HDMI input card for PC ??

[tom chang]

has anyone come accros a capture card with HDMI input as well as output ??
I'd imagine the film studios would have a fit with this kind of a card.

[dasbin]

Blackmagic's Intensity does just that.

There is a lot of excitement about using this with the HV20, because the HV20 outputs live uncompressed, 4:2:2 footage from the HDMI port.
Obviously you can't really capture uncompressed HD on your PC because your hard drives can't nearly keep up with the data rates required, but you can use some compression scheme a lot better than HDV and basically eliminate things like panning softness. Not to mention you get better color space.

IMO the trick now is making a portable, affordable solution for live HDMI capture from a laptop, so we can do this in the field.

Hollywood is 'safe' from this kind of thing (for the moment) because HDMI includes HDCP protection so you can't capture copyrighted footage. I would assume that the Intensity includes this protection.

[bluegrass]

Blackmagic's Intensity does just that.

There is a lot of excitement about using this with the HV20, because the HV20 outputs live uncompressed, 4:2:2 footage from the HDMI port.
Obviously you can't really capture uncompressed HD on your PC because your hard drives can't nearly keep up with the data rates required, but you can some compression scheme a lot better than HDV and basically eliminate things like panning softness artifacts. Not to mention better color space.

IMO the trick now is making a portable, affordable solution for live HDMI capture from a laptop, so we can do this in the field.

Hollywood is 'safe' from this kind of thing (for the moment) because HDMI includes HDCP protection so you can't capture copyrighted footage. I would assume that the Intensity includes this protection.

1. What is the HV20 resolution it's putting on tape in the HD taping mode.

2. If you can't capture the uncompressed HDMI output to a hard disk than what is the point of the Intensity card?

3. Why not capture directly to some form of memory which is much faster than hard drives. It's conceivable to put together a 20 or 30 gig ram computer. That should be enough room to capture a few minutes of uncompressed.

4. Anyone sat down and figured out what the storage hit is for a minute of 1920 X1080. What is that, about a 2 megabyte a frame at say 24 fps. I guess that would be about 50 megabyte a second for your clip. That's movin' some pixels around guy. Say maybe I did approximate a minute to take about 3 gig. Ok, so we might get about 5 minutes in a 20 gig ram system with a few gig left over for the OS and an app or two.

5. Ram drive here we come. And Dymler dumped Chrysler for a 5th of what they paid for it. Figure that.

6. And as for as that HDCP crap. It's a sack of crap that Hollywood is puttin' on us, just like the oil companies are pickin' or pockets. Some software guru will break the code eventually or an engineer will come up with a hack. Anyone want a sack of crap embedded in their videos? I didn't think so. Sorry guys, this kind of stuff has burned me for over 20 years in the micro computer business.

[dasbin]

1. What is the HV20 resolution it's putting on tape in the HD taping mode.
This I'm not sure of. I think it might actually be 1920, but it's been a while since I read the discussions over at dvinfo.net about this.


If you can't capture the uncompressed HDMI output to a hard disk than what is the point of the Intensity card?
The point is that you can use a compression format that is practically indistinguishable from uncompressed. I think using a Cineform workflow has been mentioned. I actually saw some (albeit recompressed for the web) footage that was done using this technique on an HV20 and it looked fabulous - no artifacts anywhere and best of all, perceptual noise seems to be lowered.


3. Why not capture directly to some form of memory which is much faster than hard drives. It's conceivable to put together a 20 or 30 gig ram computer. That should be enough room to capture a few minutes of uncompressed.
That would be extraordinarily expensive. I also don't know of any motherboards with that much memory support. Theoretically you're right, you could do it if you setup a RAM disk on the computer, then took a long break every couple minutes to copy what you have to the hard disk. Seems completely impractical though.


4. Anyone sat down and figured out what the storage hit is for a minute of 1920 X1080.
I've heard around 500GB per hour. The problem is that means sustained data rate of well over the usual 40Mb/s or so that a hard drive can write. Not to mention you have to deal with audio too.


