Recommended HDD For Intensity Pro?

[jaw1985]

Hi Folks,

I recently bought a Intensity Pro Capture card, now the speed test is giving my current seagate hdd READ 103MPS / WRITE 101

which for the 8Bit YUV 4:2:2 Frame rates is giving me roughly Read 58FPS and write 57FPS so my video is slightly laggy.

could someone recommend a HDD which will give me roughly 130 R/W MPS?

[aedipuss]

the samsung f3 series are the fastest 7200 rpm drives at the moment. it's right around what you are looking for.

[edit] that is the f3 spinpoint, not the eco drives.

[jaw1985]

dude, your a legend

I have seen plenty of people mentioning a raid setup, which I was going to do but my hdd was just missing out with FPS so i'll get one of these instead

[edDV]

dude, your a legend

I have seen plenty of people mentioning a raid setup, which I was going to do but my hdd was just missing out with FPS so i'll get one of these instead

The BM Intensity needs a RAID for uncompressed HD capture. From their brochure



Those are MegaBytes per sec. For example 1280x720p/59.94 is 106.8 MB/s or 854 Megabits per second sustained.

The problem with single drives is speed changes continously across the drive, fast at one end and slow at the other. A RAID zero averages two or more drives to a near constant sustained rate start to finish.

This Samsung Spinpoint F3 test puts "average write speed of a titanic 96.7MB/sec" which is too close to the edge for reliable 720p capture. You need a viable headroom (25-50%) above 107MB/s.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/10

[jaw1985]

yeah edDV I have seen this published but what RAID would you recommend?

[edDV]

yeah edDV I have seen this published but what RAID would you recommend?

Most motherboards will have built in RAID (usually the Promise chip). You can also buy PCI/PCIe cards.

If this is a hobby, the lower priced Promise cards work OK. Pro cards certified for SMPTE-292M speeds (1.5-3.1Gb/s) are more expensive.

http://www.amazon.com/Promise-FastTrak-TX2650-controller-SATA-300/dp/B000WH9VEM

[jaw1985]

So I take it a standard Raid 0 would not do the trick then?

[edDV]

So I take it a standard Raid 0 would not do the trick then?

What do you mean by "standard RAID 0"?

RAID 0 adds and averages the sustained write rate of the two drives connected. One drive is read from the fast end and the other from the slow end. So two typical 500GB 70MB/s average sustained SATA drivers would sum and average to about 140 MB/s sustained rate with 1TB capacity. They would appear as a single drive to the OS.

The downside of RAID 0, if either drive fails, data is lost for both. So ideally you would back up important data to a separate drive.

[jaw1985]

Sorry edDV I consider Raid 0 Pretty much standard, I will be purchasing two of those Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives and linking them in a raid 0. I have another 1TB drive i will backup anything onto


thank you for the advice

[mufunyo]

Or you could get a 15.000rpm drive like I have which bottoms out at 115MB/s on the innermost part of the spindle where there the disk head accesses the least amount of data per rotation. I'm still planning to put more of them in RAID, but they're expensive

[Danny Hays]

LaCie is coming out with a USB raid 0 drive, supposed to have 275 MB/S throughput.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/12/17/the-lacie-2big-usb-3-0-raid-drive-is-stupid-fast/
If you don't have USB3 on your MB, checkout this Asus usb 3 card.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813995004&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_m...SUS-_-13995004
I have the Shuttle so I needed the x58 chipset so I went ahead and got the Asus P6TX58D-Premium motherboard with USB 3. I have the Shuttle working with it at home and at work. I'm using the Motion JPEG capture setting as you only need a single 7200 SATA drive to capture, and it looks great. I'll defenetly try a USB 3 raid drive when it's avaliable, instead of using raid 0 w/ 8 drives as Blackmagic Shuttle says is needed for 1080p uncompressed.
That's if it will ever capture 1080p period. The specs say it will but nobody on any forum I visit has gotten it to work. 720 60p is the best I have gotten through the the HDMI, and 1080i 59.94 through component in. Anyone else getting better results, please share how your doing it. Danny Hays Universal Studios FL.

[jaw1985]

thanks folks I purchased two Samsung Samsung Spinpoint 500gb F3 drives last night for £63 delivered I'll set them up in raid 0 on my pc and that should do the trick.

If it doesn't i'll cry and sell my pc ....well not really but it sounds about right

[edDV]

thanks folks I purchased two Samsung Samsung Spinpoint 500gb F3 drives last night for £63 delivered I'll set them up in raid 0 on my pc and that should do the trick.

If it doesn't i'll cry and sell my pc ....well not really but it sounds about right

Good thing your PC had the RAID chip on the motherboard. That means the only cost is the second drive. You will need to install the RAID driver which in the past ran as a low level boot before the OS installs. You will configure it per your motherboad's manual. That way the the RAID is set from firmware during boot and appears as a single drive when the OS starts. Then you will format the virtual drive from the OS.

