Intensity doesn't support HV20

[Terence Krueger]

hi denis

the magma box is basically the same as what im making. with a black magic card plugged into it, you will be able to stream back uncompressed 4:2:2 at 30fps (60i) to a notebook. this is approximately 150megabytes per second.

the next problem is what the heck to do with that stream. the fastest notebook drive (seagate momentus 7200.2 160gb sata) has a sustained write speed of a bit over 30 megabytes per second. obviously theres no way that this can save the uncompressed stream.

so you have 2 options:
1: compressed the stream, either with the blackmagic on card codec, or a third party real time compressor like cineform. both can get you to a bit rate that will fit within a fast notebook drive's ability.
2: raid. raid on a notebook is fairly simple. an E-SATA express card and a silicon image "steelvine" transparent raid 0 box will do the trick. a customized casing for 5 seagate notebook drives and the raid controller ($130 off the shelf part) would bring you to a little over 150mb/s and able to store full uncompressed 4:2:2 or any form of compressed stream while still being very light and portable.

there is one hitch with this system i havent found a suitable solution for. you need 2 expresscard slots. one for the black magic card, one for the raid card. ive not found a notebook, big or small, with 2 slots. the chipset specifications on most notebooks allow 2 (usually 4 actually) express cards in theory, but noones bothered implementing more than one.

there are however a few (usually larger) notebooks that support 2 sata ports. in this case it may be possible to have one of the ports wired out to the raid card. because the raid in this case is transparent (the host pc sees it as one drive) it doesnt matter if the notebook natively supports raid.

so, uncompressed is in theory possible on a notebook, but at this point, rather cumbersome, so using a good compression method will be much more feasible.

terence

[Terence Krueger]

rob, i had only read a few threads where people speculated that it didnt work due to hdcp, but none that had first hand experiene. guess i didnt read enough :)

anoyhow, our system isnt special i dont think... its a basic amd X2 machine, 2gb ram, windows xp64. were ran both adobe premiere 1.5 and cs3, both were just fine. black magic drives as we said were v1.3, canon firmware 1.0.0.0

i can only imagine that either the other people has older bm drivers, or they something screwed up (i cant imagine what, theres not much too screw up). did these same people try hooking the camera up to an hdtv as well?

im at a loss, we didnt do anything the least bit magical here. just plugged it in.

terence

[Denis Cadamuro]

Thks Terence !
very useful your answer.
I'm interested in the "box" you would build !! keep me updated
To conclude : it sounds that with your box (or Magma's one) + an intensity +
a CineForm codec we would be able to get a nice stream ?
not uncompressed 4:2:2 but maybe not so far ?

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Denis Cadamuro

Then, I see that the CineForm apps could help, David please could you explain me where they could be "positioned" in our workflow ?
do they change anything in the acquisition data rate which seems to be the Critical parameter ?

We position our products for more quality and more editing performance below 20MB/s data rates. While this acquisition to laptop isn't concerned the editing characteristics like multi-generation, which we excel, it is still import that the first compression generation be as high quality as possible for the available data rate. We have a range of quality levels to adapt to the recording conditions.

[Derek Green]

anoyhow, our system isnt special i dont think... its a basic amd X2 machine, 2gb ram, windows xp64. were ran both adobe premiere 1.5 and cs3, both were just fine. black magic drives as we said were v1.3, canon firmware 1.0.0.0

terence

Hey Terence, thanks for posting that footage.

It's great that you got the Intensity working with the HV20. If it's not a canon firmware issue (since we all have the same cam), or black magic driver issue (I've tried v1.3) then it must be something else in your pipeline that is allowing it to work. Strange... yet, one thing I've learned is PCs are very quirky to say the least.

You say you're using XP64 with AMD chips? I wonder if the operating system would have something to do with it as I've only tried XP32 on a Intel... anyone else tried XP64bit or AMD processor?

Also, if you don't mind answering a few questions, maybe it'll help the community here figure out what is going on...

1. Do you know what brand of HDMI cable you are using?
2. What graphics card are you guys using?
3. What kind of monitor? Is it a DVI connection?
4. Have you tried putting the Intensity card in another computer and testing that or trying another HV20?

[Terence Krueger]

hi derek,

1. Do you know what brand of HDMI cable you are using?
not a clue, ill ask later. cables are cables, theres nothing that should prevent it from working other than a faulty cable.

2. What graphics card are you guys using?
xfx geforce 6600gt, pci express.

3. What kind of monitor? Is it a DVI connection?
its a cheap 17" widescreen lcd, i believe its analogue, ill ask again later.

4. Have you tried putting the Intensity card in another computer and testing that or trying another HV20?
nope, havent tried in another pc. im getting another card wednesday (so they say) which will go into my pc here, which is a dual amd opteron, 4gb ram, dual geforece 6800 ultras, xp64.

the black magic drivers are different for xp64. different meaning 64 bit drivers have to be recompiled. that would be a highly unlikely, but i guess possible answer to this issue. we have no 32 bit system to test on though. wheres them black magic people when you need em :)

terence

[Terence Krueger]

oh, and we have another peron we know that got the hv20 and intensity a few days before us, and its fine as well. ill have to find out what his system specs are.

terence

[Derek Green]

Originally Posted by Terence Krueger

hi derek,

1. Do you know what brand of HDMI cable you are using?
not a clue, ill ask later. cables are cables, theres nothing that should prevent it from working other than a faulty cable.

2. What graphics card are you guys using?
xfx geforce 6600gt, pci express.

3. What kind of monitor? Is it a DVI connection?
its a cheap 17" widescreen lcd, i believe its analogue, ill ask again later.

