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the best capture card for HD footage?
Hey Everyone,
I am currently working on a project where my company is using HD video from a shoot. The video will eventually be web based for an interactive site, but initially we want to capture this at the highest, uncompressed level. I need to purchase a good capture card for our editing station that will grab the footage in true HD. Trying to log and capture using just a firewire has giving me good footage, yet still compressed a bit, just is the nature of the HD filesize. Any good capture cards out there you can recommend? I’ll be capturing in FCP HD, but I don’t suspect that to be an issue with selecting a capture card.One card I may purchase is the “blackmagic”… any reviews of that?
Any and all information is greatly appreciated!
Cheers,
Francisco -
3 Replies
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Blackmagic are good in my experience, but some have said their Multibridges especially are very temperimental with HD. I believe the Eclipse has replaced it now though. For roughly double the cost of BMD cards you can go for AJA cards. Supposed to be very good. Bluefish cards are big money, but supposedly best for high-end dual link capture (HDCAM SR, etc) But Autodesk use AJA cards in their new Smoke and Flame systems, so they must be pretty darn good.
Sounds like you don’t really need to capture at HD resolution for this project – just uncompressed SD res. Though, if it’s going on the web (Flash video?) It’ll look pretty rough by comparison anyway, but uncompressed is still good for stuff like keying and colour correction. Buy a HD capture card is you can afford it anyway – the cost diff is very small these days anyway.
Make sure you have several striped fast drives if you are grabbing uncompressed HD, or you will get dropped frames galore. A fast quad system or more is recommended aswell and plenty of RAM. For uncompressed SD a system like mine below should be enough.
Good luck with your purchase!
*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0 -
Keying,color correcting, and compositing are all going to be a large part of this project. I have DVCPro tapes that we need to capture, and work like to capture in true HD. Figuring that this type of work will come up again, it’s probably more effective than farming out the work to a production house.
Would capturing to a Raid drive be as useful as several drives?
Thanks for the detailed response, you rawk!
-Francisco
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Hi Domani,
A RAID drive *is* several drives. For uncompressed HD it’s recommended you stripe together at least 8 x 10,000rpm drives..though people will use less or slower drives you’d need to test what works for you. There is a more detailed explanation of how striping works and what kind of RAID setup you should choose here: https://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail.asp?techID=62
To be honest for DVCPro HD you won’t have *truly* uncompressed HD data on the tapes anyway, but I guess capturing it through an uncompressed card will mean no additional compression will be added via Firewire (you’d need to double check that.) Even HDCAM tapes are compressed, though significantly less than DVCPro. You’d need HDCAM SR or D1 or even shoot straight to hard drive to get truly uncompressed HD, and even then you’d need a VERY expensive camera.
That all said, an AJA or BMD HD card should work well for you anyway – not least because you’ll be able to use it to monitor your output on a proper calibrated monitor, rather than a TV through firewire..But for web stuff I’m guessing you would even need that.
*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0
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