bit, but Cineform works great and you could even do a raid 1 or 5 with that to make sure your files are safe from disk failure. The Wafian uses Cineform with some sort of HD-SDI Capture card. It's a bit bigger and more expensive than my option though.

Well, they do have PCIe to ExpressCard adapters, so you would think going the other way would be possible

http://www.addonics.com/products/hos...ler/adpexc.asp

My guess is intensity is already working on it though, having a mobile solution for their product would be very popular I would think.

James sorry to burst your bubble, but that is to put an express card slot into a desktop, not to put a PCIe card into a laptop express card slot.

I certainly don't see why they can't put a whole intensity into an express card form factor, but I think it's a bit down the road. Look at AJA's IO box. It's a pretty big box and you still have to have a computer and electricity to run it, I've got the whole thing in one box.

Everyone thinks a laptop is the solution, but a laptop is just not as powerful as a properly configured desktop. Bus speeds, ram speeds, onboard video, slower rpm drives, slower processors, all of these things contribute to slower laptops. Now you can buy a smoking laptop, but you'll have to spend some money, it's not going to be the $1000 special from Dell.

Chris

I did find a motherboard that has 2 PCIe16x slots on it and was mATX, but it was on the 945 chipset, which is a little older, and didn't come with onboard raid controller, but it certainly would be a good solution for an AJA Xena, or a Decklink card assuming the case is big enough to hold either of the cards. My suspicion is that it could be done with a little creativity.

Chris

Asus has a board that has a PCI-E x16 slot and a PCI-E x4 slot. The 4x slot is all you need for either the AJA or Blackmagic boards.

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?m...3&l2=11&l3=371

In fact I have heard that some x16 slots do not work as well with capture cards due to the fact that some motherboards only like to see a graphics card in the x16 slots. I do not know if all motherboards have this issue but I know a few people who could not get the cards to work in a x16 slot. This is even more true if the 2 slots are designed for Crossfire or SLI. The two slots are really designed to work together so putting a video card in one slot and a capture card in the other slot sometimes will cause problems or not work at all.

The beauty of the x4 slot is that you can then either add a HD-SDI card or the Intensity card into the same slot and you wouldn't have to change motherboards based on which card the user wanted.