HDMI monitoring (INTENSITY)

[taubkin]

So, how do you use this thing?

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

You spend 250 bucks, pop it behind your mac and plug an LCD monitor on it? It seems great to me. Does it work as an accurate monitor, or it works terribly like video cards with S-Video outs? Can this lower the need for an HD link? Are there professional monitors, even LCD, that take HDMI?

Maybe this is pretty much a stupid question, but I'm really not very tuned with all the new technology nowadays...

 

[HKSC 2007]

From now on you are not stupid, BE smart

HDMI / DVI monitoring / Electronic Viewfinder output from the RED one ......Stuart English

 

[taubkin]

Sorry, I didn't explain!

That would have nothing to do with on-camera monitoring or even 4K, just for finishing content on 1080p...

Maybe I should have posted this in the HVX section! But anyway, it can still be used with RED 1080p material, right?

 

[Chris Kenny]

There's not much point in using an Intensity for monitoring. It won't accomplish anything you can't do with a $30 HDMI-to-DVI adaptor, which, unlike the Intensity, doesn't require you to be tethered to a tower.

There's also really no point in using an Intensity for recording off of a RED. Why record uncompressed 4:2:2 1080p to a big RAID when you can record wavelet compressed 2K 4:4:4 or 4K RAW on camera, that will look better while maintaining much lower data rates?

The Intensity might be useful in conjunction with RED if you want to do live streaming. You could get an incredible 1080p signal into the card scaling down from a 4K sensor. But it'll be a while before Internet streaming is good enough to justify shooting with a 4K digital cinema camera!

For any recorded material, though, Intensity doesn't do much for you.

Edit: Hmm. Looking at the specs, it doesn't look like Intensity supports 1080p. Only 1080i. I believe that means you couldn't use RED with it in scaling mode, only in windowing mode. Unless you want to go all the way down to 720p.... Anyway, this makes RED really, really absurd overkill for anything you might want to do with this card. It's much better matched with a consumer or prosumer camera, where it has a lot of value letting you get an image that hasn't been mangled by HDV or DVCPRO HD compression.