The Intensity Pro works great in Premiere. It provides hardware accelerated, full resolution, real-time HD preview via HDMI to my monitor. It sort of works in Vegas, it will provide a full resolution preview, but Vegas doesn't take advantage of the hardware acceleration, so the preview rate is a little slow on HD material. It is real-time on SD stuff though.

I bought and installed the Intensity Pro and tried using it with Vegas. I installed the latest drivers and send its output to the HDMI of my 1920x1200 Ben-Q monitor and the Component into my Sony Broadcast NTSC monitor. Both previews looked like draft resolution quality regardless of the setting (text looked jagged etc.), I ended up going back to using the secondary monitor preview feature of Vegas to my Ben Q which looks great and also my firewire to the Sony. I will try again later but so far the card has been a paper weight. I should also mention that I only tried it using Neo captured files which might have made a difference.

Marc

GlennChan:

Interesting article ...

What test patterns should we use?

I have noticed LCD's blacks are not black and saturation
does seem too strong. All sale hype to spend over a grand for new tv?

Without using test patterns, etc., I matched my 1080p HDTV for best picture with the widest range of programming from a wide range of sources (B&W programming, greys, blue skies, clouds, skin-tone in sun and shadow, and foliage all help). I then matched the best I could the 1/2 sized preview window in Vegas (using preview at "best 1/2" on a 1920x1200 LCD monitor) to it (it matches quite well). I then hooked up a 19" LCD monitor to the dual head video card and placed it 45 degrees off to the side and pointed it exactly toward me for the best picture and matched its characteristics to the preview window (I needed to use the video card driver to get it right - the monitor controls alone were insufficient). I selected "720p" in Vegas (that was sharpest of the three selections for this size and resolution monitor when the preview was set to "best full"). The resulting video playback is fairly smooth on the secondary monitor and quite sharp - and motion can be made very smooth by using RAM previewing. If there is enough RAM in the computer to spare it (3 gigs is enough), set the RAM previewing amount in Vegas to 1 gig to get about 22 seconds of smooth preview time using "Shift B". Properly set up in a properly illuminated room for LCDs, the blacks *can* be quite good (but this varies with the monitor). BTW, for monitoring, I would avoid using LCD TVs with dynamic black adjust that cannot be defeated - otherwise you have no consistent picture reference.

--David Ruether

What test patterns should we use?
Hmm there is a test pattern to test if the luma coefficients are being handled correctly... I don't know if it's freely available.

----------------I have noticed LCD's blacks are not black and saturation does seem too strong. All sale hype to spend over a grand for new tv? ----------------
The blacks not being black is related to the technology. A bright surround will hide the raised black level. Some info on black level:
http://www.broadcastreferencemonitors.com/understanding/black-level.htm

The saturation too strong might be any or some combination of the following:
1- The transfer function of the LCD is inherently a s-shaped curve... like doing a s-curve in Color Curves in Vegas. This will boost saturation.
2- The set might have saturation boosted to make the colors stand out. On wide gamut displays, they do this so the wide gamut capability is being used (though it will avoid boosting memory colors).

Thanks for the comparison page Glenn, very informative.

John, what do you have to do to make the Intensity Pro work with Vegas Pro 8? When the card is installed does a new option appear in the list of preview devices in Vegas? Otherwise, I'm not clear how one would point the preview output to it.

Thanks.