Call to all Intensity Pro owners

[kctobyjoe]

bought card; installed; downloaded all most recent software; NO experimentation YET
Also have loaded Cybelink Pwer Director for 64 bit
GiGabyte GA-X58-USB 3 LGA 1366 w/ i7-920 (not sure what Ghz
6 GB DDR3 in dual channel mode (cannot get tri to work)
Running win 7 64 bit ultimate
about a dozen 1tb/2 TB drives in JBOD Rosewill tower
Looking to record DVI feed from COMCAST HD receiver; in all likelyhood NFL games
Appreciate any and all suggestion(s)
kctobyjoe AT comcast.net

[joe burgess]

Hey guys, i recently bought a blackmagic intensity pro and attempted to capture xbox 360 gameplay in 1080i quality. The video quality was great but the audio suffred latency of about 2 seconds please halp :/

[rcubed]

Hi,
I have an Intensity Pro card and do 1080i 8 bit 59.94 fr/s captures (raw). I have an AMD X2 5600+ cpu and run 4G of RAM on an Asus M2N32-SLI and capture in XP (Means only 3.x G of the RAM gets used in XP). I have dual boot XP Pro 32 bit and Win 7 Pro 64 bit. I don't use the Win 7 much due to limited compatibility with some of the s/w I use. The disk performance was slightly higher in Win 7.

I run two - three drive RAID 0 configurations, one internal and the 2nd external in a SansDigital TR8MBP enclosure and all controlled by a HighPoint RocketRaid 2721 6G/s with SAS to E-SATA, and SAS to SATA cables. I chose the SansGigital enclosure because it allows you to spread the RAID-0 configuration over the two E-SATA connections. I don't use the on board SATA controller for the RAID configurations. 4 drives connect to port 0, 4 connect to port 1. The hard drives are all WD1002FAEX 6Gb/s 1TB drives. I have the external RAIDs configured with 2 Drives on one port the third on the second port. The internal RAID configuration can take advantage of the 6g/s HDs.

The Blackmagic performance numbers for 1080 HD is Ext RAID 69 fps read 75 fps write or 297.2 MB/s wr and the Internal RAID are 93 fps rd 91 fps wr. 363.4 MB/s wr. This is with the disks partitioned as 2G partitions NTFS and no data in the partition (again limited by Win XP). The JBOD interface on the external RAID enclosure is 3G/s.

I capture from a cable box with component video. A raw capture does take a lot of space 1:52:38 movie takes 822,798,231 KB. The longest capture was 3hr+ and took about 1.3TB of drive space. Windows media player or KMP player will play back the avi capture file w/o pauses. The video card is a Radeon X1950 Pro.

When I capture I turn off all the anti-spyware, firewall, and virus software, CPU temp monitors and HDD temp monitors no other apps running. With this configuration I do not drop any frames and the audio stays in sync. I have found if I forget to shut down the previously mentioned software I sometimes get dropped frames. If you turn on ignore dropped frames in the Intensity capture software things can get out of sync. I haven't tried any extended JPEG captures.

Normally I process the source capture with AVIsynth back to 23.976 fps (telecided), resize to 720x480, and encode as 16:9 with 3:2 pull down. With HC encoder and the AVI script an encode takes approx 10Hr. using a lossless file. I do SD because I don't have a Blu-ray burner or player, plus the cost of Blue-ray disks are currently too expensive.

Hope this helps the discussion,

rcubed

[Brad]

That sounds like an awful lot of expensive hardware and work just to get an anamorphic MPEG-2. Why not capture to lossy?

[rcubed]

That sounds like an awful lot of expensive hardware and work just to get an anamorphic MPEG-2. Why not capture to lossy?

I also have a Canopus Pegasus capture card which does a real time compression of about 5:1, however, in some really busy scenes there is some blocking. Also Canopus was unwilling to create drivers and software for the card that would run under Win 7. They are trying to "encourage" the user to update to one of the newer products.

The annoying thing is according to a repair technician (who appeared to know what is going on) that T/W is transmitting HD in Mpg4 to get additional band width. This in some cases leads to a lot of macro blocking in the signal as presented from the Cable box. It explains a lot as to why sometimes HD quality is just not there. It is impossible to know for sure, but I suspect they are selectively reducing bandwidth on some channels to also free up band width. It is impossible to talk to anyone internal to the company (engineering or programming) that really knows what they are doing. In our area they have switched to the supply the channel you are asking for and send only that one to your box, as opposed to broadcasting all the channels to everyone. Since they aren't installing fiber they have a definite overall band width limit over coax. Also having to broadcast analog signals for older sets so a set top box is not required takes up a lot of band width. They are the sole provider in our area.

I like to capture stuff and author it. Capturing a raw data gives you about as good a data as you can get. It's a hobby what more can I say.

rcubed

BTW I have called or e-mailed Blackmagic support several times and they have been most helpful.