Hauppauge HD-PVR vs Blackmagic Intensity Pro

[w4tt4n4b3]

Fellow forum-members, I need your help and guidance.
In a couple of days I will be receiving a hd satellite receiver box with yuv component. And I want to be able to capture hd content from sports footage.
I want the final hd file to be at about 3gb per hour of coverage/footage.
My pc has a AMD Phenom II x4 920 (2.8ghz), 4gbs of Geil Ram (800mhz, 4-4-4-12, 2.0v), WD black caviar 500gb @ 7200rpm and MSI KA790GX m/b with ATI Radeon HD 3300 onboard...

I am before a crossroads. 2 ways to go. One is the Hauppauge HD-PVR and the other the Blackmagic Intensity PRo. Both have yuv component inputs to capture hd material but share different philosophy.
The Hauppauge has an inbuilt hardware h264 encoder and connects to the pc with usb 2.0.
The Blackmagic Intensity Pro has no hardware encoder, is a pci-e card and cooperates with Adobe Premiere Pro...

I can't decide and I need your help.
Which is the most reliable to have a capture without stutters, glitches and other problems?

Another issue is that I do not want to spend many hours of encoding for 1-2 hours of sports footage...
The Blackmagic Intensity pro can capture in motion jpeg compressed hd. One hour of 1920x1080i 50fps is equivalent to 37gbs. If I encode it with x264 and bring it down to 3-4gbs how much time would it take for my machine?
The HD-PVR on the other side will do the h264 encoding during the capture and has settings for 2mbit/sec to 20mbit/sec for bitrate...

I have to make a decision soon, so I'd like your recommendations...
Thank you.

[DJ Bobo]

Afaik, the HD PVR is limited to 13Mbit/s, not 20. This is not very high for 1080i, but normal when compared to consumer AVCHD camcorders which record in that range too, and should lead to a high video quality nonetheless.
If you just need to cut things out, like ads and stuff, without fancy editing and effects, I would say the HD PVR is the way to go, because AVC encoding is very time consuming. Look HERE (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1256771#post1256771) for 720p 2-pass encoding results. This is about x0.5 realtime encoding (2 hours for 1 hour of video). Encoding Full HD videos will be much slower (probably more than 2 times slower).

[w4tt4n4b3]

Thank you, DJ Bobo. The HD-PVR can achieve 20mbit/s only as peak. The average bitrate can not be set beyond 13.5mbit/s. Honest to be I intend to capture only sports events and I am not planning to do much editing apart from cutting the ads. People report that in order to cut the .ts files one needs the tscutter application which isn't too easy to use.
One of my fears for the Blackmagic is that I may need a raid even for the uncompressed mjpeg. My hdd disk is 500 sata 7200rpm and I have another 250 7200rpm as well.
And also one of the things I really dislike is audio/video desync... Ι would like to avoid such situation and I don't know if a hardware or a software encoder is best to avoid such situation.

[DJ Bobo]

37GB per hour means about 10MB per second. This is something any HDD can handle, even older ones. So RAID won't be a necessity. But you have to be careful to capture to the secondary disk (where you don't have the page file!) to avoid unnecessary access through Windows or another application.
Editing MJPEG videos is definitely much easier and more precise, there is no doubt about that.

To be honest, you're comparing two solutions that aren't really equivalent. The Intensity Pro costs twice as much as the HD PVR and is clearly targeted at professionals: Adobe Premiere Pro is a 1000€ software, no regular consumer would buy such a thing!
It's not even a card you can buy at your regular computer store.

For the average consumer, the HD PVR covers it all. And thanks to the hardware encoder, you'll save a lot of time, something that you'll learn to appreciate if you capture a lot.
The software that is delivered with the Hauppauge product should be able to cut the TS files by the way.

