REVIEW: Blackmagic Intensity Pro HDMI Capture Device

Looking for a way to get uncompressed, super-high quality HDMI signals directly to your hard drive from a HD video camera? Are you someone who works in television professionally who needs to edit the highest of high quality feeds? No? Well... me neither... so a week after I received my card it is back in the annuls of Amazon's warehouses. Here's my (short) experience with the card and what I think.

While I'm not a professional TV editor, what I am is some dude who wants to press the record button and play video games so I can share my experiences with the internets. I play my xbox 360 via HDMI to my television, so that's where my search began. I went to Bing and typed in "Capture card hdmi." There are very few choices when it comes to HDMI capture, so I went to some forums to see what people thought. The overwhelming majority of people came back to me with get a Blackmagic Intensity Pro or use composite cables and get a Hauppage HD PVR. I figured an internal card was good enough and probably more reliable than an external one and the HD PVR does not work with HDMI, so my mind was made up.

Setup

The box came with the card and two "breakout" cables that were ways to change the signal from composite to HDMI if your source only uses composite video/audio (thus the two cables). It also comes with an installation CD... that DID NOT WORK with windows 7 64bit. I had to go to the website and download the installer for both the drivers and the capture software. Once that was all said and done it was a quick path to uncompressed HDMI to my PC. All I had to do was run the cable from my xbox 360 to the card's input and a second HDMI cable to the television from the card's output.

Software

The software gives you very few options. It also doesn't make it clear that if your signal doesn't match the settings you won't get picture or sound to the PC. I spent the next few hours learning that the hard way. The easiest way for me to get this right was to hook my Xbox 360 directly to the television, set the display settings via the dashboard to 1080p (RGB), turn off the "autodetect display" option (the 360 has a nasty tendency to just switch display modes when you plug the HDMI to the pc if you don't do this...), then hook the Xbox BACK up to the capture card, and just trial and error around with the multiple 1080p settings until you see a picture in the "capture" tab.

After multiple hours of frustration... I had a crystal clear picture of my Xbox 360 dashboard on my PC.

Capture

At this point I was extremely excited to get recording. I figured I'd do a quick test and capture myself scrolling through the blades on the dashboard. I click capture, pick up the controller, press LB to scroll, and the capture card throws an error. I go back and it had stopped recording due to "dropped frames." I went into preferences and unchecked the box that said "stop capture for dropped frames" and tried again. This time everything seems good.

I have to inform you that I only use one display adapter. I have a 42" plasma from Panasonic that I use for both the PC and Xbox, so I didn't notice anything strange until I flipped back to the PC.

So, now I'm back on my PC and click "stop capture." I see a brand new clip in the library that I had just created. It was approximately a minute long.... and almost a TERRA BYTE in size. To be fair I believe it was something like 750gigs. I lol'd a minute and then went and watched it. The video could not have been any more clear. It was amazing. The problem was it would drop a series of frames every time something happened on screen making it a bit choppy... not easy to notice, but it was there. The audio was not even CLOSE to being sync'd up. The video played normally for a minute, then it freeze framed itself, and the rest of the audio kept playing.

The BIG problem was the file size. I've done stupid things like this before where I just didn't check a box or pick an appropriate bitrate and it turned into a mess, so I knew there was a way to set it properly...

BUT...

This card/software IS NOT designed to take anything but the highest quality video/audio. They only have 3 settings for quality and I already had it on the lowest one!

I figured it had to be the 1080p setting on the xbox so I turned the xbox's display to 720p. I repeated the test and the file was not much smaller than it was the first time, the picture was choppy, and the audio was not sync'd up.

I then tried multiple video editing software platforms to try and capture at a lower bitrate but could not even get them to recognize the hardware.

Searching for Answers

At this point I didn't want to admit I had purchased a $199 brick so I went searching for advice. I spent an entire day looking for people who use this card to capture video and what I found was a whole bunch of happy campers that got exactly what they wanted. They weren't gamers like me who wanted to upload videos to sharing sites and post them on their blogs. They were professional video editors of one type or another and they all had one thing in common... RAID ZERO.

I haven't had this computer for a month yet. It has an i7 930, 2xATI Radeon 5770 1Gig GDDR5s in Crossfire mode, 16gigs of DDR3 RAM... and it cannot handle the card due to the single hard drive. I thought I did a ton of research before purchasing the Blackmagic Intensity Pro, but as it turns out, I did a pretty lousy job.

What I don't understand is how I could have missed the fact that this card takes such amazingly fast hard drives. Even the solid state drives of today are NOT fast enough to capture this type of feed alone without being configured in RAID ZERO. The people that actually have, use, and enjoy this card recommend having 6 or more drives in RAID ZERO at 2TB each. One such user said that he uses the card to transfer HD video feeds to the PC in 1 hour increments. That 1 hour of video/audio runs about 10TB of HD space.

I had it in my head that I was going to record up to 8 hours of game play at a time... what a shame.

TL;DR

The Blackmagic Intensity Pro capture card allegidly works great as long as you have a bleeding edge PC with 10+TB of hard drive space configured in RAID ZERO. This is NOT the card for the casual user. It should not be considered for capturing video games to upload to sharing sites due to its massive requirements and impractical file sizes.

What's Next?

I have a HD PVR from Hauppauge on order from Amazon.com. Hopefully that review will come with video evidence.