BMD Intensity card, what for?

farss wrote on 10/26/2007, 7:19 AM
Rather than clog up another thread that really should be kept just for driver issues I'll ask the question here as I'm curious about where this device sits today. It's two main uses seem to be:

1) Using an external monitor via HDMI.

2) Capturing HD from a consummer camera without HDV compression.

Use 1) I don't see any advantage to when we have the ability to do this with the secondary display device. Almost any monitor you care to use comes with a DVI input, the 30" models need dual DVI and as far as I know the HDMI spec pegs out at 1920x1080. If you want to feed the rather expensive HD monitors from Sony etc HD SDI seems the path to go down.

Use 2). Aside from the issue of just how much recording with less compression than HDV with consummer camcorders really gives you there's more ways to do this now than when the Intensity card first came out. The only manufacturer I'm really familiar with is Convergent Design but no doubt other have or will stepup to the plate. Convergent Design have a range of devices, some battery powered, to go from HDMI to HD SDI and the other way around as well. HD SDI is a much more robust way of carrying HD than HDMI, it's designed to run long distances over a single piece of coax cable. Convergent Design now have their XDR recorder that'll record 4:2:2 HD to compact flash cards using the Sony XDCAM codec. I haven't got my hands on one of these yet to check that the files will open in Vegas but I'd be surprised if they didn't.

Maybe I've missed something here but it seems to me that a little box that can run off batteries recording to CF cards would be a more elegant way to record HD in the field than lugging around a PC with a RAID array in it. The XDR sells for around $5K so it's probably not as cheap as a BMD card and a PC but it seems way more convenient.

Now I could be completely off the mark with all of this and/or I might have missed other very good reasons to be using the Intensity Pro card. Either way, it's probably not a bad time for everyone to chip in and talk about why we might find it beneficial to be using it.

Fire away.

Bob.

Comments

Bill Ravens wrote on 10/26/2007, 7:35 AM
I've made a fair bit of study out of extracting component analog signals from my HD110 ILO the compressed HDV from tape. There's an extensive thread on this subject over at DVInfo.net.

My conclusion is, basically, that the HDv compressed signal is the best I'm going to get out of this camera. Capture of full uncompressed analog suffers in quality due to a number of factors that arise from less than perfect A-D and D-A conversion. BMD avoids any specific facts about the bit depth of their converters, especially in the Intensity card. Of course, for a fair investment, I can get component to HD-SDI converter boxes, but, why? It would be much more cost effective to just update to a newer cam that outputs HD/SD-SDI directly.

There's some arguement that an HD-SDI signal will transmit over long cable distances better than firewire or HDMI, however, the HD110 doesn't output digital SDI signals. The Sony EX, arguably, looks like the best camera to come down the road since the XL2.

The bottom line is that I can't do better with this camera than the m2t available from tape or hard drive. I routinely capture on both FS4HD or nNovia hard drives rather than tape. Same same. The nNovia solution is pretty elegant, in that direct to edit on solid state devices, 8, 12 or 16 Gb is now a reality. I don't think the Convergent Design SS device is available yet, is it? And why invest $5K in the C-D Flash drive when I can buy an EX for only $3k more?
rmack350 wrote on 10/26/2007, 9:10 AM
When the Intensity came out I wasn't seeing graphics cards with HDMI output. I was seeing such cards in test labs, but not being sold yet. So the intensity was filling a monitoring niche.

Since you can buy DVI to HDMI adapters, I'm not sure that monitoring niche needed to be filled, but there's a difference between most gfx card's output of 1920x1200 and the HD output of 1920x1080. So maybe, and probably, the Intensity card was a better choice for critical HD output.

As far as input over HDMI...it seems like a narrow application for prosumer cameras with HDMI outputs.

It's just another product in BMDs product line, and a relatively inexpensive one at that. Purely an elective purchase, as far as I can tell.

Rob Mack