• Blackmagic Design

  Capturing screen in HD with Intensity Pro?

  Posted by Stephen Vilas on March 17, 2008 at 11:49 am

  I am developing a documentary which has, for the most part, been shot in HDV with a Canon XL H1. The footage is all progressive with an hdv resolution of 1440×1080.

  Apart from the real life documentary footage, the film will also contain a huge amount of screen captures from various apps, ranging from virtual worlds such as WoW and Second Life to simple screen caps of 2D social networks such as Facebook, etc.

  So where the OpenGL and DirectX apps are concerned, FRAPS of Camtasia is not really an option here, since its maximum resolution is way too low (and is based on the size of your screen).

  What do you suggest is the best way of capturing all this screen footage with a (minimum) resolution of 1440×1080? Full HD would be even better of course.

  I am working with both Mac and PC, so ideally the capturing device to get would work for both (an external device perhaps?). Of course, the PC is used most of the time, simply because most of the apps are only available for Windows.

  I’m fairly new to all this and I have read through the forum already, but I am bit puzzled. People have suggested the Blackmagic Cards as a possible option. What about the ioHD by AJA?
  What would the setup requirements and workflow be if i would use any of these?

  Alan Scott replied 18 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Alan Scott

  March 20, 2008 at 4:14 pm

  From Fraps:

  “The maximum resolution for Half-size capture is 2560×1600. Full-size video capture is limited to a maximum of 1152×864 (4:3) or 1280×800 (widescreen). If Full-size is selected and the game is set to a resolution higher than the maximum, Fraps will automatically switch to Half-size when recording”

  It does scaling for “Half-Size” and guessing it doesn’t look good.

  Folks are suggesting using a Blackmagic card so you can output from from your DX graphics card at 1440x1080p HD and plug that into the capture card on another system.

  Not sure which graphics card you have, but not all can easily be set to output at 1440x1080p. I have to fiddle with that on my nVidia 8800GTS to make that work at most HD resolutions.

  That being the case I would start by getting your system to output 1440x1080p.

  Note that not all Blackmagic HD capture cards can do 1080p capture (I think the Intensity is 1080i only) so research out which card to use or I’m sure some helpful folks here will have suggestions.

  I use component output from the nVidia to a Decklink HD Extreme.

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