[Don Harris]

This problem isn’t terribly complex.

The Intensity card is a Windows XP era card and the firmware revisions need to be progressed in steps. If you try to load the latest FW (FW=FirmWare) without loading the prior FW first, the latest one won’t load.

So the simple solution is to load the older FW 1st, then upgrade to the latest. The break point for the Intensity seem to be version 9 FW. You can still download the version 9.8 software from the BMD support page (it is called: Desktop Video 9.8 dated 06/10/2013).

Now you may ask “well can’t I see what version of FW is already on the card ?” – the short answer is no. BMD chooses not to share that with us. You can use the SDK to see that information, but frankly it doesn’t matter much.

So the steps are:

Un-install whatever desktop video version you have installed (skip this if you haven’t installed any of the BMD software yet on your Win764 machine).

Download Desktop Video 9.8, install it. During the installation, you may be asked to reboot a couple of times, this is normal.

You can now either jump straight in and download 10.5 (latest as of this post) or whatever the latest is and install it. It too will need you to reboot once or twice and you should be good to go.

If you want to be more cautious, I stopped after installing version 9.8 and tested the card inputs and changed and saved different settings. A word of caution, if the card won’t let you select anything but the HDMI input, this means that the BMD software hasn’t gotten “active control” of the card, but instead is using the default preferences (this is kind of a half way there situation). In other words, changing inputs and saving these (using the “Blackmagic Desktop Video Utility” – which you launch from within the Control Panel) is the way you test the card talking properly to the utility (and eventually the application you want to use).

Also, I don’t know how far back these FWs for intensity go, but some of my cards are dated 2010 – and the original install SW says “Intensity 3.9.1”, so this could mean FW version 3.9. But since I don’t really know what firmware I am starting from, I am not sure knowing really matters much. I have successfully upgraded 14 cards so far, all with various manufacturing dates, so I think you don’t need to go back any farther than FW version 9.8 (at least I haven’t yet).

A couple of other issues to look at:

Win7 Power management is a bit aggressive and shuts off cards when not in use, so set to “high performance mode”, which leaves the cards running all the time (one of the potential problems here is the card won’t be visible to Win7 when it tries to write the FW onto the card, so it throws up the “firmware failed” error”. I haven’t always made this change after I started using the “burn FW V9.8 first” approach, so I can’t say this is critical to success.

Your PCIe slots in the BIOS (yeah I said that) need to be set to Generation 2 versus 3. This is a comment made by a BMD guy and I doubt most users will have this option in their BIOS, I haven’t tested it one way or the other.

Life is goo