Never have I delt with such atrocious hardware

Dear Blackmagic and anyone who is an anyway interested in any of their products

I have never, ever had such a variety of problems with one single company and its products, Nothing you advertise actually works the way it is meant too, in the last week alone I have used 3 items of Blackmagic hardware

The blackmagic ultrastudio SDI
The Black magic intensity shuttle USB 3.0
The black magic h264 pro recorder

The intensity shuttle and ultrastudio SDI just simply did not work, I might of well bought a brick and put that next to my computer, occasionally it would give you a glimmer of hope that it might work and then immediately stops again. how on earth you are allowed to advertise a product that BLATANTLY does not work with 90% of the world computers i will never know but i will do everything i can to make sure you are stopped.

you advertise that these 2 products to work with ANY USB 3.0 ENABLED COMPUTER, but that is not correct is it, and you know it, as have spoken to you directly about the issue and have said that you don't actually know what it works with, professional..... it only works on specific old USB 3 chipsets, which you do put in the small print but then why would you say that it works on any. Not only that but if you do have this 1 in a million chipset (excluding PCI cards) it still only ... MIGHT work. HOW ARE YOU ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH THIS. And it isnt hard to find disgruntled customers on this issue so im not the only one here

Now on to the H264 Pro recorder. This was meant to be the saving grace for me, the one product with good reviews and few issues. The first problem was getting the device to actually be detected on windows 7 without it spitting it back out saying the drivers are not digitally signed. Even after downloading all the proper drivers and firmware updates necessary. After disabling all device signing and getting media express to actually detect any sort of input what so ever the next problem was getting media express to work in any sort of way that would be deemed professional by even the likes of a dead rotting goat. Not only would it cut out constantly, but it wouldn't capture if another 3rd party program (like premiere) was open, and even when it did work, it would only do so for a few minutes before refusing to detect anything all over again. how you are allowed to put the term "pro" on your products is beyond me

im not some low level user of your products, I work in the Tv and film industry, i do a lot of video editing and capture from high end professional cameras like the RED and Alexa etc, all i wanted to do was capture a live signal from HDSDI into an edit program on my laptop (which is a high end Asus G75 with specifications that max it out in every way, I didn't want to use a Mac and shell out twice as much money for half the power)

All in all i have had ZERO success with 100% of your products and I will not only refuse to by anything that has come near your company ever again, but i will also be going out of my way to persuade others who are considering your products to look at a more reputable company. One that actually delivers what it promises rather than one that is essentially comparable to a cheap rip off manufacturer listing everything and giving nothing. Next time ill go with a reputable company like AJA or Matrox.

I am truly disgusted in every way about everything i have ever used of yours and i will never ever even consider you ever again. you are a company that promise so much and deliver so very very little.

LOL

I purchased the UltraStudio Express SDI and it has worked flawlessly for me so far...
just my two cents...

My experience has been mixed. Our Decklink and Multibridge systems have been flawless for years. We use them daily, all three. The oldest one was set up back in like 2004 and still captures uncompressed HD on an old G5 without complaint.

We had to return our Hyperdeck Studio because basically it didn't do what was implied in the marketing literature. Before purchase I asked a series of specific questions of the US sales office via email and was told that the box would do what we wanted it to do. (Insert editing to existing files, embedding of the timecode from an FCP 7 timeline to the file on the Hyperdeck. it doesn't do either)

last I checked, that marketing material hasn't been updated. That was a huge disappointment, because we spent a month trying to get it to work, only to be told that the information I had been given months earlier was incorrect.

Most recently, we had a hardware problem with an Up/Down/Cross converter. the replacement for it arrived a few minutes ago, and I'm about to test that to see if it's fixed.

We're holding off on purchase of a Teranex, because it seems that some of the things the marketing material says it does aren't yet implemented.

And this seems to be the crux of the problem with BMD - when it works, the hardware is rock solid and very reliable. But I think they have a tendency to underestimate their delivery times and announce product too early. Look at the Hyperdeck Studio, which was like 6-8 months late, or the Teranex 3D which still isn't shipping. every month, the shipping month is changed to the next month (in June it said July. In July it said August, etc...)