4. Have you tried putting the Intensity card in another computer and testing that or trying another HV20?
nope, havent tried in another pc. im getting another card wednesday (so they say) which will go into my pc here, which is a dual amd opteron, 4gb ram, dual geforece 6800 ultras, xp64.

the black magic drivers are different for xp64. different meaning 64 bit drivers have to be recompiled. that would be a highly unlikely, but i guess possible answer to this issue. we have no 32 bit system to test on though. wheres them black magic people when you need em :)

terence

Terence, thanks for getting back about that... hmmm, I'm going to try installing xp64 and see what happens. It's worth a shot anyways. It's got to be something if you, and you say your friend now also, has it working. The only other thing I can think of is, it's a firmware thing with the HV20. My HV20 is from the very first shipment to BC. I noticed there's a missing feature-the demo mode-small thing, yes, but indicative of maybe an early firmware. Maybe they 'tweaked' the firmware after this first batch of cameras shipped but didn't bother to change the number from 1.0. If you guys don't mind, check if your HV20 has the demo mode. That might be telling. Maybe trading in my unit would be the answer then.

[Solomon Chase]

You could put two 15k rpm Seagate Savvio drives in dual drive laptop. Should be 160MBs or faster. Then magma breakout box w/ intensity. No external drives or anything crazy like that.

[Terence Krueger]

"You could put two 15k rpm Seagate Savvio drives in dual drive laptop"

unfortunately ive not seen any laptops that support SAS, let alone dual SAS.
but you also have the issue of your OS. recording to your system drive will cause it to be inconsistent, and as 2 savvios just barely meet the speed needs you may run into issues, particularly in the last half of the disk array.

then theres the fact that they are only 146gb combined, which gives you barely 15 mins recording time (20 with pulldown removed if that was possible on uncompressed in realtime).

there theres the cost of about $550 each and the heat they produce.

fun fun :)

terence.

[Derek Green]

Originally Posted by Terence Krueger

not a clue, ill ask later. cables are cables, theres nothing that should prevent it from working other than a faulty cable.

terence

Dude, I. Can't. Believe. It.

It WAS the HDMI cable! It wouldn't allow a 1080 signal, just a 480.

ENERGY HDMI CABLE = BAD
VELOCITY HDMI CABLE = GOOD

Terence, you are a rock star! If you hadn't of joined this thread saying how yours was working, I would never have given it another shot, especially since Black Magic confirmed their HV20 wasn't working with the Intensity either.

So everyone who's having problems, time to pony up for some new HDMI cables. I'm staring at a glorious 1920x1080 HDMI signal on my monitor right now. COOL!

[Solomon Chase]

Originally Posted by Terence Krueger

"You could put two 15k rpm Seagate Savvio drives in dual drive laptop"

unfortunately ive not seen any laptops that support SAS, let alone dual SAS.
but you also have the issue of your OS. recording to your system drive will cause it to be inconsistent, and as 2 savvios just barely meet the speed needs you may run into issues, particularly in the last half of the disk array.

then theres the fact that they are only 146gb combined, which gives you barely 15 mins recording time (20 with pulldown removed if that was possible on uncompressed in realtime).

there theres the cost of about $550 each and the heat they produce.

fun fun :)

terence.

I thought SAS and SATA were compatible. Guess not! :(

What about those new laptops with three drive bays? Apparently the new king of speed is the new "Travelstar 7K200" which claims 22% faster than the Seagate Momentus

3 x Travelstar 7K200 @ 50-60MB/s sustained = 150-180MB/s

[Terence Krueger]

" thought SAS and SATA were compatible. Guess not! :(

What about those new laptops with three drive bays? Apparently the new king of speed is the new "Travelstar 7K200" which claims 22% faster than the Seagate Momentus

3 x Travelstar 7K200 @ 60-75MB/s sustained = 180-225MB/s"

sas controllers can run sata drives, but sata controllers cant run sas drives.

3 drive bays in a notebook, ive never seen that. theyd have to support raid too (windows software raid may or may not work well).

i think youve confused maximum write speed and sustained write speed though. because a drive is a disk spinning at a constant speed, the begining of the writing and the end can have wildly different speeds. plus due to the controller etc it will fluctuate. for something like real time capture you need to look at the minimum write speed, which for the seagate 7200.2 160gb is a tiny bit over 30mB/s(http://images.tomshardware.com/2007/...e/image030.png) making 5 drives in raid 0 barely adequate (theres overhead in the raid too of course). the savvio can sustain 73mB/s. you can stick a partition on the slow end of the disk to keep speeds up, but you eat away your precious little disk space.

theres a few other quirks in this as well. sata in many notebooks chipsets is actually on the legacy pci bus, limited to 133mb's tops. most notebooks only support sata 150mb/s as well, making an external raid like the steelvine unusable because one sata port wont handle the bandwidth needed after overhead. the steelvine raid can sustain over 220mB/s on a single sata 300 port provided you have drives capable of this. the trick is getting a sata 300 port onto a notebook AND still be able to connect the black magic card.

theres a number of machines it seems with a spare pci express lane in the docking port. there may be a way to expolit this connection, but it would be notebook model dependent solution as they all have different connectors.

computers are your fun.. no, really :)

terence

[Terence Krueger]

derek.. what!?

thats nutty. i wonder what could be wrong with that cable that it would trigger the low res output.

good to know its working though and its something super simple for other people to check if they have issues.

terence

[John Hotze]

I think you may have stumbled onto why there is such a broad price range in HDMI cables. When I bought mine at Best Buy they went from one brand at about $60 to a Monster at $120 for a basic 6 foot I think. Guess I won't bother adding any to my toolkit with the off brand Internet HDMI's for under $20. Guess the old adage - "You get what you pay for" is pretty true in the long run.