Just wanted to post up some pics of my Portable Intensity Capture Station.

I am running it through some paces, but do plan to make them available to interested parties.

Here are the specs

Intensity Capture Station

Portable Case w/ handle
Silent Power Supply 500 Watt
Micro ATX Motherboard (Intel)
Intel Core 2 E6600 2.4 Ghz
Geforce 8500
Processor Cooler
2 Gig Ram
DVD Burner
2 500 Gig Seagate Drives
Intensity HDMI Capture
Keyboard / Mouse
Win XP Pro SP2
7 Inch LCD

Let me know if you have any questions.

Out of curiosity, why the floppy drive? Was it just for initial set-up (i.e. BIOS upgrades) and you're going to swap in a x-in-1 flash device reader or something similar?

I needed to install Intel RAID drivers so I needed a floppy. The drives are on a RAID 0 right now, but could be on a RAID 1 or whatever was needed.

I get about 130 MB/s read and write at raid 0.

Chris

Floppy is old school!

Wow, they need to make an Intensity ExpressCard or something, that setup is ridiculous! Although I don't know how you'd hook up drives to handle 4:2:2 video unless you can convert to something like ProRes on the fly.

It captures to 4:2:2 video as is. You can capture HD video to one drive if you like. Your options are what come with the Intensity which is a motion jpeg compression, or buy cineform. And yes you're right that an express card setup on a laptop would be nice, but there isn't one yet so here's what we get. BTW laptop HD would be pretty slow, they usually only spin at 4500 to 5300 RPM so you're data rates are lower. So ESATA would probably be in order.

The nice thing about the computer is once you're done capturing just sit it down at your desk and start editing. BTW you could add HD-SDI instead of HDMI.

Chris

BTW laptop HD would be pretty slow, they usually only spin at 4500 to 5300 RPM so you're data rates are lower. So ESATA would probably be in order.

On the high end Alienware machines you can get dual 200GB RAID 0 7200rpm drives.
http://www.alienware.com/Configurator_Pages/area-51_m9750.aspx?SysCode=PC-LT-AREA51M9750&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT

And any notebook can take a normal 2.5" 7200rpm drive.

I want one!
M

Yes James you're right about the HD's in laptops, just no laptop that I know of right now, can take an Intensity card. Ahh there's the rub.

Chris

Except by way of a Magma ExpressBox, of course. But then it's not as self-contained/rugged a package.

Andrew.

BTW you could add HD-SDI instead of HDMI.

Chris

Does the motherboard you are using have a PCI Express x4 slot? The HD-SDI boards need a x4 slot to work and not just a x1 slot. I know Asus has a few micro-atx boards that actually do have a x4 slot.

As for the pci-e 4x slot, it has a 1x and a 16x slot. I'm using the 1x slot for the Intensity and nothing as of now for the 16x slot. I'm using the onboard video for all the test right now. Onboard video works ok for now, but the Decklink apps don't like the overlay with the intel chip, although it seems to work fine in Premiere, After Effects, and Avid.

One solution would be to use the 16x slot for AJA Xena or Decklink Multibridge and use the 1x slot for a Quadro NVS for the overlay preview if the Intel onboard didn't quite work out.

So many options. If you are interested in Uncompressed HD then one more drive should suffice, I've only got 2 in a raid 0 right now, but the case could possibly hold 2 more minus the floppy and the DVD Burner. 4 drives on raid 0 should be fast enough for Uncompressed 10 bit, but Cineform works great and you could even do a raid 1 or 5 with that to make sure your files are safe from disk failure. The Wafian uses Cineform with some sort of HD-SDI Capture card. It's a bit bigger and more expensive than my option though.

Well, they do have PCIe to ExpressCard adapters, so you would think going the other way would be possible

http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adpexc.asp

My guess is intensity is already working on it though, having a mobile solution for their product would be very popular I would think.

James sorry to burst your bubble, but that is to put an express card slot into a desktop, not to put a PCIe card into a laptop express card slot.

I certainly don't see why they can't put a whole intensity into an express card form factor, but I think it's a bit down the road. Look at AJA's IO box. It's a pretty big box and you still have to have a computer and electricity to run it, I've got the whole thing in one box.

