intensity pro woes
by Stephen Stratton
on
May 22, 2008 at 8:34:50 pm
So my buddy helped me set up an affordable HD capture pc designed to record 720p footage through an Intensity Pro card. I need this setup to record HD footage from current game consoles like the 360 and PS3, but unfortuantely, the setup isn't working, and it's baffling us. It did work perfectly at first, capturing both audio and 720p video at a smooth 60 FPS. But within a few days the setup steadily became unstable. The audio was finicky at first, and then the video bogged down to about 2 frames per second. Now, I can't get any video feed to appear on my capture software (virtualdub) at all. My buddy designed this whole setup and has built it for others, and he assures me it's an Intensity Pro driver issue. But I've uninstalled and reinstalled the latest intensity drivers (1.8.8) about a bajillion times and it's not having any effect. In fact, these new drivers seem to work even worse as I now get error messages that "the capture device can't be found" (I'm assuming that's the Intensity card). I am completely non tech-savvy... anyone have any advice, or ideas on things I could try? I'm just trying to record 720p footage from an HDMI or component source at 30 or 60 FPS.
As a side note, I notice that I have some sort of "Legacy Video Capture Device" hardware installed under my PC's Device Manager. I have no idea what this is, as I only have the Intensity Pro card installed on my machine. I can't uninstall it but it seems to be working properly. But could this legacy device be causing a conflict with my Blackmagic Intensity capture device (also listed as working properly)? And if so, how to remove?
Re: intensity pro woes by Stephen Stratton on May 23, 2008 at 1:02:56 am
Cancel that! A genius Blackmagic support engineer named Albert Chu deduced the problem: I was running into HDCP issues over HDMI. He had me switch to component and it totally fixed the problem! I'm up and recording 720p with audio at a lovely 60 FPS through Intensity Pro once more. And loving it!
Re: intensity pro woes by Stephen Stratton on May 23, 2008 at 6:45:38 pm
Yes indeed, component does both SD and HD. Just make sure you set your Intensity software to component (Y, R-Y, B-Y) under Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Intensity.
I also found it helpful to tie a rubber band around my component squiddy to keep the "in" cables separate from the "outs". :)
