Sunday, July 08, 2007

Reasons to hate Black Magic, part 3

I have a long and proud tradition of criticising Black Magic Design - much beloved of the FCP crowd their products are built to a price rather than the signal spec. Read some of my previous rantings here and here. This last week I had the pleasure(!) of their new Intensity Pro card - HDMI & analogue component (at 1920x1080) capture. The reason they've launched this card is the slew of HDV camcorders that have an HDMI output. Now - we all know about HDMI's support for HDCP encryption. For most things the HDCP flag is set but no encryption is present. That's the way games consoles work (and foolishly we thought that this card would be good to capture the HD output of a PS3) - BUT, if the card sees even a hint of the HDCP flag it won't capture! Also - the card output is not the usual RGB feed you've expect, but whatever colour space the Quicktime clip is recorded in!

Never mind the quality, feel the width.

When will they start to conform to the specs rather than fobbing you off with "I'm sorry - that's not a supported configuration" - argh!

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