Customer Reviews

Blackmagic Design H.264 Format Video Recorder

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I purchased this product because it was the only Video Recorder I could find for the Mac that had Component inputs on it. I was excited to be able to record some of my favorite TV show in stunning HD quality. The recorder is well constructed and looks sharp. It came with all of the adapters for recording Component and S-Video and the instruction booklet was very clear and easy to understand.

I was however very disappointed to discover that HD video to Black Magic Design is 480P. I have a 720P DLP and an HD receiver capable of outputting 1080P. I don't care what they say 480P is NOT HD video. I was also disapointed to discover that the video recorder will only capture in a 4:3 aspect ratio not 16:9 like most of the programming now showing on TV.

The software is also a little disappointing. I mentioned previously that I have a 720P DLP TV I also have a Mac Mini as a media center PC; its set with a vertical resolution of 720 pixels to match the TV's output. Unfortunately the application has a set interface size which is larger that 720pixels. As a result the lower portion of the software is cutoff and I cannot actually click the record button. This is just poor design. The interface for the software has no reason to be a specific size. I connected the Video Recorder to my MacBook Pro which has a larger screen resolution and found that recording was easy and the presets are nice.

Overall I'm not satisfied with the product and hope that through future firmware and software updates my issues will be resolved.

Although Hi - 8 worked great through an S-Video cable, composite does not work. Color video is black and white. Several decks and cables were used and the directions followed. A support document was sent and three weeks later, still no reply. A phone call to Black Magic resulted in 20 minutes of hold time and then we were told that the product is ineligible for phone support. No mention of this on the website.

Finally received an email from BlackMagic stating that, "we have seen a significant number of cases where issues may arise when trying to capture from a VCR". Since this is one of the primary reason that I purchased this product and since it is shown as one of its key functions. I cannot recommend this product.

They went on to suggest purchasing a Time Based Correction device. We booted our Mac into Windows Vista and tested a similar product (KWorld) that our neighbor had which was PC only and it worked fine without loss of color. They have no intention of taking this product back and we filed with small claims court. A very discouraging experience.

Update: Black Magic has now agreed to help in the return process.

Before purchasing, I contacted the company to make sure it would work with an older Powerbook G4 (1.67GHz) I had set aside and thought would make a dedicated encoding machine. They were not sure whether that machine had USB-2 (It does) and It turns out that the video converter works great with the Powerbook. As the instructions state, these older machines are not capable of displaying the full frame rate, but that does not impact the encoding.

Over the space of about two weeks I have converted our entire (large) collections of VHS tapes over to H.264, which is a huge saving over the time it would have taken to bring them in as DV and encode them to H.264 using iMovie or something similar. I have a Sony Media Converter and had tried that for a few TV shows, and it is a painful route because H.264 is a resource hog. However, this unit converted them in real time and at a quality that is on-par with the original tapes. What I did was:

1. Connect the VCR to the video converter by RCA jacks (it does support component or s-video, if you player does).
2. Connect the video converter to the laptop USB-2 port
3. Install and update the software.
4. Select Full Res and then change the bit rate from 2.0 to 3.5MBPS**. It does not make a huge difference, but I have a lot of hard drive space.
5. Check how long the movie/show plays for, add 1-2 minutes, and type that into the auto stop box on the converter.
6. Start the tape and then press the big red record button.
7. Walk away and leave it to record.
** Options are available to tweak sound, color, brightness and cropping, but in most cases I just used the default settings.

It really is that simple and the quality is great. I have seen a number reviews complaining about how bad the HD quality is when this is not designed for use with HD. You can record from HD sources, but if the unit tops out at 3.5MBPS, it is not going to handle 1080p or 720p for that matter without some losses even though the AppleTV configuration option is available. You have to use the right tool for the job and this is superb for standard definition quality inputs such as VCR or most none high definition television signals. Having said that, if you accept it has limitations you will be happy with the price performance of this little units, even with HD signals, if you are planning to view it on an iPod/iPhone or something similar. Consider that more advanced encoders such as those by canopus can costs hundreds of dollars more, and generally require a two step process to get them in to H.264, and without a H.264 accelerator, that step can take huge amounts of time compared to this realtime unit.

I really like the device and the documentation (instruction manual) is really clear and so easy to use. the device does just what it promises but I haven't yet found a way to clear up one issue in my transfers. When I transfer a video tape recorded at extended play (EP) (6 hrs of recording on a 2 hour tape) the transfer often splits the frame up horizontally. So far video tapes I have that are recorded at normal speed (SP) seem just fine. Maybe I should record my EP tapes onto SP video and then transfer them with the USB capture device. Just an idea. I'll try to report in if it works.

As some of the other reviews have mentioned, this device captures at 480i ONLY. This limits it's use to very specific applications. If you aren't familiar with how to work with interlaced video, I'd avoid this product.

I'm trying to use this to capture video game footage from a PS3. It's pretty much useless for this purpose. Video game rendering engines (which, by the way, are specific to each title, not to the PS3 -- each game has a different engine) are not optimized to render interlaced images -- they expect you to be using HD. The antialiasing algorithms don't quite work with interlacing, and give you very blurry images.

So... you basically can't use this to capture video from any computer-generated source.

I bought this device in the hope that I could use it as a capture device to record games from the Wii. The Wii has component output as its best option and so does this device, and the Wii is also not HD, which seemed to avoid the limitation of this device which only does SD recording.

However, even considering the limitations I already knew about, I ran into a stack of other limitations which I had no idea about before buying:

1. Output from a Wii comes out in green with the same image shown twice side by side. Presumably this is something to do with the Wii being 480p widescreen and this device not handling widescreen very well at all. As there are no settings in the software, and the cable was connected correctly, it cannot be user error.

2. With regards to the software itself, the window is gigantic - so big that it cannot fit on the display I'm using it on which is 720p. Maybe it can be resized - I don't know, because the corner you would normally resize from is not on the screen in the first place. Someone never taught their designers to design for the lowest common denominator, and my display isn't even 800x600.

3. The device does not show up as a standard capture device. This is really the deadly problem which prevents working around the other problems in any way entirely. We are forced to use their awful application which can only record to a file with limited settings, and cannot use any of our existing applications for recording video or streaming it.

All in all it seems like it's impossible to recommend this device to anyone. All I can say is - don't be fooled, even if it's the only device on the market which appears to support component input via USB on Mac OS X (there is the Eye TV HD, but it also has TV input which only works in the US so it's difficult to recommend that too.)

Great little tool for only $150. Perfect for capturing old analog video and converting it into the H.264 format used for YouTube, the iPod and more. A definite must have!

I was told this was an exceptional product and it might be but be aware, it only works on a Mac. I wish this would have been a little more prominent in the description. It would have saved me the time and effort of sending it back.

It works as described except that I have to stop and restart the software to record if I make a settings change if I am connected as composite video. If I don't restart the software, then all I have is green incoming video. This sounds like a problem with some color decoding or video detector hardware. Restarting the sofware is easy enough.

Excellent product. Exactly what I was looking for and does everything as advertised in a simple clean design. The only thing that I'd want in a software update would be the ability to record 480p video through the component input.