[w4tt4n4b3]

The Blackmagic comes with some kind of software it. I think it's the way you say it. For the low end user the Hauppauge HD PVR looks the best solution but I intend to be uploading some major sports events on the internet so the HD pvr is a solution as far its hardware encoding produces a suitable for uploading filesize, let's say 2-3 gbs per hour. I think it's achievable.

About the cutting of .ts files I read that needs a bit tweaking. It is true that the HD-Pvr comes with software that enables .ts cutting but I heard negative comments generally.

[DJ Bobo]

2 to 3GB per hour will produce bad results with a live capture device like the HD-PVR. For 1080i, you really need the full 13Mbit/s the device can deliver if you need near-transparent compression. If you can't afford this bitrate, you have no choice but to get the Blackmagic card if you care about quality, since recompressing an MJPEG source will lead to a much better quality than recompressing from an already heavily compressed AVCHD source.
But if you don't mind artefacts, just go ahead and capture directly at 6 to 7Mbit/s with the HD PVR. That will spare you a lot of time.

[w4tt4n4b3]

So the equation is like this...
Blackmagic=potentially more quality but more time in order to encode and more expensive.
Hauppauge hd pvr= less quality, saves time and money...

I have to mention that I will be capturing a lot of sd content as well.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yep.

13mbps for 1080i is plenty if you're doing an offline, high quality 2 pass encode with x264, but with a realtime hardware encoder that's definitely pushing things a bit. If you're serious about quality, invest in the Intensity.

Can the Hauppage card do the same 13mbps for SD content? If so, it would be quite good in that regard.

~MiSfit

[w4tt4n4b3]

I can't really tell about sd bitrate but I have watched some 720p hd clips at 7,5 mbit abr and 12000 peak that seemed ok to me. At 13mbit abr the 1080i clip was ok...
What I get is that the Blackmagic card will give me the opportunity to maintain better quality in less size and bitrate than the hardware encoder of the hauppauge...

13mbit is the ABR in the Hauppauge, the peak is 20000...

[Blue_MiSfit]

:shrug:

It will be pretty good :)

Not amazing, but pretty good!

~MiSfit

[squid_80]

For the record, the intensity pro can be used like any other directshow based capture card (e.g. works with virtualdub's capture mode). Capturing using huffyuv normally reduces the bitrate enough for a single SATA hard drive to cope with. Blackmagic's MJPG codec is fast and it's reasonable quality, but lossless is still marginally better.

[zcream]

Hi squid_80. Can I confirm what you said ?
If you select the capture window from virtualdub, you are able to use huffyuv to capture in realtime ??

Is that correct ?
I thought you can only select Blackmagic MJPEG or uncompressed, even if you use virtualdub ?

I can try it again, but I did not have much luck with it..

Do you reckon it will work to capture with PicVideo MJPEG codec as well ? It allows for 4:2:2 capture at a variable bitrate..

For the record, the intensity pro can be used like any other directshow based capture card (e.g. works with virtualdub's capture mode). Capturing using huffyuv normally reduces the bitrate enough for a single SATA hard drive to cope with. Blackmagic's MJPG codec is fast and it's reasonable quality, but lossless is still marginally better.

[squid_80]

Info here: http://forums.virtualdub.org/index.php?act=ST&f=6&t=16116&#entry66552

[w4tt4n4b3]

I bought the HD-pvr in the end and I am satisfied but I think one parameter that can make the difference in quality is the colorimetry. 4:2:2 is a lot better than 4:2:0. My question is whether the HD-pvr can cap a 4:2:2 source and the produced AVC-mpeg4 .ts file will have 4:2:2 colorimetry.
If anyone knows it would be nice to know. Thanks.

[Ghitulescu]

Why not buying a HDTV-PVR and COPY/PASTE the recordings as aired? :confused:

[w4tt4n4b3]

What do you mean by hdtv-pvr? a digital receiver that has hard disk?

[Ghitulescu]

Yes, and an USB or SATA or Network port, otherwise you can't use the recordings ;)

PVR - Personal Video Recorder.