Everyone thinks a laptop is the solution, but a laptop is just not as powerful as a properly configured desktop. Bus speeds, ram speeds, onboard video, slower rpm drives, slower processors, all of these things contribute to slower laptops. Now you can buy a smoking laptop, but you'll have to spend some money, it's not going to be the $1000 special from Dell.

Chris

I did find a motherboard that has 2 PCIe16x slots on it and was mATX, but it was on the 945 chipset, which is a little older, and didn't come with onboard raid controller, but it certainly would be a good solution for an AJA Xena, or a Decklink card assuming the case is big enough to hold either of the cards. My suspicion is that it could be done with a little creativity.

Chris

Asus has a board that has a PCI-E x16 slot and a PCI-E x4 slot. The 4x slot is all you need for either the AJA or Blackmagic boards.

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1421&l1=3&l2=11&l3=371

In fact I have heard that some x16 slots do not work as well with capture cards due to the fact that some motherboards only like to see a graphics card in the x16 slots. I do not know if all motherboards have this issue but I know a few people who could not get the cards to work in a x16 slot. This is even more true if the 2 slots are designed for Crossfire or SLI. The two slots are really designed to work together so putting a video card in one slot and a capture card in the other slot sometimes will cause problems or not work at all.

The beauty of the x4 slot is that you can then either add a HD-SDI card or the Intensity card into the same slot and you wouldn't have to change motherboards based on which card the user wanted.

James sorry to burst your bubble, but that is to put an express card slot into a desktop, not to put a PCIe card into a laptop express card slot.

I certainly don't see why they can't put a whole intensity into an express card form factor, but I think it's a bit down the road. Look at AJA's IO box. It's a pretty big box and you still have to have a computer and electricity to run it, I've got the whole thing in one box.

Everyone thinks a laptop is the solution, but a laptop is just not as powerful as a properly configured desktop. Bus speeds, ram speeds, onboard video, slower rpm drives, slower processors, all of these things contribute to slower laptops. Now you can buy a smoking laptop, but you'll have to spend some money, it's not going to be the $1000 special from Dell.

Chris

Yes that device would not work but there is a device that is a box that can add a PCI-E card and then a cable hooks that box into the Express card slot on a laptop. I do not know how well it works and it looks a little clumsy to work with but it shows that it can be done. I cannot remember where I saw the deive but somewhere on this forum there is a link to it.

Everybody likes the laptop method because it can run off a battery and it has a high quality LCD screen, keyboard and mouse built in to make it easy. Having to drag around a desktop tied to a power cord just doesn't appeal to people as much as a true portable method. Don't get me wrong. I think the tiny desktop is a great solution for a studio environment or a controlled shooting environment but a laptop has it's own advantages as well. A lot of people may already have great editing systems so they may not even want to use this device for editing but just want it to be good enough to capture mjpeg or Cineform live and many laptops can already do that in the $1,000 to $1,500 price range.

That would be the Magma ExpressBox (http://www.magma.com/products/pciexpress/expressbox1/index.html) - I should have linked to it in my previous post. It can only host an x1 PCI Express card though, so you'd only be able to use it with an Intensity card, not the DeckLink.

Andrew.

That's a cool piece, I'm glad you sent a link. That makes a laptop much more viable as a solution. Not for the Xena or bigger Decklink cards. I'm surprised I didn't see that before. Only problem is it's $700 plus to get, then you have to buy the Intensity card as well. Thanks for the link.

Chris

My biggest concern with using it in a laptop would be having enough high-speed, high-capacity disk space. FW800 is only 800 Mbits/s so you're pretty much forced to either have a fast enough internal drive for short captures or an eSATA port for capturing to large-and-fast external drives. BlackMagic has some Mac-specific tests listing data-rates of 170MB/s (http://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail.asp?techID=175)

Aside: My MacBook Pro only has one ExpressCard/34 slot (fast 7200rpm SATA internal drive though) so I'd only be able to do short captures, save those to an external USB+eSATA drive via USB, then swap in my SIIG eSATA ExpressCard-M (http://siig.com/product.asp?catid=10&pid=1100) to access the data via eSATA. Doable, but a bit of a kludge.

James sorry to burst your bubble, but that is to put an express card slot into a desktop, not to put a PCIe card into a laptop express card slot.
Chris

Yeah I know, thats what I meant by "so you would think going the other way would be possible".

