Using CineCap in a HD environment- first test

[jhoneycutt]

Folks....

I have been exchanging emails with Jeff Dodson, the author of CineCap.

Jeff tells me that CineCap does not support HD. He does not recommend any HD hardware, and one would not email Jeff for help with CineCap and HD issues. Having said that, we talked about the highest capture mode CineCap supports. Jeff said he thought it was 1440X1440. I sent him some links and a white paper that talked about HD standards. Jeff responded that it was a easy fix to change the capture size. He tells me that with the next update of CineCap, he will have it changed so that one can capture at the highest HD mode of 1920 X 1080.

The next issue is whether CineCap would see a HD capture device like the $249 Blackmagic Intensity card:

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/produc ... techspecs/

Jeff says this:

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CineCap never really "knows" what type of port it is talking to. It only talks to a software driver that is installed on the machine. This software driver, usually provided either by Microsoft or the capture card manufacturer, does the real work of "talking" to the capture hardware. What matters to CineCap is whether the software driver supports the standards that CineCap understands. These standards are WDM, DirectShow, and Video-for-Windows. If the driver supports one of these standards, it will at least show up as a capture option in CineCap. An additional requirement is that the video stream that the driver delivers should not be MPEG-encoded, as CineCap only produces AVI files, which cannot normally hold MPEG data. Also, CineCap must "grab" individual frames from the live video stream, which is problematic if the video stream is MPEG-encoded, since most of the frames depend on previous or successive frames for some of the encoding information.

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One of the fellows on this forum, down loaded CineCap and found that it saw his Blackmagic card. I believe it was this DeckLink card:

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/hd/

I just ordered the Blackmagic HDMI Intensity card. It is *suppose* to run under Vista. If that all goes well, then I can try some test captures from the HDMI port on a HD camera to the Blackmagic HDMI card using CineCap. My Workprinter is a Workprinter Jr which will only capture at 1 fps. So I am not going to have any problems with data overload on my machine. I believe if one were to set up a RAID array, then you could capture HD with your workprinter at a much higher fps rate.

I think this is going to work. I don't have the ability to burn a HD or a Blue Ray DVD, but I can at least view my edited HD video on my computer and store it to a hard drive until a future date.

Folks running Macs are probably aware that the Intensity card will run under OSX. It may be that newer Macs can take real time uncompressed data from a HD camera, and stream it directly into iMovie or FCP. I know that the Mac OS will let you stripe two hard drives together. That might help increase the capture speed.

I will report back on my progress.

jack
Portland Oregon

[gianni1]

I'm usually surrounded by amateurs, but a few weeks back at the Video Forum trade show in London, I meet a BBC line manager who distributes camcorder kit to program makers. He says they typically request shooters set their cameras to record in DV not HD, because it's too much work to downsample it for broadcast TV. That may change when everybody's got HD TV's. If the show's planned for HD, or the shooter needs something else, then HD is ok. I think it was the Sony Z1 they like the best ATM.

I still have only met two people who have used HD cameras, and both worked with Sony Cinealta out of reach of us mortals. [EDIT] Oh, I also recall a collegue of mine, who was forced by his producer to use HD for the shoot and edits last summer. The show ended up distributed onto DVD and the internet.

Gianni

[Scotness]

I'm usually surrounded by amateurs, but a few weeks back at the Video Forum trade show in London, I meet a BBC line manager who distributes camcorder kit to program makers. He says they typically request shooters set their cameras to record in DV not HD, because it's too much work to downsample it for broadcast TV.

Gianni

That's strange - I would have thought they'd reccomend shooting in HD and then downsampling on capture to the PC in DV. That way the image will be better than shooting in native DV and they'd have the source in HD if they ever needed that down the track.

Scot

[gianni1]

This is where my memory getz fuzzy... I think he said the in camera downsampling is better than the off camera sampling, which is too much work, both time consuming and problematic.. too many variables out of their control. (Me thinks) their problem is compounded because they've got about two hundred camcorders... and all the kit that goes with the cameras production and post production.

Non technical but related, the camera people don't do the editing, that's typically done by others, often the director doesn't edit either... This leads to the problem that the photographers don't see their work untill it's broadcast, and don't get to see their mistakes and learn from them.

