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Express Box / Intensity / Cineform on a Mac Book Pro
I just got a Mac Book Pro 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo notebook and would like to know if anyone has tried to use a similar Mac with a Black Magic Design Intensity card plugged into a Magma ExpressBox and compressing the data stream with Cineform. The reason I ask is that I have tried ¬ unsuccessfully to capture uncompressed HD through Intensity on my desktop (I¹m not using RAID drives), but have gotten fine results on the same computer using Intensity and Cineform. Could this possibly work – ¬ Express Box / Intensity / Cineform on a Mac Book Pro?
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6 Replies
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James,
I don’t care HOW lucky you have been in the past. Uncompressed HD require an absolute minmum of 118Mb/sec (and that’s 8 bit uncompressed HD). There is NO WAY that you ever captured sustained uncompressed HD on any laptop, or desktop MAC with a single internal hard drive. A single drive can’t achieve these speeds. If you say “but I did it, and it worked” – it’s because you had two or more internal SATA drives in a MAC Pro tower stripped together RAID 0 – and you were lucky, because 2 drives could BARELY play back this uncompressed data rate.Disk drive arrays are a fact of life in our business. Every person who is reading EVERY ONE of these forums relies on disk drives more than any other product to do their jobs. Just look at the ad campaigns on these forums, and other magazines – its practically all disk drives. Dont’ you dare say “but there must be a way, without having to use these fancy drive arrays” – there IS NO WAY – not yet at least. Not to get SUSTAINED playback of uncompressed HD. There is no trick – well, there is – don’t use uncompressed HD. Use ProRes422HQ, or DVCProHD. They look teriffic.
You know the expression “there ain’t no free lunch” – well, you are living this right now.
And by the way – the Mac Book Pro has a tough time EVEN WITH AN EXTERNAL DRIVE ARRAY using the slot34 adaptor to do uncompressed HD. You will get very inconsistent results, as the buss speed is limited. This is why you see amazing results with products like the Cal Digit HD Pro on a MAC Pro tower, but crappy results when being used with a Mac Book Pro.
SORRY – facts of life.
Bob Zelin
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Bob,
Thanks for the fast response.
I’m not sure I was clear enough in my post, but I have been capturing from a Canon HV30, via HDMI cable into the Intensity and compressing using Cineform. Reading your post I guess you might have missed what I said about using Cineform. Anyhow, Cineform is compressing the data with their (all but lossless) codec and sending the data to the 7200 rpm SATA drive as compressed 10-bit CineForm Intermediate (4:2:2) https://www.cineform.com/index.php . I also mentioned in my post that I was unsuccessful in trying to capture uncompressed HD with the same system – for all the reasons you mentioned in your post.
So, my original question still stands. Has anyone tried to capture via HDMI using the combination of: Express Box / Intensity / Cineform, on a Mac Book Pro?
James -
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Why not say something useful instead of being rude?
I’ve had enough of the arrogant and condescending attitude of some of the posters. The worst thing is that they start getting rude and most of the time they haven’t even read the question. So their rant actually has nothing to do with the question. But by the time it’s pointed out to them they’ve already moved on to rant and rave against someone else.
You must really be bitter.
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No Margus, I don’t think Empollon Fernandez was referring to your post, but rather to Bob’s less than attentive remarks.
Thanks for your relevant suggestion.
James
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