The Magma ExpressBox is exactly what I was hoping for, too bad its so damn expensive.

Another idea is using a Mac Mini, I wonder if the newer ones have PCIe slots inside that you could get to? They probably have pretty good bus speeds and use low power, but a laptop would be so much easier with its built in power system and screen.

My biggest concern with using it in a laptop would be having enough high-speed, high-capacity disk space. FW800 is only 800 Mbits/s so you're pretty much forced to either have a fast enough internal drive for short captures or an eSATA port for capturing to large-and-fast external drives. BlackMagic has some Mac-specific tests listing data-rates of 170MB/s (http://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail.asp?techID=175)

Aside: My MacBook Pro only has one ExpressCard/34 slot (fast 7200rpm SATA internal drive though) so I'd only be able to do short captures, save those to an external USB+eSATA drive via USB, then swap in my SIIG eSATA ExpressCard-M (http://siig.com/product.asp?catid=10&pid=1100) to access the data via eSATA. Doable, but a bit of a kludge.

Says who? mjpeg and Cineform work great on even a single 5400 RPM laptop drive. Any form of external drive you use on top of that will be more then fast enough for mjpeg or Cineform.

Now if you are talking uncompressed HD then of course none of this stuff will work. In order to capture uncompressed for any decent amount of time you will need a 4 drive raid-0. Yes the desktop can do that since it has 4 or more SATA ports but good luck trying to cram 5 hard drives into a micro-ATX case.

Your best bet to use this device for uncompressed HD capture would be to use the x16 or x4 slot for a E-SATA raid card and another external raid box. You would have to use the onboard graphics chip but if you had a micro-atx board with a x16 slot and a x4 slot like the Asus board then you should have no problems.

In my opinion uncompressed HD is a little overkill for anything under a $10,000.00 camera. Even then the difference between Cineform and uncompressed is so minor that nobody is going to ever notice. Even mjpeg is not as bad as some people say it is. Yes mjpeg may show you more artifacts compared to Cineform or uncompressed but the level of quality over HDV is so much better that unless somebody is a freak and likes to play with pixels all day long instead of actually creating video then it isn't going to matter. On a HDTV you will never ever notice a difference. Even on a computer the only time people can notice anything is if they compare the formats side by side.

If uncompressed is a 10 and HDV a 5 then mjpeg would be a 8 and Cineform a 9. (rough figures of course) In terms of quality there is nothing wrong with a 8. Some people argue that mjpeg is a DCT format but so is HDV, DVCPRO, DVCPROHD, HDCAM and HDCAM SR. Mjpeg is better then all of those except for maybe HDCAM SR. Get Cineform Neo HD and you are even better then HDCAM SR in terms of compression.

Voice of experience trumps quasi-educated guess any time. :-)

Thomas,

I found a better board for the system. It's a Gigabyte mb with the newer chipset and 16x and 4x pcie slots.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128053

This is what I'd put in a new system. That way I could move up to Xena LHe or Decklink HDSDI card. Pair that with Cineform and who needs a Wafian? (Ok, who needs to pay for a Wafian!?)

chris

I second everything you said about the different compressions available for HD capture. I was definitely surprised by how good the Mjpeg was, not to mention it's really easy to capture on a single drive and edit with.

Says who? mjpeg and Cineform work great on even a single 5400 RPM laptop drive. Any form of external drive you use on top of that will be more then fast enough for mjpeg or Cineform.
Thomas, so as long as I understand, you mean that a "chain" like :
- an intensity
- inside a Magma Box
- plugged to recent laptop
is able to capture the HV20 HDMI stream, with cineform's quality !!
is there anyone who has already practiced this setup?

Thomas,

I found a better board for the system. It's a Gigabyte mb with the newer chipset and 16x and 4x pcie slots.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128053

This is what I'd put in a new system. That way I could move up to Xena LHe or Decklink HDSDI card. Pair that with Cineform and who needs a Wafian? (Ok, who needs to pay for a Wafian!?)

chris

I second everything you said about the different compressions available for HD capture. I was definitely surprised by how good the Mjpeg was, not to mention it's really easy to capture on a single drive and edit with.

That is also a good board from what I can tell. Did you see the link I posted to the board on the last post on the first page on this thread? I think too many posts went to the second page after I posted it and it may have been missed.

