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GOING "ON AIR" On BUDGET AND IN STYLE WITH BLACKMAGIC_DESIGN INTENSITY PRO AND ON AIR 2.0 BY FATBARS' SZE

I recalled my initial doubts, the first time I heard about the Blackmagic-Design’s Intensity Pro. Coming from a heavy Professional Broadcasting equipment background and from that point of view that HDMI is not really broadcasting standard interface (Comparing to HD SDI), I honestly thought that HDMI capture into HD as a workflow solution is kind of odd.


However, once I got over the so call Pro Broadcasting standard hump, I am more than happy that Blackmagic-Design came up with this very cool card.  Depending on my budget, now I can use consumer to pro-sumer or even Professional Video camera that has an HDMI out to capture my HD footage via the HDMI output.


Skipping the software HDV or AVCHD encoder/decoder.
Doing a real time HDMI Capture means no need to convert from HDV/AVCHD to another format to edit.  I can now use the on board hardware encoder/decoder to play back the footage from the camera. Therefore forgoing the software decoder in the editing software! Using the camera’s own decoder to playback HDV or AVCHD footage is one way to keep all my footage as true to the camera as possible.


The Setup
You need a Mac pro 4 or 8 core with 2 Gigs or more ram and disk space.  Editing anything HD needs horsepower.  You must have computing horsepower and storage, a Blackmagic-Design Intensity-Pro Card, HDMI-Cable to connect your camera to intensity card.


Capturing Footage skipping AVCHD or HDV Tape.
You can use the Intensity Pro capturing HDMI output skipping AVCHD or HDV encoding.  As you might know that AVCHD and HDV are high compressed format.  You do loose a lot of video data using HDV or AVCHD.  Now with Intensity Pro you can set it up to capture using Media Express from Blackmagic-Design. Media Express is a simple software for capturing footage.  This software comes free with the Intensity Pro.  This high resolution capture is only possible because the HDMI output from a camera gets the signal straight from the CCD chip skipping all the HDV or AVCHD encoding all together. Now you can get footage straight into my Mac pro from HDMI when you are doing an Indoor shoot and retaining 4:2:2 color sampling quality.  DV and HDV uses 4:2:0 (PAL) or 4:1:1(NTSC) sampling so you loose video data doing DV,HDV.



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Let’s go ON-AIR
Blackmagic On-Air 2.0 combines a real time HD mixing console when used with two Intensity boards plugged into Apple Mac Pro systems for a complete live television production studio. ON-AIR is included free with every Intensity board. If you have 2 HDMI output capable camera and have the need of a small studio for product shot or Interview you can use ON-AIR   You will need a second Intensity or Intensity Pro card to connect two HDMI input source.  With ON-AIR you can do live video mixing and record the mix realtime to your hard drive as a quicktime file.


At the event, we used two cameras : SD-9 from Panasonic and AGHSC-1UE. Both cameras are tapeless and no hard disk, only using AVCHD encoder to store compressed storage into SD(HC) Cards.  I hooked up both camera’s HDMI output to two Intensity Pro card with a Mac Pro 8 core, 4 gig of ram and Raid 0 internal hard disks ( 3 Disks setup).  Right after starting the On-Air 2.0, instantly I was able to switch between the two cameras like a live show switcher! Amazing! It is very simple and clean.  I can even record the live video straight to hard disk and play it back later. Not bad for a small free application that came with the card.  This got me thinking of small studio application, Video Pod Casting and more. Think about it, you can switch between Camera A and Camera B in real time.  There is also a feature to have graphics overlay that I did not get a chance to try out but it is there and it is simple enough to use.


So next time you got yourself an HD Camera make sure there is an HDMI output.  You can  use the to play back to an LCD, HDTV or use the HDMI for capturing.  With Intensity from Blackmagic-Design an alternative option for Video footage ingestion opens up to more possibility.


We like to thank Alvin Lim from BlackMagic-Design for having us in the event. Jadason and Shung Hing (Panasonic) for setting up all the hardware so that I get to play and test out all the great equipments.


Client : 客戶

Blackmagic-design