-
A Question About The Intensity Pro For Mac
I have a tape based high definition camera and I looked at the Blackmagic Intensity Pro on their website it looked really cool but the website doesn’t seem to specify one thing so heres my question. The website talks about how you can capture from hdv cameras and do all the way up to an uncompressed 4:2:2 which is great but can it do it after the footage has been captured to tape or is it just plugging it in while the camera is capturing to achieve a raw uncompressed 4:2:2, it doesn’t seem to specify this on the website which is why I figured I’d ask here, from experience when footage is captured to tape it is by that point that the footage is compressed into the mpeg-2 codec I was under the impression that the Blackmagic Intensity Pro could bypass this just in the uploading state is that true/false help is greatly appreciated as this holds the key to how I will film future projects
Thanks
-
4 Replies
-
All the Intensity can do is capture whatever your camera sends. Once compressed the quality loss is permanent. So it really just depends on what your camera does. Probably, your camera compressed it to HDV format, and so you are just stuck with that.
However, recompressing already-compressed data will cause further loss, especially if a different codec is used. So you would still get better quality from an Intensity in uncompressed mode compared to a capture system that can only record compressed data. It would just not be as good as a totally pristine data stream that was never compressed in the first place. A capture system which handles the HDV format natively would be just as good quality-wise and produce smaller files (assuming that’s what your camera uses).
-
Thanks, that’s what I thought but I just wanted to make sure do you know of anyway to capture the video data to a hard drive and capture it in some kind of pro res I use Final Cut Pro by the way, I have heard of the Ki Pro but that’s to expensive, it would be really nice to be able to use the cameras I have to shoot really nice and not to compressed footage. File sizes are not a big deal to me I have plenty of hard drive space on external hard drives and I can always get more
-
If the video data is actually in HDV format, you’ll need to connect your computer to the camera via Firewire, set your camera to output over firewire and then use a suitable capture program that knows what to do with the incoming data. I don’t know anything about Mac software but I found this link pretty easily:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/poisson_chris/hdv-prores.php -
My cameras component out is straight from the imager, but if I capture to tape, then it’s already HDV and you may as well use firewire. You can see the difference, connect via component or HDMI to your HDTV and firewire and run VLC in live mode to another input on the same HDTV, then switch the input sources on the HDTV from the component to the firewire (live through VLC) and you will be able to see a big difference if your camera can be captured from the imager and bypass the HDV compression and the 4.2.0 color space and capture MJPEG via the intensity straight from the imager. Danny Hays
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up