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Not very happy with Intensity Pro
This card looked very promising at first, but after a day of playing with it I think I’m going to return it.
1) It makes Premiere CS5 crash a lot. In one day I already had about 13 crashes in a very simple timeline with one A/V track, all by simply positioning the cursor where I want to start playing from, and hitting the space bar. Sometimes the clip has a 3 way color corrector, sometimes nothing at all. It crashes right away and the culprit, according to the error message box, is BMDPlayer.prm, which is obviously the player module for this card.
2) One of the reasons to buy this card was to be able to capture some VHS tapes without having to go through the annoying setup I was doing so far, which was connecting my VCR to my Sony Digital 8 camcorder, which allows analog A/V to be digitized and sent through the firewire cable to the computer. But when I finally found the way to make the S-Video inputs work, the video signal comes and goes constantly. Upon reading about this online, it looks like it’s normal for this card if you have a tape that is less than perfect. But wait, the same tapes that are impossible to capture with the Intensity Pro look without a hitch using the A/V to firewire method I described above, using the same VCR. So what’s the deal? I read that some people spend about $40 at Radio Shack to buy a series of adapters to workaround this, but basically what they do is turn the composite signal into S-Video, but it’s not real S-Video. Besides, I shouldn’t have to spend anything extra to be able to do what Blackmagic advertises the card does, capture from composite and S-Video.
Yet, the second reason would be tolerable for me if I wouldn’t have to put up with about three or four crashes per hour of editing in Premiere. The only reason I spend $190 in this card is because the secondary monitor preview in Premiere doesn’t output properly interlaced video, which this card does, but at the price of crashing 3 or 4 times an hour, which as far as I’ve read online, seems to be very common with it.
So I think I’m going to send this back and save until I can get a card from another company that allows me to do editing properly.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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12 Replies
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HI.
1. I would not comment on cs thing as my experience is cs stuff is really unstable in my experience.
2. you do not get the simple idea here. vhs has so bad signal and no sync, that the standardized capture cards will go nuts with that. been there done and tested that a lot. does not matter what card you use.
with digital 8 route you have the best possible way to capture those old vhs tapes. capture card can capture those advertised signals but question is if you can provide descent signal. digital 8 input is internally compensated for this really bad signal. with regular vhs you just can not do that. heck it was the way to protect rental vhs tapes to be not copyed. sync was manipulated as far as i could see.
Just capture all your stuff with digital 8 flyby and you are done with this horrible vhs for ever.3. it is always some drivers or configuration issue that users complain about. they just do not know it.
most of the time products works as expected. user errors makes things look bad. specially really bad material like vhs.—
Margus
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[Margus Voll] “you do not get the simple idea here. vhs has so bad signal and no sync, that the standardized capture cards will go nuts with that. been there done and tested that a lot. does not matter what card you use.”
While I agree that VHS seems to be a very unstable signal, I have used some other capture cards in the past and never had problems. Granted, I haven’t used them with this very cheap JVC VCR, but I have captured different VHS tapes, some were decent, some were copies of copies, and never had a problem.
Besides, if the Digital 8 camera has whatever stabilizing module it needs to make this tape look fine, I don’t see why a dedicated capture card doesn’t have the same chip. Perhaps they were expecting the users to connect one of those $ 2000 pro VCRs, but people that have those VCRs are pros that probably bought those pro VCRs 15 years ago and wouldn’t buy a $190 card to capture their footage, they would probably buy a $1500 card. What I mean is, a card that is $190, which is obviously targeted at the consumer or prosumer, should have better stabilizing features for cheap VCRs.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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Ok i agree you have some expectations but still if i would be you
i would go with digital8 route. It seems most effective. Afterwards
i would use intensity to play out all the material to tv. I would say
Video Recorder for 149 is the product that could be the one you had to buy for vhs. I have not testes it myself but it seems mor for your needs of capturing vhs.Few years ago one did not have option to play out something for 190.
At home this feels really good option to me.—
Margus
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[Sebastian Alvarez] “if the Digital 8 camera has whatever stabilizing module it needs to make this tape look fine, I don’t see why a dedicated capture card doesn’t have the same chip”
Because it would cost more to add it in the $190 card you are talking about, most people who copy VHS tapes professionally have a TimeBaseCorrector/SignalConditioner, a while back you could buy a DVD Stabilizer(MacroVision remover) cheaply which would make quite a few(%80-90) vhs tapes more usable, those used to sell for $30-50, now you are lucky if you can find them on ebay for under $150, stuff like that and stablizing chips for older camcorder passthrough had the bad doda put on them by the RIAA -
I use an ADVC110 to convert analog to digital. It also has a super secret macrovision defeating trick.
Alternatively, I use a VHS/DVD recorder and rip the DVD. Probably not as professional, but neither are the tapes I get.
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Stop blaming the card for your crashes and impatience. Get the right connections for the in and out and you will have fun. You can capture with Premiere Pro or Media Express. For CS5 crashing, update to 5.02. But if your computer is sub-par then use CS3 or CS4 as PPro5 demands more power. The $180 card does more, but will not do magic unless you push it and get it right.
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[George Sey] “Stop blaming the card for your crashes and impatience. Get the right connections for the in and out and you will have fun. You can capture with Premiere Pro or Media Express. For CS5 crashing, update to 5.02. But if your computer is sub-par then use CS3 or CS4 as PPro5 demands more power. The $180 card does more, but will not do magic unless you push it and get it right.”
No, that’s where you’re wrong. I can blame the card for the crashes, which in turns makes me (as would everybody else) impatient and frustrated.
The Premiere CS5 crashes happens with 5.02, updated from a fresh install of CS5 on a fresh install of Win 7.
And why do you assume that my computer is “sub-par”? My system is an AMD 1090T CPU with 16 GB of DD3 RAM with Western Digital Black Edition hard drives. If you consider that subpar, well, you live in a very different world.
Truth is, this is a card with very flaky drivers that just don’t work well in Premiere CS5. Each and every crash I got in Premiere since I installed this card has been because of the card’s own player plugin. So I think the card will go back to B&H.
Sebastian R. Alvarez
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[Sebastian Alvarez] “And why do you assume that my computer is “sub-par”? My system is an AMD 1090T CPU with 16 GB of DD3 RAM with Western Digital Black Edition hard drives. If you consider that subpar, well, you live in a very different world.”
People may consider your computer sub-par when you don’t mention your system specs when you post your problems, since you say you have an AMD product, you should check the recommeded list to see if your product is on it or contact tech support to find out if you system is capable. -
Thank you Brian, Sorry Seb, The system is okay but I use ASUS boards and have 6 machines One i7, and 9550s all running intensity. They only drop frames at times during playback.
Seb, is just not lucky that (Myabe) he got the faulty one. Have you tried previous versions of Premiere? This card is really fun to use do not lose hope yet -
My computer doesn’t crash, but I have the same problem as Sebastian while trying to capture VHS. Capturing video from old VHS tapes was the only reason why I purchased the Intensity Pro. I wish I would have returned when I had a chance. I guess I thought for $200 it would eventually work (firmware upgrade). I first purchased Blackmagic’s Video Recorder, but I sold it and bought the Intensity Pro because thought I would get better results. Also, the Video Recorder did not capture in mov format.
What I don’t get … When everything is plugged in correctly the video capture is constantly going on and off like Sebastian stated, but when I remove the audio cables I get nothing at all. Why would this be? Shouldn’t I be able to simply capture the video signal by itself? Does this also have to do with my cheap VHS player.
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