Blackmagic Design Intensity Versus Hauppauge HD PVR

By supergreatfriend

Here's some comparisons of what you could expect from these devices.

http://i46.tinypic.com/24zacnd.png (Uncompressed)
http://i49.tinypic.com/29pd7w6.png (Motion JPEG)
http://i48.tinypic.com/2vvomk7.png (HDPVR)

The first image was captured with the Intensity using uncompressed video. Uncompressed results in the best possible quality: a pixel perfect capture of what the video device is outputting. Of course, the lack of compression means that the size of uncompressed videos are ridiculously large. So large that a single hard drive would not be able to write that much data per second while capturing. To record uncompressed you would need 2 or 3 dedicated hard drives set up in Raid 0.

The second image was captured with the Intensity using its Motion JPEG codec. I suppose Blackmagic figured that they had to make it possible for people to capture video to a single hard drive, so they provided this codec with their recording software. It's kind of crap. It leaves JPEG compression artifacts everywhere, and I get inaccurate brightness/contrast levels, as well as black crush in the dark areas. This isn't really worth using.

The third image was captured with the HDPVR. It has a bit of blurring, but it's not significant. Image quality looks good, minimal compression artifacts. Brightness/contrast levels look accurate. Only problem here is that the video I record with the HDPVR is slightly off center. You can see the thin black border on the top and right sides. Don't know why it does that.

Now let's zoom in on a part of that title screen...

http://i48.tinypic.com/2mmfu60.png (Uncompressed)
http://i47.tinypic.com/11rzkls.png (Motion JPEG)
http://i47.tinypic.com/21orcza.png (HDPVR)

So uncompressed is what the image is actually supposed to look like. The HDPVR capture is very close to it, while the Motion JPEG capture has artifacts all over.

So far the HDPVR doesn't look too far off from uncompressed, but this is only a still title screen. When capturing fast-motion video, some more visible artifacts appear. So now here's some captures from a fast moving game. The left side of these images were captured with uncompressed, the middle of the images were captured with Motion JPEG, and the right side of the images were captured with the HDPVR.

http://i46.tinypic.com/2hn43yr.png
http://i49.tinypic.com/2iayez7.png
http://i47.tinypic.com/qye1iv.png
http://i49.tinypic.com/fk2xko.png
http://i46.tinypic.com/1zno8as.png
http://i47.tinypic.com/2zs318j.png
http://i47.tinypic.com/es6uxe.png
http://i50.tinypic.com/210x0k6.png
http://i45.tinypic.com/2dtw58j.png
http://i48.tinypic.com/r02ex3.png

Under fast motion, the HDPVR's capture isn't as high quality. If you want to see the video these were captured from, here you go:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JK06XPZ2

But keep in mind that the captures were taken from a Lagarith-encoded video, and this uploaded video was compressed with h.264. Also here's a Youtube version of the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULnkGT9wZOI&fmt=22

The reason for the Youtube video is to show that after a video-sharing site has recompressed your video, you won't be able to tell the difference between these capture methods anymore. So you might as well just get the HDPVR, since it's the easiest one to work with.