Multiple Intensity Pro cards.

I am looking at purchasing 2x Intensity Pro cards to use for the 2x live inputs into VPT6.0
Link - http://hcgilje.wordpress.com/vpt/
They will be fitted to a Mac Pro running lion with a Matrox Triplehead2go and an ATI Raedon HD5870.
Does any one know weather the 2x Intensity Pro's will work together or is there another solution?
I prefer the connectivity of the Intensity over the Decklink options as it better suits my outboard equipment but would consider other options and use convertors if needed.

[Chris Pearse]

Hi,

Two Intensity Pro cards can indeed work together simultaneously, as long as the software you are using supports it. I'm afraid that I'm not familiar with the software you mention, and can't say myself whether it would work with the Intensity Pros or not, but the software vendor may have a better idea.

If you have two cards installed in the same machine you would just need to install the driver, and they should both be detected by the system. There will be a dropdown box in the Blackmagic section of System Preferences to change settings of each card.

It would then just be down to your software to detect and use both cards.

Hi,

Is this really possible? I have two Intensity Pro's on a Mac Pro OS X 10.8.2 but while I can see both cards, only one of them works. This is true in both Blackmagic Media Express and my own custom Quicktime application.

Again, my apps see the card, but Quicktime doesn't seem to connect to any of the cards outputs. When queried, Quicktime reports "cannot determine media" instead of the capture format (which is usually YUV or something similar plus the resolution).

Anything that I need to do to get two Intensity's to work simultaneously?

Thanks,

c.

[Chris Pearse]

I don't see any reason that configuration should not work. I would suggest checking that both cards work OK individually if you have not already done so. Quicktime applications should also work in effectively the same way as applications developed with our SDK do.

If they are OK, you should find that in System Preferences->Blackmagic there will be a dropdown box to select between the two cards, so that you can alter each card's preferences. Make sure both cards are set up correctly, and then launch two copies of Media Express. You should see in the device menu of each copy of Media Express that they've both selected a different Intensity card.

From here you should just need to make sure both copies of Media Express are set to the correct format in Media Express->Preferences->Project Video Format, and that they have 'Continue playback in background' selected. Once you've done this, you should see a picture in both.

If you have the first generation Intel Mac Pro, it's possible, but I think unlikely due to the Intensity Pro being a x1 PCIe card, that you may need to configure the PCIe slots. You can find more information on this here.