Thomas, so as long as I understand, you mean that a "chain" like :
- an intensity
- inside a Magma Box
- plugged to recent laptop
is able to capture the HV20 HDMI stream, with cineform's quality !!
is there anyone who has already practiced this setup?

Nobody seems to know yet is the Magmabox will work for sure or not. In theory it should work no problem at all because all it is doing as acting as a bridge between Express card and PCI Express. In the end it ends up being no different then plugging the card into a PCI Express slot. Of course as many of us know electronics do not always work the way we expect them to so until somebody actually tries it we will not know for sure how well it will work. I for one hope Blackmagic just makes a Express card version of the card because it will make things much easier and more compact. We would all love it however if somebody could try out a Magmabox to see if it works. :o)

Chris how much was the setup altogether?
Have the prices been lowered since you put that together?
4:2:2 is a great reality and you have showed it here - now only if it were portable!

Well I'd say it was portable. It's easily transported form one location to another, you don't need a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. Just electricity. I know some people say if you need to hook up a power cable then it's just a computer, but I say try lugging around your desktop or workstation vs carrying this and tell me which you would prefer.

Chris

email me off board to talk about the price of the computer. I just put it together within the last week or two so prices are basically the same.

This micro-atx box is about as portable as you can get without having a battery powered device that plugs onto the camera itself.

While a laptop is nice because it can run off of a battery in some ways the box is more portable. With a laptop if you had to move around while capturing you would have to have somebody hold it with two hands while open in order to work with it. This box however can be moved around with one hand holding the handle while the device is capturing.

For short shoots maybe a laptop running off a battery would be better but what about all day shoots? Chances are you would end up plugging power into the camera anyway unless you plan on having a boatload of batteries to switch all day long.

You can also use a 150 foot HDMI cable so you still have a lot of moving power with the camera if you lock down a location for the capture box.

The only way a laptop would be true portable was if you could flip the screen over so it was flat while open and the screen was touch screen with a virtual keyboard. The laptop would then need to be small enough such as a 11" screen so you could somehow mount it to your camera. No computer is ever going to be 100% portable unless they can make it the size of a Firestore device. Even with a laptop you are still tied to another device via a cable and you would have to have another person move along with you while you shoot or you would to move it yourself to a new location before you shoot.

The way I look at it is if you are in a studio or controlled location shoot then whats the big deal about having to plug in power? Buy an extension cord for $5.00 and just plug the darn thing in. If you want this for bluescreen shooting guess what, all those lights to light the screen are going to need power anyway so just plug in the computer. If you say you may want to shoot some bluescreen footage where there isn't power, I need to ask why you are going far away to shoot bluescreen? That doesn't make any sense at all. In all my years as a visual effects artist I have never seen a bluescreen shoot that didn't have a power source. Even if you wanted to use the sun as a lightsource outside chances are you will be close enough to run an extension cord to a power source.

Thanks for the vote of confidence Thomas, I think you're completely right about the unit being portable and having to use power is no big deal. I've been having this conversation with so many people. We are not going to get a battery powered device that captures uncompressed HD video(or for that matter cineform compressed video) that we can take into the jungle for our little HV20's that costs around the same as our cameras. That is just pie in the sky dreaming. Look at that Codex recorder, nice, but how much is it? I'm not going to engineer one, I'm just one guy who builds computers. But I'm defiantly going to continue the quest for smaller, lighter, more powerful. I'm just happy I found that other motherboard so now we could actually do HDSDI capture with a similar box. That's really exciting.


Chris

BTW you say 150 feet for an HDMI cable length, but I've heard different reports on different cables. I assume it's always the same, you get what you pay for, quality cables cost decent money. What should we expect reasonably?

I did find a motherboard that has 2 PCIe16x slots on it and was mATX, but it was on the 945 chipset, which is a little older, and didn't come with onboard raid controller, but it certainly would be a good solution for an AJA Xena, or a Decklink card assuming the case is big enough to hold either of the cards. My suspicion is that it could be done with a little creativity.


Hey Chris, meant to ask you about this one. Any other reason(s) for avoiding the 945 chipset, or was it more the combo of older 945 and no RAID on that particular board that you were avoiding?

