Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro - HDMI and Analog Editing Card

by Blackmagic Design

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 3.9 x 0.8 x 3.9 inches ; 9.6 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• ASIN: B001CN9GEA
• Item model number: BINTSPRO
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #35 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Computer Components > Graphics Cards

Product Description

The Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro HDMI Editing Card is an excellent choice for your digital and analog capture needs. The card fully supports NTSC, PAL and HD video via HDMI, component, composite or S-Video. It supports two channels of embedded, RCA or S/PDIF audio at television-standard sampling rates. The Intensity Pro supports 4:2:2 color sampling for superior chromakey performance. The card can work with both Windows and Macintosh computers, making it an excellent choice for your editing needs regardless of your operating platform.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 81 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Limitations September 21, 2009

By H. MCWHORTER

Hardware:
I have put together 4 SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration that maintains a minimum of 180Mbyte/s. It's running on a 3GHz Xeon processor and 16GB of RAM. I'm using a video scaler that can basically translate the component input into (almost) any kind of HDMI signal which feeds into the Intensity's HDMI input.

Software:
This product has some good points and some issues. In an effort to be thorough I downloaded the manual several months before I bought the product. There was no mention that a software program named "Blackmagic Media Express" was included. While this program is a simple capture/replay screen, it has limitations in the configuration and setup. There are actually TWO configuration programs: 1) a control panel addition named (appropriately) "Blackmagic Control Panel" and 2) Edit->Preferences inside Media Express. The Blackmagic Control Panel selects the types on inputs and ouputs and pre and post processing. The Media Express Preferences sets captures at a) "Uncompressed 8-bit YUV" or b) "Compressed Motion JPEG".

Issue 1:
Initially I couldn't get any audio thru whatsoever. I had HDMI audio or analog audio and nothing would work. Tech Support said that this has happened to a lot of people and asked if I had on-board audio. I do. They suggested adding an audio card and turning off the on-board audio. This partially worked, but I can't use HDMI audio, only analog. And I had to buy a new audio card!

Issue 2:
I consistently had a problem with video/audio synchronization after 31 minutes of recording. You could watch the output and Media Express screens get more and more frames apart until, after 31 minutes, a message comes up and says "Frames have been dropped". Tech support has not offered any solutions, and said that they do not buffer video/audio. I can't believe that my RAID can't keep up w/ the recording of an SD signal.

Issue 3:
While I don't think that Blackmagic actually SAID that 1080p is supported, I somehow thought it was. But, after further investigation, here's what they do support:
HD 1080 PsF 23.976
HD 1080 PsF 24
HD 1080 PsF 25 (and other formats)

So any recording of 1080p 50 or 60Hz is out of the question.

Tech Support:
I've emailed them several times and they seem to wait a week to get back to me! The person explained that while the hard drive performance test shows different sample rates, it's just for show. They can only sample at 8 bits. (Aren't high bandwidth ADCs common?). After I told them that I finally got some audio thru on the audio card (see Issue 1) but that it was analog, and that HDMI audio didn't work (even though the HDTV played it perfectly), tech support provided no other diagnosis or suggestions. Also, w/ Issue 2 above tech support blamed it on my computer and had no diagnosis or suggestions.

Overall:
I can record in 1080i60 just fine. Tech support helps somewhat, but mostly you're on your own. I'm a little disappointed in the fact that they don't get involved in customers' problems more. Overall I'm still glad that I got the card, but when something better comes along I'll probably list this one on ebay.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pretty Good November 1, 2010

By J. K.

Amazon Verified Purchase

I'll say it now, but thus far I've only used the Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro to capture HDMI 720p 59.94fps video. I'm running Vista x64, and I've got a motherboard with the X48 chipset (processor is the Intel E8400), so haven't had any compatibility issues.

What this review will try to do is explain my experience so far with the card with the hope that it may help someone decide whether or not to buy this card.

I am no video production/recording professional (if I were, I wouldn't be buying this card), and don't know much about video capturing/compression/encoding, but here are my impressions of the card so far:
- Very easy to setup,
- Very easy to use.

Other thoughts:
- Blackmagic Media Express (Blackmagic Design's capture/playback software) is pretty much garbage.

As I have not tried capturing anything other than HDMI source 720p 59.94fps material, I cannot discuss any limitations for other input modes. However, for 720p 59.94fps video, the YUV capture format is HDYC (YUV 4:2:2).

The reason why I mention that the YUV format is HDYC is because this kind of limits the capture compression codecs that can be used. If you use Blackmagic Media Express in Windows, you are limited to what they call "AVI 8-bit YUV", "AVI Motion JPEG", and "DPX 10-bit RGB".
- I think AVI 8-bit YUV is uncompressed HDYC capture (haven't tried it, because I use VirtualDub for capturing anyway),
- I think that the "AVI Motion JPEG" capture format is pretty bad---seems to be Blackmagic's own MJPEG compression implementation, and there's no way to change any settings (e.g. quality, etc.). I tried using it once. Never again.
- Have not tried DPX 10-bit.

Blackmagic Media Express does not let you use any other installed capture codecs. Thus, I recommend using VirtualDub for capturing.

Now, there does not appear to be too many compressors out there that can deal with HDYC. There's a HuffyUV modification floating around that's been edited to work with HDYC, but it apparently has a problem with proper color conversions, or something. There's some pretty ghetto workaround so that the colors aren't represented improperly, but, yeah. As a side note, I think a Japanese guy is working on a pretty nice-looking lossless compressor called Ut Video Codec that is supposed to work for HDYC capture formats at a later point, but doesn't seem to work with HDYC so far.

Also, the PicVideo M-JPEG codec does not support HDYC formats for some reason according to someone's email correspondence with AccuSoft Pegasus (just straight up no support for HDYC at the moment).

So what are you left with for HDYC capture formats? A ghetto HuffyUV mutation, uncompressed HDYC, and Blackmagic's included codecs.

----------

Basically, what I'm trying to say is:

- Use VirtualDub for capturing.

- If you're planning on getting this card for capturing HDYC format video, make sure you've got a fast as balls hard drive (i.e. RAID 0 that writes ~120MB/s) so you can capture uncompressed. Or else you're stuck with bad/ghetto compressors like Blackmagic's bad MJPEG compressor implementation or like one lossless compressor that has color issues.

- (When I capture uncompressed 720p 59.94fps material, VirtualDub tells me that I'm writing at approximately 105MB/s, so aiming for a bit higher than that is probably a good idea. I don't know how fast a setup you'd need for 1080i material as I haven't tried. The Intensity Pro's manual has some estimated data rates for different input modes.)

The End.

80 of 100 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Misleading... January 11, 2010

By D. Largent

Amazon Verified Purchase

Nowhere on the official website OR on amazon.com did it mention this card would not work with the Intel i7 processor, so I went ahead and bought it. I received it in the mail and installed it in my system, but could not get it to see video or hear audio. I tried several different things, including installing it in different ports and re-installing the drivers and programs needed for this card, but to no avail. I finally resulted to calling Customer Service and as soon as I told them that I had the Intel i7 920 Nahelm CPU, they proceeded to tell me that their card does not work with the i7 line of products and that there was no way around it.

So I've basically got a (probably) wonderful card sitting here waiting to be returned.