Blackmagic Design announces, HDMI Capture card for $249

by Ben Drawbaugh, posted Sep 13th 2006 at 9:55AM

We all knew the time would come when the studios would have reason to enable HDCP and it appears that it may be time. Someone correct us if we're wrong, but this device, named Intensity, looks like it will enable consumers to record via HDMI and for only $249. Considering the costs of other HD recording options this is pretty resonably priced and will without a doubt put fear in studio execs everywhere. This doesn't come out until October, but we'll look forward to seeing it in action. It's interesting that it doesn't record component video, it might be worth picking up a converter to make sure you are covered.

[Via AVSForum.com]

Filed under: Industry

Tags: HD, HDBeat, HDMI

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Fokk @ Sep 13th 2006 11:00AM

Good devise I need it! But prise is to high!

Neutral

Josh @ Sep 13th 2006 12:05PM

Ive been waiting for this to come out. Price is reasonable considering the capabilities.

Neutral

Jim @ Sep 13th 2006 2:17PM

It's reasonable for the price (although I bet their profit margin is still very high as it looks like a relatively simple device). Now my question is can it really capture content from any HDMI source (read: does it *support* HDCP, kinda ironic if it does) and what are the system requirements for capturing the video/audio. My thinking is that uncompressed video and sound will be HUGE. An HD-DVD/BD movie can be 25GB or so in size COMPRESSED (think jpeg or mp3). Now capturing UNCOMPRESSED video (think bmp or wav) will be a serious under taking, multi TB probably, then reencoding that bad boy back to a workable format (VC-1, H.264, MPEG2) will take some serious time and horsepower to accomplish. However it probably won't be a big issue in a year or 2 when quad-core CPU's are released and multi-TB hard drives.

I would not be suprised to see it suddenly disappear into thin air either as it scheduled to be released next month.

Neutral

Jake @ Sep 13th 2006 2:27PM

There is exactly 0 chance that this will support HDCP. None, zip, zilch. It would facially violate the HDMI license. This is for transmission of unprotected, uncompressed raw data from an HDMI-capable source. Read: an HDV camera. You can try to plug in your HD-DVD player, but it will fail the handshake, guaranteed.

Neutral

mike @ Sep 13th 2006 2:44PM

the studios have already enabled HDCP on digital outputs for this reason exactly - they want to avoid digital copies. now, the image constraint token that limits output resolution on component video will probably not be enabled solely because of this device since this has nothign to do with recording from component. further, thsi device will undoubtedly not support hdcp recording.

Neutral

pete @ Sep 13th 2006 3:14PM

Do the studio's really need to worry? The biggest reason is will people actually download 25+ GB for a TV show? I've looked at the torrents sites and there aren't many people doing it.

Neutral

GhostDoggy @ Sep 13th 2006 8:33PM

Who said this card has to not ignore the HDCP? But, as Jim stated the ability and the desire to capture 1080P uncompressed content (at 1-2 Gbps) are two completely different worlds. How many people have computers in their home to disk-cache 200MB per second for an hour or two, and how much time will you labor into to edit and compressed the resulting content?

Neutral

nemi @ Sep 14th 2006 9:18AM

#3 is correct.

When DVD "ripping" was in it's infancy 9+ Gb of free HD space was definitely a premium for your average home computer. Encoding the DVD data to VCD or DivX took all night (8+ hours) on the ~1GHz single core CPU's of the time.

Learn the lessons of history. PC's eventually catch up.

It is only a matter of time that someone releases a HMDI-HDMI convertor that filters out the HDCP so this card coudl work on such content. Or conversly someone hacks this card (driver software?) to allow HDCP recording.

Neutral

Christopher Johnson @ Sep 14th 2006 5:48PM

Two things:

A Black Magic representative told me it would not record the HDMI output of my HD-DVR.

The real big value for us video editors is to actually see our software editing timeline (like in Final Cut Pro or iMovie) live out to an HDTV. Last week, this required at least a $1000 card in our Macs or PCs. This alone makes the card an incredible value.

-Christopher

Neutral

Jim @ Sep 14th 2006 7:13PM

It probably does not support HDCP but it does say on their site:

*Intensity features HDMI-in for connecting to cameras and digital set-top boxes for the highest quality capture.*

So it's a bit vague. I was under the assumption that HDMI was *always* HDCP compliant, where DVI was a hit or miss proposition (ie. My upscaling Denon DVD player has a HCDP-compliant DVI port, my PC does not, etc). I wonder then if there are some STB's with HDMI ports that are not HDCP-complaint?

Neutral

Zjoden @ Sep 23rd 2006 10:18AM

would you be able to hook up a console on this and play games at full HD?

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