Blackmagic Intensity: First HDMI PCI Express card

If you are on a mac, this is horrible, particularly because you can only use it with the Mac Pro. On a PC its fine.

One thing I have never understood about Black-Magic is why they dont go more for mobility? PCI Unompresseed HD Capture cards are suitable only for studio-like environments since desktops obviously cant be carried around. We need a latop/notebook solution, especially since Merom processors now allow Laptops to be as powerful as Desktops for processing HD.

I wish either the MacMini could be modified to accept the cards, or BlackMagic would release a PCMCIA card so that we could use a new Merom Laptop with the camera and really get some Indie-style Uncompressed-HD fottage.
 
Fugitive said:
Thats what I meant. You cant use it with IMac, emac, or or the books...
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It is a PCI Express Card.

Of course it won't work on a Mac or PC without slots.

or am I missing something?
 
It's pretty portable when you take time to plot out a portable system.

A little PC Cube with a large enough HD LCD screen with this input is rather portable. I mean, you get into powering issues, but once you figure that out then you're set.

S'what I plan to do.
 
Fugitive said:
Thats what I meant. You cant use it with IMac, emac, or or the books...
Click to expand...
Well of course not. It's recording uncompressed HD! It needs the PCI bus to handle the data rate of, what is it, 2 gigabits per second? That means a data rate of somewhere around 250 megabytes per second. How could you even begin to record that on an imac's internal drive? Or a laptop's? Hard drives only run at around 30 megabytes per second.

It is an impossibility. The only way you could even start to do so would be to compress the footage. And if you're compressing, then what's the point of recording uncompressed?
 
You need a Raid 0 of at least 10 drives with fiberlink or infiniband (sata II may just cut it) to lay down 250megabytes a second... this could work no a mac mini.. as long as you have a small refrigerator sized raid array sitting below it.
 
Silly Product

Silly Product

I want to record the decompressed HDMI signal uncompressed so that I can....what. Eat up a ton of hard drive space. It's analagous to capturing SDI (270 mbps) from DVCam (25mbps) tape. It's not like there is anything out there (acquisition) that records uncompressed HDMI. Even HDCam SR is compressed. Good enough for Star Wars good enough for you I always say. What I would like to see is an HD toaster. Remember when computers weren't fast enough to process video and you had to use dedicated external boxes? What about having a box that had various inputs analog HD, HDSDI, etc., married to a SATA card. You could use a slow machine that would control the parameters of the box but the actual processing would be done on the toaster. Your machine would only guide the process and not do the processing. You could use a G3 iBook and a SATA raid and capture high data rate HD. The major cost of devices like the FS 100 is the development of the control processes that your computer cal already do. 2000 dollars for a 100gb hard drive is ridiculous. My 100gb hard drive has a 17" screen and runs my editing software as well as email, after effects, photoshop, etc., Innovation Please!
 
Actually, this product looks very interesting, not to record uncompressed but to bypass the 25mbit HDV compression and capture to a decent HD codec. On Mac, Photo JPEG at 75% quality would be an excellent choice in principle, although even the new Mac Pro seems to stuggle to encode in real-time. DVCPRO HD would be another possibility.

Either way, a simple FireWire drive can easily handle the bandwidth and a laptop is a whole lot more practical in the field than a Mac Pro!
 
I went by BlackMagic's website and it said you can use two Intensity cards in a high-end Mac with their switching software called On-Air 2 and switch 2 HDMI signals while recording the result to hard drive.

Doesn't the Red have an HDMI output?

Couldn't you use Intensity to record a live-switched two Red-camera shoot?
 
As far as I knew you couldn't expand a Mac Mini in the first place. a Mini PC, however, yes.

Which laptops come with the ability to add a capture card? Only option I've been thinking of is Mini - PC cube with two internal drives. Or, maybe, two external G-Raids.

Why won't the cameras just be here so I can test?
 
