Decklink for non-professional use

[Luke Maslen]

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

[Wesvasher]

Luke, is it possible to capture single frames with Intensity? Something that is useful for stop-motion.

[Jonathan Shohet]

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.

[Kristian Lam]

Hey Wes,

Blackmagic Deck Control as a capture still frame option that work with all the cards, including Intensity.

regards

Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design