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| Blackmagic Intensity Pro - Image courtesy of Amazon.com |
The device will accept Composite, S-Video, Component and HDMI. The composite connection gets connected to the Green Y plug of the supplied breakout cable. One thing to note is that the device is aimed at the camera market, so non standard resolutions used by retro consoles (240p) are not supported. It will only handle resolutions of 480i or more. However, 480p over component is not possible (only over HDMI) so if one of your main consoles is a Nintendo Wii you should really consider something else.
The drivers are just plain annoying to use. You need to go into the "Blackmagic Control Panel" and select what input you want to capture from. No other capture card I own requires you to do this. It's not a big issue but something I think needs to be said. The drivers are DirectShow compatible and thus work with any program you would need (AmaRecTV, XSplit and OBS).
The composite capture quality is average and nothing special to talk about (there is no 3D comb filter). The component quality is very near to what the source outputs and as expected, HDMI is excellent. The real downside to the card lies in its color space. For SD the card uses UYVY (this can easily be worked with) and HD uses HDYC. No freely available codec besides UT Video will support HDYC natively (make sure to choose ULH2 in UT). This pretty much leaves you with 3 capturing options.
1. Use the Motion JPEG encoder supplied with the driver (unless you are very limited by disk space or processing power avoid this). The quality is very bad.
2. UT Video. Delivers very good CPU load and compression for a lossless codec.
3. Uncompressed capture (the data rates with this are just way too high without having to invest in RAID0).
So out of the 3 options, only UT Video is really viable for great quality on a single hard drive. The problem is that other lossless codecs like Lagarith and x264vfw don't support HDYC but can perform better (in regards to CPU load and bandwidth). HDYC is basically YUV 4:2:2 with 709 levels for the U and V. This means it is identical to other YUV 4:2:2 color spaces like YUY2. You can read more on the subject here. There also exists a Huffyuv HDYC build but users have reported it has color space issues so don't use that.
The last thing I want to talk about is the pass through feature of the card. What Blackmagic won't openly advertise to gamers is that the pass through is not lag free (input lag is introduced). One of the cool features is that you can input say component video and output over HDMI. This will add more lag (analog to digital conversion) than inputting and outputting component video (I even directly asked Blackmagic about that). However, I was able to play perfectly fine going from component to HDMI (but I am not very sensitive to input lag) so you might want to do further reading before you commit. The pass through is also processed and not what your source device is outputting. I also noticed that there was about 2 or 3 black pixels at the top of my 720p image when looking at the pass through image. This seems to be a common issue with the Intensity Pro but it was fixed with the Intensity Shuttle.
I always like to have a choice of what codec I want to use and that is where the Blackmagic ultimately falls short. There is very limited uses for this capture card. If you are just looking to capture HDMI video from a console then buy yourself the much cheaper AVerMedia C027/H727 with a HDMI splitter and put the spare money to something else. The only real resolution the Intensity Pro is good for is 480i over Component and for the price, not exactly worth the money.
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