Barry_Green said:
That means a data rate of somewhere around 250 megabytes per second. How could you even begin to record that on an imac's internal drive? Or a laptop's? Hard drives only run at around 30 megabytes per second.
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Reasoning that most modern laptops come with a firewire port, and that Firewire's bandwidth is either 400MBs or 800, I would assume that unless there is a technical idiosynchracy i am unaware of, that would mean a Laptops hardrive "can" store at a significantly faster rate than 30mbs.

Besides, arent those external USB 2.0 harddisks up to snuff? Unless the bottleneck is that the data has to go "through" the computer first. Still, should be decently fast.

And wait, the new IMacs have a laptop-type Hard disks? Man, yeah I know its the only logical explanation for the slim size, but I just so want this to be untrue! :(
 
David S. said:
It is a PCI Express Card.

Of course it won't work on a Mac or PC without slots.

or am I missing something?
Click to expand...

No you are not. Actually I was referring to what I had mentioned in another thread. I mentioned that BlackMagic ought to be considering PCMCIA cards. We really need those cards on laptops.

Make sense now?

kholi said:
Which laptops come with the ability to add a capture card?
Click to expand...

I think I already answered that. We need PCMCIA cards...and faster Hard-disks...
 
Fugitive said:
Reasoning that most modern laptops come with a firewire port, and that Firewire's bandwidth is either 400MBs or 800, I would assume that unless there is a technical idiosynchracy i am unaware of, that would mean a Laptops hardrive "can" store at a significantly faster rate than 30mbs.
Click to expand...
Bits and bytes, bits and bytes. Laptop hard drives run at around 30 megaBYTES per second, firewire runs at 400 megaBITS per second. Even so, firewire is capable of up to 50 megabytes per second, laptop drives aren't. You can look at the tests for yourself; tom's hardware guide used to have lots of great test info but they seem to have undergone some sort of reorganization and I can't find anything decent on 'em.

Let's put it this way -- a two-drive 3.5" RAID like a G-RAID can only sustain a maximum throughput write rate of about 50 megabytes per second. No way will a little 3.5" or 2.5" laptop hard disk come close to that.
 
Fugitive said:
One thing I have never understood about Black-Magic is why they dont go more for mobility?
Click to expand...
What I don't understand is, after spending close to $1,000 for one of their cards, why couldn't they throw in a few cables? Even a manual would have been nice.
 
HD Uncompressed? you'll at least 400mbs a to succefully run uncompressed video with AVID of Finalcut using any of their capture boards MOJO.BLACKMAGIC or AJA. You will need a fiber channel drives to have that type of tranfer rate. Raids 1 or 2 will not work in your favour at 270mbs, you will expereince drops in the transfer speed pretty much all the time using uncompressed.
Solution, dig all your media on site with your laptop usind HDVPRO if you wish to see how the edit would look in big format, I recommend you did 4:3 to save space for your off-line, Firewire 800 should bring HDVPRO in only some problems, I recommend a SATA drive for best results. You should!, unfortunately at this time only use HD 10 or 12 bit unconpressed during your online process, at this point if in most casses can't afford a fiber channel drives you can rent them for a day or two to get you media at that quality.
As far as laptops you won't experience this type of technology that is applied to your desktop computers for sometime.
 
Actually capturing uncompressed HD on Laptop has been done in the past.
Scott Billups had a portable system back in 2003, using his Powerbook g4 with a Magma extension cabinet with the Pinnacle Cinewave and a scsi controller, and an external raid.
This enabled him to capture uncompressed 8-bit 1080p.
Article

If a company made a combined eSATA / HDMI expresscard it should be possible to capture uncompressed 10 bit 1080 to a 4 way SATAII hardware raid.
 
Barry_Green said:
How could you even begin to record that on an imac's internal drive? Or a laptop's? Hard drives only run at around 30 megabytes per second.
Click to expand...

The new Imasc have a 160GB Serial ATA 7200-rpm hard drive at a minimum. I am sure thats more than 30 MB per second. So now we only need a PCI slot on the IMac and we are all set.

I wish Apple would produce an Imac with a PCI slot...

Thanks for the link Anders. Checking it out.
 
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