H.264 Pro Recorder Test

[Scott Francis]

I would like to see some too….it seems from the forums, this may not be the magic bullet I am looking for…I cannot find any (detailed) review online either…not dropping $500 on a “maybe”….

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Andrew Stone]

Too busy with paying work to fulfill your request… Should be known though, the quality of the output, the video is stunning. If you need to produce video dailies of takes on a set or you are producing material that will end up on Vimeo or YouTube, this solution fits the bill to a “T”. If you are looking to produce long form web ready video out of the shoot to post on the web, until they lower the acceptable bitrate scale from 2.0 Mbit to 500 kbps. You need to look elsewhere but the only solution I know of that will do this is the Teradek at over 2 grand and out of the box the Teradek solution doesn’t give you h.264 that directly savable to your computer. You have to buy another $500 piece of software to do this. Obviously the Teradek is aimed at the higher end pro market, who won’t blink at this kind of price tag and the wireless functionality that it affords.

I am hoping that Blackmagic will see the wisdom in providing a lower bitrate as this would make the unit the runaway success that it should be.

Again the quality out of the BM H.264 Pro Recorder is stunning.

-Andrew

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Steadicam & Camera Operator

[Scott Francis]

So do you feel the HD quality of the H.264 output is BETTER than an HDV compression? I am hoping to get several of these to capture from the imager of my Sony FX1’s to computer bypassing the HDV format…thanks for your input…sounds promising so far!
Regards

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Heinz Bihlmeir]

As long as you don’t need encoding support for interlaced formats (like PAFF and MBAFF), yes. 20 Mbps H264 should compare well to 25 Mbps HDV. Interlaced sources should be de-interlaced externally before encoding.

The Fuitsu codec used in the design can also be found in some high-end consumer AVCHD camcorders.

[Andrew Stone]

Hi Scott,

I am not familiar with the FX1 although I use Sony cameras. I assume your output is 1080i60. The Blackmagic recorder does do progressive output. I assume it can convert the signal to progressive so it should be more useful and subjectively the image should look much better, if your cam does output interlaced video. Progressive video is much more useful as an acquisition format unless your video is going DIRECTLY to broadcast a la ENG material being zipped off for news programming.

Go to the support section of the Blackmagic site and download the manual for the device. It should mention the different ways it can acquire the footage. You can check about conversion as well.

I cannot stress enough how good the footage looks given what it is doing — compressing the footage on the fly. It could give your camera a new lease on life, if you can only capture interlaced and it will output progressive from your cam.

Hopefully someone from BM will chime in soon. They’re on Australian time so they should be arriving at work soon.

-Andrew

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Steadicam & Camera Operator

[Scott Francis]

Thanks Andrew, FX1 is a Sony camcorder, I have 3 and am looking as you put it at a “new lease on the camera’s life.” I see a big difference from it’s component out (which is 1080i), and the HDV it encodes. I have downloaded the BM manual and it was quite worthless in helping me find out the info I am looking for. Since it states in the tech specs that it does 1080i (60) I suspect it will accept the signal from the camera. With it only being 20Mbps, vs 25Mbps for HDV, I was concerned about that. My AVCHD camera does 24Mbps, and the “pro” version of it does 50Mbps and 4.2.2…I am not sure how the BM H.264 Pro can do 4.2.2. and only 20Mbps…in any case I think I may give it a try based on your input…thanks again so much!
Regards

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Jack Welten]

Hello Andrew,

thanks for your input, I will order one too, as soon it is available over here in the Netherlands
for your info, I’m not a pro like you are, I operate the camara at acrobatic gymnastic competitions (about 120 hours / year),
these video’s are used by judges, for this reason it is important that the videofiles’s are directly available after recording (over a wired networkconnection), furhtermore these files are used to educate new judges,
last years I captured in SD-quality by firewire and recorded in mpeg2-format on a laptop, which is connected with other viewing laptops of the judges,

again thanks for your input,

with kind regards,

Jack

[Joshua Helling]

Okay…I’ll chime in here (not from Aus though).

The H.264 compression is much more complex than HDV, so at similar data rates you should find that the H.264 looks better. Because the compression is so different you should stay away from comparing 25Mb/s HDV to the same rate in H.264…they’ll be two different beasts. The downside is that due to the increased complexity it makes H.264 even harder to edit than HDV, and consequently it doesn’t hold up as well to editing. But for delivering dailies or stuff for streaming (basically stuff you don’t plan on adding renders to, its perfect).

As far as interlaced support, how it works now is that if you feed 1080i59.94 to the encoder it will output 1080p29.97. Same data rate, its just doing a deinterlace. I think we’d like to add proper interlaced support to it in the future.

As for allowing lower bitrates, I think that’s something we’d also like to consider adding in the future.

I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.

[Lauri Ahonen]

We currently purchased several “Blackmagic Design H.264 Pro Recorders” for our archieving project within university. We were previously using Intensity Pro cards and encoding the material to H264 with software and aquired the Pro Recorders to simplify the workflow. We were really, really surprised that the product does not implement any kind of support for encoding interlaced material. We need to archive old PAL/NTSC tapes and the quality of the progressive encoding is really sub-standard (deinterlacing artefacts are prominent) with the embedded deinterlacer.

All in all the quality of the unit and hardware is excellent. The color balancing is great of the box and the unit does really good when capturing VHS signal – even with weak sync. The unit fits most users just perfectly and the only real concern is the bad quality of the deinterlacer and lack of support for interlaced encoding. The other problem is the included software which lacks the support for MP4 cutting. 1080i->1080p capturing is of stunning quality.

It is clear that the product is a bit work-in-progress. The package did not contain any installation cd or manual but a small piece of paper that. We intend to keep the products in hand and wait for an software/firmware upgrade for interlaced encoding. I think that this feature is _obligatory_ for this kind of professional unit.

I hope that Blackmagic adresses this matter promptly. I’m a longstanding customer and highly appreciate your products. I trust that this will be resolved. Thank you for your time.

M.D. Lauri Ahonen

[Johan Vermeire]

Hi lauri,

I have this device also, bought it for converting +- 4000 vhs tapes.

Testing setup VHS player -> ADVC300 ->h264 pro recoder

What line level converter are you using btw?
Because the device does not work with the comsumer level of VHS. 🙁

I have also the same problems, no realtime cropping ability
(they anouced this on there site).
And i also mis the option to trim (like you can do in quicktimeplayer) and split of a large captured movie files.

At the moment this device is useless for me. 🙁
It is not giving me the workflow a expected from this device.

I hope that BlackMagic fix this fast, i don’t gonne tell my boss he spends 400$ for nothing …

At the moment it looks like the consumer version has more options?

gr. johan