[jaw1985]

Yeah edDV my motherboard has a SB710 Chipset which supports raid 0,1,10 and JBOD. The rest of my pc spec is easily poweful enough to run this card, my only issue was my WD and Seagate HDD where rubbish

[mufunyo]

That's if it will ever capture 1080p period. The specs say it will but nobody on any forum I visit has gotten it to work. 720 60p is the best I have gotten through the the HDMI, and 1080i 59.94 through component in. Anyone else getting better results, please share how your doing it. Danny Hays Universal Studios FL.

Where exactly in the specs did you read it will do 1080p60? According to the specs, the Intensity will do:
720p60
1080p24
1080p30
1080i60

1080i60 is pretty much the same thing as 1080p30 (same amount of data per second).

[edDV]

That's if it will ever capture 1080p period. The specs say it will but nobody on any forum I visit has gotten it to work. 720 60p is the best I have gotten through the the HDMI, and 1080i 59.94 through component in. Anyone else getting better results, please share how your doing it. Danny Hays Universal Studios FL.

Where exactly in the specs did you read it will do 1080p60? According to the specs, the Intensity will do:
720p60
1080p24
1080p30
1080i60

1080i60 is pretty much the same thing as 1080p30 (same amount of data per second).

The Intensity Pro does not support 1920x1080p. Neither does the Intensity Shuttle. Not that it is needed for XBox360 which mostly uses 1280x720p (or lower) native games.
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/techspecs/

1080i/59.94 and 1080p/29.97 may share the same bit rate but they are not the same thing. 1080i has field motion samples every 1/59.94 sec, twice the motion rate of 1080p/29.97 which has both fields sampled from the same time slice. This gives 1080i twice the motion fluidity. When 1080i is presented to a 60Hz HDTV, the TV does a motion adaptive deinterlace to 1080p/59.94. Areas of the picture that are in motion get a bob deinterlace to 59.94. Areas in low motion get a blend or weave. The end result is 1080p/59.94 to the screen. A 120Hz HDTV will interpolate intermediate frames doubling the motion fluidity to 119.88 Hz.

1080p/29.97 will appear motion stepped compared to 1080i/29.97. 1280x720p/59.94 has all the 59.94 motion samples at full frame so no deinterlace (or deinterlace artifacts) is needed. The 1280x720p frames will be upscaled by the HDTV to 1920x1080p at 59.94 rate. A good HDTV will have a superior upscale vs. the XBox360.

A 120Hz, HDTV will interpolate intermediate frames for 1280x720p/59.94 to double motion samples to 119.88 Hz. then will upscale to 1920x1080p.

So, in the XBox360 case, where a 1080p HDTV is the display goal, 1280x720p/59.94 would get the best result with minimal deinterlace or frame interpolation artifacts. Next best is 1920x1080i/29.97. Compared to those, 1920x1080p/29.97 will appear motion stepped or show more frame interpolation artifacts.

All of the above assumes the same bit rate (file size) is used. High motion game content requires sufficient bit rate > 12 Mb/s for MPeg2 or > 8 Mb/s AVC or you will see increasing compression artifacts.

[mufunyo]

1080i/59.94 and 1080p/29.97 may share the same bit rate but they are not the same thing.

<tl;dr about motion fluidity>

Well that was pointless. For the purposes of technical bandwidth limitations, 1080i60 and 1080p30 are pretty much the same thing. Motion fluidity doesn't come into play here. The Intensity simply deals with bits, bytes and pixels. It does not deinterlace and it does not care about whether a video source is 30PsF or 60i. I understand the need to show off your knowledge prowess, but please keep it on topic.

[edDV]

1080i/59.94 and 1080p/29.97 may share the same bit rate but they are not the same thing.

<tl;dr about motion fluidity>

Well that was pointless. For the purposes of technical bandwidth limitations, 1080i60 and 1080p30 are pretty much the same thing. Motion fluidity doesn't come into play here. The Intensity simply deals with bits, bytes and pixels. It does not deinterlace and it does not care about whether a video source is 30PsF or 60i. I understand the need to show off your knowledge prowess, but please keep it on topic.

OK, maybe I made a leap to assume the topic was game console related but 98% of the Intensity discussion here is on that topic. Why else would anyone contemplate capture at 1080p/59.94 except for game console or computer display card capture?

My point was not only is 1080p/59.94 capture not possible for the Intrnsity Pro or Intensity Shuttle, but it is not necessary. Also that 1280x1080p/59.94 capture is superior to either 1080i/29.97 or 1080p/29.97 for game consoles. The reasons for that conclusion relate to the method of display.