It's something BMD might want to take a good hard look at. I know the hardware underneath is quality, but shipping what amounts to beta hardware isn't cool when people are relying on it to get work done under deadline. I'd rather they do things like Apple - keep the product more or less secret until it's truly ready and very thoroughly tested, then spring it on the world. Don't set up the expectation that something will do something that it won't do when it ships, especially when we're talking about hardware that costs thousands of dollars. Either that or call it a beta version if it's not finished yet. I'm happy to beta test hardware if it's a beta test. But if I drop a couple grand on something, I expect it to do exactly what the marketing material says it does, when it ships (not months later in a firmware update).

-perry

The Shuttle and Ultrastudio work with my Asus G53 and G74 just fine. Though, these use the Fresco Logic USB3.0 controllers, not sure what the G75 uses.

Also, there is an option in MediaExpress to capture in the background, you need to turn this on if you plan on opening another application while capturing. If you plan on capturing (ingesting) in Premiere Pro, unfortunately, it doesn't offer this option, but that's an Adobe problem.

With your Asus G75, do you have the Asus video drivers installed, or the drivers straight from nvidia? You need to have the direct nvidia drivers (newest available) with a modified inf file. More info can be found here:

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/

I wouldn't run Beta drivers, as I haven't had much luck with those.

Most recently, we had a hardware problem with an Up/Down/Cross converter. the replacement for it arrived a few minutes ago, and I'm about to test that to see if it's fixed.

Sadly, this problem exists in the replacement downconverter. Has ANYONE else seen this, or can someone with a similar setup to ours run a quick test to see if they can reproduce it? BMD support claims to be unable to reproduce the problem, yet we can reliably. Details here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1321&p=6891#p6891

-perry

I have an ASrock z77 extreme4 motherboard and a renesas usb 3.0 PCIe controller. The shuttle simply gives me flashing images no matter which PCIe slot I plug it into and I've still not got any response with my issues.

I would not recommend this product to anybody.

I must admit that when I first went looking for ways to get HD in to my laptop (must be over a year ago)... I researched the USB3 Intensity Shuttle. At that time it was clear to me that USB3 was not a reliable approach (using BMD devices anyway). Nothing seems to have changed since then.

Even with my ATEM 1ME... I can access the USB3 output on one laptop (yay) but not my more powerful desktop (where I have an intensity pro anyway).

So... I would agree... it is Buyer Beware for any of the USB3 products.

Like the motherboards recommended by the Intensity Shuttle FAQ page don't even support modern processors. You would have to settle for a 3 year old computer just for this single product.

This thing cost me nearly $300, if you convert the currency straight over, and it does nothing.

Like the motherboards recommended by the Intensity Shuttle FAQ page don't even support modern processors. You would have to settle for a 3 year old computer just for this single product.

This thing cost me nearly $300, if you convert the currency straight over, and it does nothing.

BMD isn't the only company that recommends out of date computer hardware. Avid does it too. Ugh.

With respect to USB3 --

I've finished implementing a new high end desktop with USB3. Discovered the USB3 ports were VERY finicky.

I dug in hard on it (I'm a HW/FW/SW/Drivers guy)... and found that both host ports and external devices can implement USB3 in various unfortunately-not-very-compatible ways.

I finally had to get a custom registry patch from the host-port chipset provider to get mine working stably. Until then, in my testing USB3 was often worse than USB2 on throughput, and often crashed.

A few suggestions:

1) Make sure you own another device to test your USB3 port.
2) Use an HDTest tool to test USB3 I/O performance (like to an external drive) with various block sizes from 4kb up to 1mb.
3) Until it works smoothly and reliably at all speeds (4kb-32kb blocks will be slower but it should all make "sense"...)... do NOT expect to get good results from a more specialized device like BMD I/O devices.

I will tell you I like my Koutech flash media reader a LOT. I can get 75MB/sec from a fast compact flash card.

(I use PCIe not USB3 for my BMD I/O)

Blessings,
Pete