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Decklink for non-professional use
Hi,
I’m an independant stop-motion animation artist.
I work with targa sequence\uncompressed quicktime files, converted from RAW files captured with a DSLR.
I realise the decklink cards may be a bit of an overkill for me, especially since I won’t really use them as capture cards.
However, since I am basicly working with uncompressed 1920×1080 video on combustion premiere pro and after effects, I’m interested in a good solution for real-time previewing and monitoring.
My current budget is very limited, (around 2000$), so I thought of buying just the basic system, and buying one of the decklink cards, along with additional storage, raid controller and HD monitor a little later on.
Here are the specs for the basic system I am considering :ASUS P5WDG2 WS PRO P-4/P-D/Core2Duo 975X DUAL DDR2
INTEL Core2Duo (CONROE) E6600 2.40GHZ 4Mb SHARED CACHE
3Gb DDR2 KINGSTON 667MHZ NON-ECC CL5
LEADTEK WINFAST PX7900GT-TDV256 PCI-E SLI 256MB DDR3
SEAGATE Barracuda 160GB SATA2 7200RPM (system drive)
2xWD 320GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB BUFFER (video drives, on motherboard based RAID 0)1. will this system support any of the decklink cards, and allow me real-time preview in combustion\premiere pro?
2. is it at all logical to buy a decklink card just for playback\preview, or are there cheaper\more suitable options?
3. thank you all very much in advance 🙂 -
4 Replies
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Hi,
There is a good chance this will work and you could take advantage of the low price of the new card we are about to release named “Intensity”. This card has HDMI input and output. It works just like our DeckLink cards except it has HDMI. Best of all, the price is only US$249 and it is due out on 15 October. This is an incredibly low price for an uncompressed, digital, capture/playback card. However HDMI makes it easier to build cards at a lower cost so that’s what we’ve built with Intensity and I think it is probably a perfect match for your needs without lots of extras that you won’t use. You could then connect it to your HDMI TV of choice for monitoring.
RAM previews out of After Effects and Combustion can be real time if your PC is fast enough but you do need to render the video in to RAM first. So the first play through will be slower but then subsequent replays of the video should be fast assuming you have enough RAM as the realtime playback plays straight out of RAM. Premiere Pro should play back in real time without any problems assuming you have 2 GB of RAM for HD video.
We haven’t tested your model of motherboard but I think it should work OK and I’ll also ask the engineers what they think.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Luke, is it possible to capture single frames with Intensity? Something that is useful for stop-motion.
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Hi Luke,
Thanks a lot for your response, the “Intensity” card does look like a good choise. I have a few more questions, if you don’t mind…1. Your site list the nvidia quadro cards as compatible, but not the geforce cards. will I have compatibility issues if I buy the geforce 7900gt?
2. When you say “Premiere Pro should play back in real time without any problems assuming you have 2 GB of RAM for HD video”
does that mean I can preview video from the timeline without rendering, or will I have to render to disk first in any case? with dv, you don’t have to render in premiere, so does Intensity\Decklink allow me to achieve the same with uncompressed, or at least with some “nearly uncompressed” blackmagic codec?
3. Do the Intensity\Decklink cards have some sort of hardware processor to help the cpu speed up rendering times, or do they only deal with capture\monitor output?
4. I’ve been told that a fast disk array is important for performance in premiere. Will the Certified SATA II HBA’s :
3ware 9550SX (PCIe)
Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1420SA (PCI-X)
Highpoint RocketRAID 2220 (PCI-X)
listed on your site provide a noticable performance increase over the intel onboard raid controller that come with the motherboard?hope these are not too many silly questions, but I really am clueless about video cards…
lots of thanks,
Jon. -
Hey Wes,
Blackmagic Deck Control as a capture still frame option that work with all the cards, including Intensity.
regards
Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design
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