Blackmagic Intensity Pro

[Pillorian]

Our shipment, which has the Blackmagic Intensity Pro, arrives on Monday. We can't wait to start recording our games in full HD.

 

My bro chose the Blackmagic over the Hauppauge because of his tv/monitor setup.

 

I was just wondering if anyone has experience with the Blackmagic. What settings do you recommend for recording/rendering in? Not sure where we would be uploading the vids... lets just say YouTube for now.

[Pillorian]

First upload test:

Be sure to watch in 720!

 

Action starts at 1:50

[Nikastylez]

That looks really really good! How is the setup with this and the tv?

[Pillorian]

PS3 Component Cables to BM Component Adapter into BM PCI Card. HDMI out of card to monitor.

 

I think my bro said that his computer is not fast enough for recording in 1080... said you would need a RAID array of HDs to record 1080.

[[-VR-] Tool_Minion]

That was nice bro.

[Pillorian]

Thanks Tool!

 

Also, HDMI input to this card from the PS3 does not work because of the HDCP (which protects from recording copyrighted data), the workaround is using the analog component cables.

[X-Factor--]

if u dont mind me asking, whats the price on this. if u do mind could you please PM me it. thanks

[[SoW] Lucky_Saint-]

yea could you shoot me a pm on the pricings and neccisities as well?

[Pillorian]

Sent. There was a strange error, let me know if you both got them or not.

[LunaticWolf]

Just a few notes.

 

Technically, the only requirements for using this card are Hard Drive write speed and Hard Drive space.

 

To record in:

Compressed:

480i: 5.1 MB/s write speed

720p 60fps: 5 MB\s

1080i 60fps: 13.1 MB\s

 

Uncompressed:

480i: ~20 MB\s

720p 60fps ~100 MB\s

1080i 60 fps ~120 MB\s

 

There is very little quality difference between uncompressed video and compressed. You can download a program like HD Tach or HD Tune to benchmark your hard drive and find your average write speed. Mine on my Terabyte I bought last winter was about 70-80 MB\s. The 350Gig I bought several years ago was in the 50s.

 

The video I recorded was recorded in 720p compressed. 10 minutes of gameplay at 720p compressed is about 3.5 GB. An hour was about 17 GBs. Takes up lots of space.

 

Using Sony Vegas or Virtualdub, you can re-encode the video, with some loss in quality, so you aren't uploading Gigabytes to youtube. The video above was 900 megs. Took 3 hours to upload on our home connection. I am going to upload another tomorrow. I was able to get the filesize down to 500 megs, with very little drop in quality. Actually, the quality might be better since I made a motion blur mistake while rendering the video above in Vegas.

 

Re-encoding the video is where your other computer parts come into play, mainly your CPU and RAM. It took my computer 1 hour to render both videos. Here are my specs.

 

CPU: E8500 Overclocked to 3.8GHZ

2 Gigs of RAM at DDR2 800

 

Worse specs than that will take longer to render, better, less time. 4 Gigs of RAM probably helps a ton.

 

The Blackmagic was $180 off of Amazon. PS3 component cables $20.

[Pillorian]

 

Different settings (don't know what--ask Lunatic)... does this look better/smoother?