Recording 480p from Games Consoles

[edwinbradford]

Hi,

I've been looking into this for two weeks now and tried asking in three for four forums with no success. I work in the games industry and am building up a library of recorded video game footage stored on PC or Mac for reference purposes. Until now I've recorded via RGB Scart to a stand alone DVD Recorder capable of RGB In and obtained pretty decent results. However, many of the consoles I'm recording from support Progressive output via Component and I'm interested in capturing this as the captures will be frames rather than interlaced fields, they should therefore be sharper images on the destination PC and Mac platforms.

I've seen a number of devices purporting to support Component In which is fine but where I'm unclear is will they capture Progressive? I'm looking at for instance the DataVideo Dac-15 which seems to be their lowest price model to support Component and has the advantage of being Mac and PC compatible which is a big plus as I use both from time to time. I don't need to support HD resolutions, SD is fine.

I was told in one forum to go for the Decklink series of cards http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/sd/ as they too support Component In but when I contacted them they told me they wouldn't do what I needed as detailed above, I assume therefore that although they support Component In they don't support Progressive capture.

Can anyone tell me if I need to spend thousands or if there's some insurmountable problem? From what I'm reading there are quite a few people asking about capturing video games footage but I've found no information on capturing Games Console Progressive output?

Many thanks -- Edwin.

[edDV]

Check out the AJA Xena line. You might need the HD model to capture progressive.
http://www.aja.com/html/products_windows_xena.html

[edwinbradford]

Thanks for coming back to me. I looked into that from other forums earlier this week and mailed them. Here's their response:

Hello Edwin,

We do capture and playback component but we do not support a 480p signal.

Best regards,

Gerard M. Tassone (aka: Gerry)
Inside Sales
AJA Video Systems Inc
443 Crown Point Circle
Grass Valley, CA 95945

I've found one (very hard to get because it constantly sells out) card that supports 480p from Japan and another that might support it from a UK manufacturer who I've contacted for more info.