6. And as for as that HDCP crap. It's a sack of crap that Hollywood is puttin' on us, just like the oil companies are pickin' or pockets. Some software guru will break the code eventually or an engineer will come up with a hack. Anyone want a sack of crap embedded in their videos? I didn't think so. Sorry guys, this kind of stuff has burned me for over 20 years in the micro computer business.
Yeah, no arguments from me here. I'm a BoingBoing reader :hv20-smilie110:

[TheDingo]

I've heard around 500GB per hour. The problem is that means sustained data rate of well over the usual 40Mb/s or so that a hard drive can write. Not to mention you have to deal with audio too.

FYI, most of the SATA raids that are built into the latest PC motherboards have write speeds over 100 MB/sec. My video PC at work uses an eVGA motherboard based on the new nVidia 690i chipset, and it includes a built-in SATA raid controller. I have it setup as a 4 SATA drive raid 5 configuration that benchmarks at around 140 MB/sec.

So with the right motherboard and $200 worth of SATA drives ( i.e. 2+ drives ) you could have a PC that would have no problem capturing high data rate video.

:hv20-smilie77:

[tom chang]

Blackmagic's Intensity does just that.

There is a lot of excitement about using this with the HV20, because the HV20 outputs live uncompressed, 4:2:2 footage from the HDMI port.
Obviously you can't really capture uncompressed HD on your PC because your hard drives can't nearly keep up with the data rates required, but you can use some compression scheme a lot better than HDV and basically eliminate things like panning softness. Not to mention you get better color space.

IMO the trick now is making a portable, affordable solution for live HDMI capture from a laptop, so we can do this in the field.

Hollywood is 'safe' from this kind of thing (for the moment) because HDMI includes HDCP protection so you can't capture copyrighted footage. I would assume that the Intensity includes this protection.

I assume during playback of hv20 from tape, the output is comppressed ??

What about component inputs ?? I would imagine that would be free of protection ??
Does the Intensity have component imput too ??

[bluegrass]

I assume during playback of hv20 from tape, the output is comppressed ??

What about component inputs ?? I would imagine that would be free of protection ??
Does the Intensity have component imput too ??

Good question and point about the protection.

My question also would be, can you regroup the the componet signals would you have the equivalent of uncompressed video? I doubt it.

Another question I have is, when you have a choice of watching video from your camcorder or any device, does HDMI provide you with higher resolution or better quality than component? I thought component was analog signals so I don't see how it could keep up with digital as for as quality goes.

[dr_bernie]

IMO the trick now is making a portable, affordable solution for live HDMI capture from a laptop, so we can do this in the field.



For a 'possible' portable HDMI capture solution to laptops, see my thread here: http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=273

[Murrelet]

Hi bluegrass,

I'll have some time tonight to see if there is a noticeable difference on the LG monitor. Meant to do it last night for you, but I actually had to do some work as we are getting ready to change ships for the summer.


EDIT:
Okay, I was out in the camper redoing the desk since the computer is hooped. I got curious and hooked the LG monitor to component, the clip I was using was from the sunset the other night. The picture resolution looks exactly the same, however....the sunset colours when using component were much more in the red, the result being the sunset was on fire, absolutely gorgeous. The HDMI hook up was totally faithful to what the cam shot colourwise, with the same resolution as the component setup. I also hooked up the monitor to my sound system (sound out just below the component jacks) so the HDMI would send that to the speakers.....wow, that was a rush!

There are probably colour correction systems in the software, but since the computer is down I'm not able to adjust.

Edit 2: Found on-monitor controls last night. When I was using "Components", maxing every control out couldn't quite get to the colour replication of HDMI...hmmmmm.... so I'm sticking with HDMI.

[Chrisman!]