Gianni

[gianni1]

... Thinking about it, it's easy to upgrade one or five edit stations... maybe twenty five... but two hundred identical systems is a bitch to upgrade.. needs to be in a cycle. Imagine comming in to an editing or capture suite and yo find all the machines are down for repair or upgrade.....

How long before a non linear kit becomes obsolescent or obsolete? Two or three years? I seem to recall that the BBC had problems in the past with compression and using a variety of different computer editing systems. I think it was like starting on one Avid workstation on Wednesday, then on Thursday editing it on a newer Avid, and Monday on back to editing in Wednesdays workstation...

One video story would go through several edits, ending up processed with multiple codecs sequentially, ironically looking worse than fourth or fifth generation video dupes. That destroyed the myth that computers produced a perfect copy of the orignial! Eventually the command came down from above to apply only one edit system per story (or something like that). ANYBODY around here know the truth?

Gianni :roll:

[tbruegg]

The next issue is whether CineCap would see a HD capture device like the $249 Blackmagic Intensity card:

the BlackMagic Studio Card works perfectly with 720P and Dodcap.

I believe if one were to set up a RAID array, then you could capture HD with your workprinter at a much higher fps rate.

i run a pc with four S-ATA drives striped raid 0 and yes you can do higher framerates.

Thomas

[mattias]

If you're finishing in dv then yes you will get slightly better quality shooting in dv mode since the signal is downsampled before mpeg compression, essentially you gain one generation, but don't they consider future proofing at all? As for the cinealta being out of reach you can rent one for several weeks for the cost of buying for example a z1. It's all a matter of how much you plan to use it. For me buying any prosumer camera is out of reach. I rent everything and the total cost per year is only $2000 or so, and as you know i shoot quite a lot in all the formats available, film and video. /matt

[audadvnc]

You must get a great deal with your rental house. Just out of curiosity, what do you pay for a 2-day rental on an Arri SR level package?

[mattias]

From my co-op $40 per day, maybe $500 from a real house but then it's s16 and zeiss primes. Same ballpark for video. So if i pay $200 on average that's 10 days of shooting, plus i often get the day rate for weekends. Plus the days i spend shooting super 8, the only camera i can afford to own, and it's more than enough. If you shoot more and mostly video, then owning a z1 or similar is probably a good idea. /matt

[jhoneycutt]

the BlackMagic Studio Card works perfectly with 720P and Dodcap. Thomas

This is great news! My Blackmagic card has not arrived yet, but any day now.

Thanks for the feedback.

jack

[jholmesh]

Jhoneycutt,

I am anxious to learn the upgrade path to HD capture with my WorkPrinters and Cinecap.

Please let us know how your experiment with the BlackMagic Intensity card went.

Regards,

Jon

[jhoneycutt]

The first thing I found out was that the Blackmagic card takes a PCIe slot. Also called a PCI Express slot. My brand new computer has only one PCIe slot. It is where my video card lives. My other PCI slots are called PCIe-X-25 slots.

The *real* name for my slots are PCIx 25 slots. They are super fast PCIx slots, but PCI non the less. After calling HP, Gateway, Dell, and a few other places I found out that most modern computers only have one PCI Express slot (if they have one at all). You have to move to gaming computers to have two PCI Express slots.

I am looking at a super fast PCI ATI video card. With my duo core 2, 2.66 Ghz processor, I have a very fast machine backing up my PCI X 25 slots. But I don't know if a PCI card will be fast enough for me.

So my fist step is ordering the replacement PCI video card and freeing up my PCI Express slot. I'll report back on how that goes.

jack

[jholmesh]

Jack,

PCI video cards can be had for fairly cheap, unless you need one with a lot of memory, etc.

The only BlackMagic PCI-X card that I saw on their website was an HD model, with serial digital input.

The rest, including the new and inexpensive "Intensity" look like they are all PCI-e, with various capabilities.


Thanks,

Jon

[tonewheels]

@jhoneycutt
Did you have any luck with this setup in the end?

[Andreas Wideroe]

I've used Blackmagic Decklink SD Extreme PCIe cards for over a year now with Dodcap/Cinecap. Works just fine. Tested it with both a DV codec and the uncompressed.

Not that this has anything to do with HD...