Hesitant about Blackmagic products...

First, I am not a newbie in this sort of things. I heard a lot about Blackmagic's products and decided
to give one of them a try. I bought the Intensity Pro card and met and surpassed the basic requirements for its use. What I've noticed with this basic video product is that it is inconsistent in its functions. This is especially true of its sound reproduction capability. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not, and when it works be careful that you do not change a parameter in your computer that might throw the sound off again. Despite the many complaints about this problem, Blackmagicdesign.com does not seem to be doing anything about it. It seems to me that this is a design problem that they do not want to own up to. If that is the case, they should not keep that product in the market.

Coming from another line of products, I am now hesitant to make other much more substantial investments in some of their professional equipment. Am I wrong in assuming this?

HI.

I can only speak about the camera as I haven't used the Intensity pro CArd.

The camera itself is very solid, even in these very early days. I've recently been running the camera all day for literally hours on end and not having a single problem with crashing or not functioning.

I'm sure, like any product, there are sometimes issues that crop up and I would expect the camera won't be immune to those. I've been shooting with it in real world environments successfully over the last few months and so far I i've only been let down by a defective SSD (nothing to do with BMD).

I should also say I've had RED drives fail and CF cards fail as well, so no camera is immune to those problems.

jb

Sorry to hear you are having problems! I personally own the Intensity card and the company I work for bought 2 at my recommendation. All 3 have performed flawlessly, and are actually more stable than the Aja Kona 3 card we have in one system, which costs about 10 times more. You may want to try reinstalling software and making sure you have the most current version of the firmware. I am eagerly awaiting the shipment of the Cinema Camera which I ordered back in April after seeing it at the NAB show and I believe that Blackmagic makes high quality products at very competitive prices.

[Kristian Lam]

Hi Jmazz,

It's always possible that you have a faulty product and it needs to be swapped out. I would recommend downloading the running the latest driver from our website. If that does not help, give our support team a call and see if they can help you.

[Grant Petty]

Hi,

Your right, you could have a faulty product, or it could be an incompatibly with the device your recording from. Have you seen the problem with HDMI or analog input as that would tell us a lot. Also, do you see any problems with the picture, or is it just the audio?

Intensity Pro gets plugged into so many devices its possible there is some kind of incompatibly with it and that device. We would need to check that, so please let us know what types of device your recording from and seeing the issue.

Is it Mac, Windows or Linux?

Grant

At this point I feel the same as John Brawley. I bought the Intensity Shuttle (IS) for 2 purposes: 2 upgrade my old cam to be able to get HD, and to get direct, live capture. I set up Media Express (ME), and ran initial tests. I found it worked inpecably with S-Video, giving me exactly what BM said it would. I was, and still am, impressed on that part.

But soon afterward I got 2 new HD cams (Panasonic AG-AC160AEN, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2), both with HDMI outs. And this is where I am stumped. I cannot get capture in M E, through these ports. I have tried all settings (and I mean, ALL settings), both on the IS's control panel and on the cams. Eventually I wrote to BM support, who have also not been able to resolve it.

At one point I thought the HDMI cable was faulty. This turned out, to a point, to be true. I got a new one, and using directly into an HDMI monitor, both cams display perfectly. The next thing I did, was to try monitoring from IS's HDMI-out into the ext. HDMI monitor. That works fine, but still nothing in Med Exp.

The last thing I discovered, is (only with GH2) that although I get no live-view, when I go to "Playback" on the cam, it does show up in Med Exp.

So my question is, does IS work via HDMI capture into ME? If any IS users have an answer, it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

So my question is, does IS work via HDMI capture into ME? If any IS users have an answer, it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Claude, I don't have any answers for you except... you will probably get more responses to your question if you re-post this as a separate thread. Otherwise it'll just get buried.

Good luck!