Let’s put capturing raw footage into perspective:

Bandwidth:
1920x1080 = 2073600 pixels/frame
24 bits of color info per pixel (8 bit color sampling for each RGB)
24 frames per second
2073600 pixels x 24 bits x 24 frames = 1194393600 bits / second
1194393600 / 8 = 149299200 bytes / sec
1048576 bytes = 1MB
149299200 / 1048576 = 142.3828125MB / sec to record uncompressed 1080P@24Frames Video
142.3828125MB / 1024 = ~.139GB / sec
.139GB * 60 seconds = 8.34GB / min
.139GB * 3600 seconds = 500.4GB / Hour

Hard Drive Performance:
Hate to be the wet blanket here, but the fastest CONSUMER level hard drive out there is the Western Digital Raptor 150GB HDD. This is a 150GB HDD that spins at 10,00rpms (ALL other consumer SATA drivers spin at 7200 or slower). This drive has the highest write speed out there at around 83MB/s. If you take two of these drives and put them in a RAID-0 striped array you can get just barely over 160MB/s for sequential writes. There is no WAY you’re going to get this out of RAID5 due to the processing requirements and overhead of XOR calculations and parity data unless you have a very high end RAID card. These stats are verified here:

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/Western_Digital_Raptor_WD1500ADFD__Bigger_Faster_S tronger/?page=3

That said, the new Terabyte drives from Hitachi come very close to the performance of the Raptors, but are not quite there:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/04/17/hitachi_7k1000_terabyte_hard_drive/page6.html#write_transfer_performance

Keep in mind that with the error correction benefits, the Raptor drives are more reliable for RAID usage. Plus they’re significantly cheaper ( $215 vs $408 each):

http://www.shopzilla.com/12--Western_Digital_Raptor_150_GB_Hard_Drive_-_cat_id--410__keyword--raptor__prod_id--390818618__sort--7
http://www.shopzilla.com/8B--Miscellaneous_-_cat_id--20000001__keyword--7K1000__nwylf--

PCIe bus and OS:
There shouldn’t be too much much latency caused by the transfer of the data internally. At least on the Intel ICH7 and ICH8 the PCIe x1 slots and the SATA ports are on the same south bridge chip:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/03/the_southbridge_battle/page2.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/03/the_southbridge_battle/page4.html

OS overhead is another factor entirely, so to avoid any dropped frames, in all likelihood, you’d need three drives.

Recording Time:
Each Raptor drive has a formatted capacity of 150,039MB each or 146.522GB each. Total formatted capacity of a RAID-0 array would be 439.566GB.

We divide out: 439.566GB / 8.34 = 52.7 minutes of recording time

I couldn’t find the formatted capacity of the Hitachi Terabyte Drives, but let’s assume (worst case scenario) they are 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.

1,000,000,000,000 bytes /1024^3 = 931.32GB /drive

931.32GB * 3drives = 2793.96GB

2793.96GB / 8.34 = 335 minutes of recording time

And there you have it!

[tom chang]

hey guys, with the intensity card, is it possible to play a movie in HDMI,
then feed it to the PC and compress it at the same time into mpeg 2 HD(v)
format so that you can save harddrive space ??

What about recording off satellites or cable boxes ??

[crobs808]

why not just use the CitiDisk HDV? great investment, and it records direct to harddrive, and very mobile/small. can record HDV or DV, and can do 1080p direct out from HDMI or HDV through firewire port.

this is why the Pansonic HVX200 is so appealing with P2 cards versus using HDV. Instant capture to 4:2:2, no capturing required, and no compression.

[VovaM]

why not just use the CitiDisk HDV? great investment, and it records direct to harddrive, and very mobile/small. can record HDV or DV, and can do 1080p direct out from HDMI or HDV through firewire port.

this is why the Pansonic HVX200 is so appealing with P2 cards versus using HDV. Instant capture to 4:2:2, no capturing required, and no compression.

HDMI in CitiDisk? i'm sure - no,
Only compressed format - HDV, in this case it's only instead of tape

[Halsu]

this is why the Pansonic HVX200 is so appealing with P2 cards versus using HDV. Instant capture to 4:2:2, no capturing required, and no compression.

Yeah, right ;-)

First of all, you'll need to switch P2 cards every few minutes, and copy the contents to a hard drive, unless you have an unlimited supply of cards - sooner or later they'll need to be copied to HD anyway, which is about the same as digitizing HDV, though it's usually a bit faster than real time.

Second, DVCPro HD is NOT uncompressed. Far from it. It's compressed at about 6,7:1 ratio.

The data rate is 100 mbit/s, four times that of HDV, but as it uses less efficient compression the quality difference actually isn't as big as one could think.