Andrew,

You nailed it exactly. The 945 is a great chipset and I edit on one everyday, but two things, all the mATX MB's I found with the 945 had the 4x PCIe slot, but didn't have the built in Raid so I didn't go with it. Now some people will say the the onboard raid on these MB's are junk, but they work fine for what we want to do. Anyway slots are limited and so is space.

One last advantage of the 965 or the new G33 is the fact that these chipsets handle the Quad core chips more readily, so it's much easier to upgrade if you want to later.(you know like a month after you buy it) Ha

Chris

I'd like to build something very similar, but using external firewire drives. Are there smaller cases for these motherboards? That thing looks pretty damn big ... maybe it's just the perspective in the photo?

The case really isn't that big. The picture doesn't do it justice. I need to get a shot with me holding it. It's a little heavier than I'd like, especially with the LCD. Without the LCD it weighs quite a bit less. Are you interested in one, cause I might be willing to part with the one I built, if you were interested. I've upgraded since last posting.

I got the E6850 (aka 3.0 ghz core 2) and I got the Intensity Pro as well.

It's smokin

chris

The Intensity Pro allows me to use my Dell 24" as a capture monitor and a preview monitor as well, it's just an input switch on the front.

I guess one potential issue with not running entirely off batteries is that you are no longer electrically isolated from power surges and spikes. Make sure you buy a decent protected powerboard for that baby...

What about these intel motherboards?

DG33TL

DG33BU

Maybe it can be used with an off board nvidia or geforce video card.

Thought I would drop in these solutions we have discussed elsewhere, as possible alternatives to the Magma box:

http://www.getcatalyst.com/board_pic/pcie2exp.jpg
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=41876
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=99632

Thought I would drop in these solutions we have discussed elsewhere, as possible alternatives to the Magma box:

http://www.getcatalyst.com/board_pic/pcie2exp.jpg
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=41876
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=99632

Hi,

I've got a report about the Catalyst board. The onboard power will not be enough to drive the Intensity card so addition power will be required.

Kristian, is good to know you (Blackmagic Design) have interest to this adapters.
May be better if Blackmagic Design can build Expresscard54 with hdmi input?;)

Double yes. Even hdmi -> two AD jpeg2000 codecs to usb port adaptor (or usb hard drive caddy chip, for cigarette packet size) . I don't know why you guys don't jump at the chance, there is so much less market for non portable solutions. And there is more processing solutions then the AD JPEG2K ones now days.

I'm using a Camera that outputs PAL @ 50P on a D-Sub 9-pin connector. Now, I can convert this to Analog DVI or Component Video. However, Intensity does not list any 576/50P recording mode. Also it does not say if I can take an output off a D-Sub connector.
Can the resident Intensity gurus clarify this ? Thanks!

Also, my computer parts reseller does not have the motherboard used in this design. Any comments on me using what he has.. ? This one
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=498&l4=0&model=1574&modelmenu=2

What about using compact flash memory instead of those bulky SATA drives? It would change the overall size and weight of the computer.
I found something like this, and you can use raid0 and raid5 but don't know if the speed of these drives is enough for uncompressed capture.

http://www.geekstuff4u.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=848

and also the CF card solution could be use as the system boot and it would shorten the overall start-up time.
And also this card solution would give you the roll-mag alternative of the digital age ;)

(just like RED :))

i have built such "transportable" system out of a Shuttle SX38pro case.
the motherboard has X38 chipset, 2 x PCIe 16x , support dual core 45nm at 1333Mhz and ram at 1066Mhz. got SATA and e-SATA, IDE, can raid the SATA.
it goes hot like hell (i burned my first box) but works very fast and is as small as it can be.
fortunately the Intensity card is so small that you can choose some graphic card with fan.
I choosed a fanless nvidia 8500 with HDTV out (component) and added a fan on it.
runing a E8400 (core 2 duo @ 3ghz) and Corsair RAM DDR2 2GB [1GBx2] DDR1066 (PC2-8500) - CORSAIR Dominator [TWIN2X2048-8500C5D] because it come with heatsink.
http://us.shuttle.com/barebone/BareboneHome.html

next step will be to add a 7 or 8 inch touch screen VGA in front so all is included and i can use it like a VCR. Just need to design a small program with big button (REC/STOP/PLAY) to use the touch screen. Monitoring can be done on a cheap 22 or 24" with the 2nd DVI output on the card.
So for less than 1000$ you got an HD recorder.