[Bob Haber]

I think the compatibility situation is well enough understood now that either you have the right parts or you don’t, and there shouldn’t be surprises. If your PC can’t handle the Shuttle then you need to get a Pro, it isn’t that much different in either price or capability.

In the future as fully capable USB3 ports become more common the Shuttle compatibility situation will just kind of fade away.

[Bob Haber]

Can you provide any way to determine if a given X58 motherboard will be compatible or not? Or is it something that is fixable with a BIOS update?

[Bob Haber]

There’s almost never HDCP on a PC’s DVI or HDMI output- usually only while playing a blu-ray disc or some sort of other protected content. If you’re just at the desktop or running normal applications, there won’t be HDCP.

Using component format instead of HDMI might cause it to work, but not because of HDCP.

[Bob Haber]

If all the systems are identical then there’s a good chance the enumeration will always be in the same order (based on PCI slot position probably) over all systems.

If one of the cards failed for some reason and didn’t appear in the enumeration then it would mess up the ordering but it would also be easily noticed because you would have the wrong number of results. In this case you might want to abort anyway.

If the ordering does turn out not to be predictable in advance then determining the configuration may just have to be part of the installation. Since this is obviously not a consumer installation you may just need to have the installer figure it out and set configuration during setup.

It’s not ideal but nobody is going to know which physical card is which from some sort of identifier code anyway so you aren’t really losing anything.

[Bob Haber]

I could use something like this too, though right now I don’t have multiple cards, I probably will eventually. I doubt the serial number is actually encoded anywhere in the card, but it might be possible to figure out what PCI slot or USB controller the device is connected to. You can enumerate the PCI devices in the system but I don’t know any way to associate that information with the IDeckLink data structure you get from the IDeckLinkIterator.

I guess, you could hope that the installed cards are always returned by the IDeckLinkIterator in the same order. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that actually is the case.

If your cards happen to have serial ports on them, you could probably query the attributes for the associated com port name and use that to distinguish one card from another, but obviously this would only work with serial-enabled cards and not Intensity cards.

Failing all these things I guess you could trace into the API’s DLL and hope to uncover some undocumented feature.

[Bob Haber]

If the video data is actually in HDV format, you’ll need to connect your computer to the camera via Firewire, set your camera to output over firewire and then use a suitable capture program that knows what to do with the incoming data. I don’t know anything about Mac software but I found this link pretty easily:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/poisson_chris/hdv-prores.php

[Bob Haber]

Drive performance really varies a lot, so I can’t say. Probably, you will be fine but I’m not 100% sure.

For RAID you need to have every drive with exactly the same size and reported drive parameters, usually it’s best to just get several of the same exact drive. Also, depending on your RAID drivers & hardware, you may have to reformat the drives. In this case if your boot drive is to be RAID, you would have to reinstall everything. If this happens it’s also somewhat annoying to install RAID as the boot drive if you use Windows XP, unless you have a floppy drive.

[Bob Haber]

All the Intensity can do is capture whatever your camera sends. Once compressed the quality loss is permanent. So it really just depends on what your camera does. Probably, your camera compressed it to HDV format, and so you are just stuck with that.

However, recompressing already-compressed data will cause further loss, especially if a different codec is used. So you would still get better quality from an Intensity in uncompressed mode compared to a capture system that can only record compressed data. It would just not be as good as a totally pristine data stream that was never compressed in the first place. A capture system which handles the HDV format natively would be just as good quality-wise and produce smaller files (assuming that’s what your camera uses).

[Bob Haber]

The only real difference between the two in terms of capability is that the Shuttle can handle a couple more video formats, but they both send the same, uncompressed data to the CPU. Your CPU would then do the compression in real-time before writing the data to disk. This is where the Intensity is better than the Hauppage because you can capture to MJPEG* which is more flexible than H.264 and much better for editing or effects.

* And sometimes other codecs as well, depending on your software

[Bob Haber]

I’m afraid I gave you some bad advice before and here is an explanation.

PCIe consists of many lanes, each lane carries the same amount of bandwidth from a card or onboard device to the CPU. There are a limited number of lanes so exactly where they go has to be rationed by the motherboard. PCIe slots can be 1x, 4x, 8x, or 16x (and theoretically others but those are what actually tend to exist), which groups one or more of these channels together. A 1x slot has one lane and a 16x slot has 16 lanes, and so on. You can put a smaller card into a larger slot and it will work fine.

PCIe version 2.0 is supposed to be twice as fast as 1.0 or 1.1 but otherwise works the same way and uses the same slots. However, only the X58-based motherboards and certain AMD motherboards can actually drive all their PCIe slots to the full 2.0 speed. Most others, including P55-based motherboards, only work at 1.0 speed for some or all slots.

Complicating the situation is the fact that you can have slots that are physically one size, but electronically less capable. This is the case with your motherboard, which has two physical 16x slots, but one of them is only electrically 4x. This allows you to put a 16x-sized card in it, which will then work at 4x speed. This is done so you can get Crossfire graphics working even though your CPU is a little short on PCIe lanes. Of course, you could also put a 4x or even 1x card in the slot.

With a 9xx series CPU, with many more lanes available, you would be able to run both cards at 16x speed, which is much of why the 9xx series CPUs work better for crossfire/SLI (and also why they are more expensive).

What I didn’t realize from your initial post was that your motherboard’s high-capacity slots are actually all full, because you have two GPUs installed and your other slot is only 1x. That means that you would actually not be able to get the ASUS USB card to work because you would not have a slot to put it in.

So you would have to stick with a 1x USB3 card which will fit in your free 1x slot. But then that complicates matters because your 1x slot is not a full speed slot, it runs at the speed of PCIe 1.1. This is probably not enough performance for the Shuttle, even with a high speed 1-lane card like the Gigabyte.

With 4 lanes available, the ASUS card ensures it has enough bandwidth available. With two USB3.0 ports and also two SATA 6GB ports, using only 1 lane would not provide enough speed for all these components. The 4x PCIe interface provides more performance (even on systems without full speed PCIe 2.0 slots) at the cost of needing a bigger slot… which you don’t have, unless you take out one of your graphics cards.

So at this point I think you might be stuck with using the Intensity Pro, which will work in your free 1x slot, or getting a new motherboard with a different slot configuration and/or onboard USB3.