4:2:2 color is a good thing to have if you're shooting bluescreen, and here the difference in compression can also show a lot.

In regular shooting of everyday subjects the difference is rarely visible.


http://www.kolumbus.fi/erkki.halkka/HDformats/HD_formats.html

[klymentt]

FYI, most of the SATA raids that are built into the latest PC motherboards have write speeds over 100 MB/sec. My video PC at work uses an eVGA motherboard based on the new nVidia 690i chipset, and it includes a built-in SATA raid controller. I have it setup as a 4 SATA drive raid 5 configuration that benchmarks at around 140 MB/sec.

So with the right motherboard and $200 worth of SATA drives ( i.e. 2+ drives ) you could have a PC that would have no problem capturing high data rate video.

:hv20-smilie77:

Have you benchmarked your write speeds with RAID 5 and a nVidia-based RAID setup? Your results are contrary to anything that I've seen documented on the internet. While the read speeds are decent (around what you've stated), nVidia's RAID 5 write speeds are even slower than writing to a single drive of the same type used in that array. nVidia has been criticized for their RAID 5 performance repeatedly, especially considering that Intel's ICH7R controllers produce reasonable results with 3 drives (four drives still isn't great on write). If you want to use an integrated controller you're stuck to using RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 if you are looking to scale read and write rates. If you use something that more efficiently uses the drives (for those that aren't familiar, RAID 0+1 effectively takes half of the drives in the array to mirror data so you have data redundancy in case of hardware failure) like in a RAID 5 (one drive worth of space in the array is used for parity data which can be used to rebuild the array in the case of a single drive failure) or 6 (like RAID 5 but with allowance for up to two drives failing but also using two drives worth of space for parity) setup you'll have to look towards a dedicated controller, preferably with good hardware-based XOR processor.

[w.pasman]

It seems to me that such file sizes are just too impractical to start editing with.
But as dasbin wrote most promising approach would be a better compression algorithm. For instance native 1920x1080x50p which I guess would be compressed very decent at about 10-20 Mbyte/sec

[ianrutter@mac.com]

I am interested in you post about the citidesk hdv unit. Is it compatable with Canons HV20? Has eany one tried it on one. I have some reviews and cannot figure out it it or other hard disk would work with the HV20

[Erik Bien]

Hi ianrutter, welcome to the forum!

CitiDisc/FireStore type devices should work with the HV20, the problem is that they only record off the camera's FireWire port, where the signal is already HDV (no better or less compression than recording to tape).

What you and I (and many others) really want is CineForm's proposed HDMI to Compact Flash Recorder (http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=3672) (sometime after NAB in April, somewhere under two grand).

[garm99]

Blackmagicdesign intensity
http://smages.com/t/3c/35/3c3520c9ed5c76d9367b5535335917cc.jpg (http://smages.com/3c/35/3c3520c9ed5c76d9367b5535335917cc.jpg.htm)

[CAFxX]

Let’s put capturing raw footage into perspective:

Bandwidth:
1920x1080 = 2073600 pixels/frame
24 bits of color info per pixel (8 bit color sampling for each RGB)
24 frames per second
2073600 pixels x 24 bits x 24 frames = 1194393600 bits / second
1194393600 / 8 = 149299200 bytes / sec
1048576 bytes = 1MB
149299200 / 1048576 = 142.3828125MB / sec to record uncompressed 1080P@24Frames Video
142.3828125MB / 1024 = ~.139GB / sec
.139GB * 60 seconds = 8.34GB / min
.139GB * 3600 seconds = 500.4GB / Hour


This is incorrect. 4:2:2 sampling means 16 bits/pixel, not 24.
(4:2:2 means that for every 4 pixel block there are 4 luma and 4 chroma samples (two for each chroma channel), so we have eight 8-bit samples for every 4 pixel, i.e. 8 * 8 / 4 = 16 bits/pixel)

[partyrabbit]

Capture HDV via FireWire will add 1sec delay to prewiev. How about Blackmagic's Intensity via HDMI? It's real-time prevew in capture software or there is lag too? If yes - how long?

PS. sd video over firewire add ~500ms, hdv ~1000. I want to get video fast as possible from hv30 to broadcast.