Friday, April 24, 2009

Blackmagic Intensity Pro

One thing that should generate more posting out of me is the fact that I just purchased the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. Blackmagic Designs announced at NAB that they were dropping the price to $199. B&H Photo Video has the card for a little bit less than that. My main use of the card will be for HDMI monitor to a 24" LCD HD display.

The quality of the video should be good, but the LCD screen I will be using certainly is not reliable enough for broadcast mission critical color. But I don't find myself doing that type of work at home. For corporate, web and wedding videos it should provide you a decent reference of what your video looks like.

The card also features the ability to digitize video from HD camcorders with HDMI out, like the HMC150. So I'm going to be interested to see the quality of the image. From what I understand, when you digitize directly from the HDMI port of the HMC150 you're getting the full resolution of the camera BEFORE any AVCHD compression is added.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Yes, it bypasses AVC, but do you really want to shoot tethered to a MacPro? Or am I not understanding the product correctly?

Brian Wilson said...

Yes, I believe you're right in that it would need to be used in a live capture. My thoughts were it would be only practical in studio shoots for green screens, etc. In that instance you would be able to bypass the 4:2:0 colorspace that AVCHD limits you too.