10 machine game capture

Hi everyone,

I'm looking into ways to capture the video/audio output of ten PCs being used for a games tournament.

Ideally I'd like one machine/bit of hardware into which we plug 10 HDMI cables (cloned desktops of the gaming PCs), hit capture, and get out ten synced video files output for editing later. Footage would be 1080p60.

The footage needs to be as high quality as possible (ideally lossless compression or as close to as possible) as the game has lots of fine detail and small text with high contrast.

Suggestions?

Thanks for your help.

No such machine exists.

Just from an I/O perspective, each 1080p60 signal is 3gb/s so we're talking 30gb/s of bandwidth not counting overhead, Also remember that signal has to traverse the I/O bus twice (once from the card to the CPU and then from the CPU to disk).

For storage you would need a 8 SSD's in a RAID 0 (assuming 515MB/s write speed) with each disk on its own SATA 6gb/s channel. I don't think I've ever seen a mother board with that many SATA channels onboard, and externally thunderbolt and fiber channel maxes out at 20 gb/s (10 gb/s shy of the 30 you would need)

The vast majority of HD capture cards max out at 4 inputs for this reason. Though I have seen an 8-channel capture card. You might be better off getting 2 machines and plugging a timecode generator into each card to keep the files in sync for later editing.