Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro (Video Capture)

[AladainAF]

Blackmagic Design: Intensity

So I bought this for a good price new ($155 locally). I've wanted an HDMI capture card for awhile now.

So this thing is.. well, its good, but the documentation and such is incredibly lacking - All the companies products drivers and documentation are all on one CD with no autorun and no read me. I wanted to capture stuff with the 360 and PS3 and it was not working for awhile, even though I read the documentation throughly. Make sure you install the Intensity software, or go to their site and just download it for the latest version.

But anyway -- the card is a great card once you finally have it working. It supports up to 1080i (though I use it to only capture 720p), fits in a PCIe x1 slot, and has an HDMI in, HDMI out, and a splitter used for component if necessary.

Other than the insanely difficult setup of this card, it works like a champ, and I recommend it if you're looking to do some 360/PS3 video capturing. The only thing I cannot do is do Uncompressed AVI recording which I'd love to but need much faster storage, so I'm working on that now =).

For reference, to save people frustration, here are the instructions on getting it set up for the 360:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Make sure you're connected via HDMI and that your HDMI color space is YCbCr and NOT RGB. Make sure you're 360 is set to output in 720p and not 1080p. Also, make sure that after installing the Black Magic software, you go to the control panel applet and set your input/output settings as appropriate (Note this is the part that appears no where in the documentation).

Once that is done, you should be able to fire up VirtualDub (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - Free software!) and then set up your devices (Use the Black Magic card, and for audio I forgot exactly - its like Deck somethingorother). Go to File > Capture AVI. Then go to Capture > Timing... and set "Resync mode" to "Do not resync between audio and video streams" and check the box to "Automatically disable resync when integrated audio/video capture is detected". If you do not do this, the video will look fine but the Audio will be distorted as all hell.

Next, go to Video > Compression and select the BlackMagic card. You should be able to Select Motion JPEG here, which you should do unless you have an epic badass machine, or want it to use something like xvid to compress on the fly but you need a badass machine.

Now you're setup and can start capturing. Note that even with Motion JPEG the files will be very large and VirtualDub should render them (not on the fly) to a complete AVI which can be even larger (720p works out to be 26.6 GB for a 2 min 44 sec capture).

At this point you can use the conversion tool of your choice (I like Any Video Converter Pro) to convert it to something more manageable. That 26.6GB file converted to 270MB once it was complete.

Here is a Youtube video I made using the capture card, it turned out very nicely:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

[Darus Grey]

I know I've plugged this a lot in other threads, but it's an awesome capture card.

Was worth it when it was $500, at $200 or less it's a no-brainer for anyone who wants to work with HD video capture.