krispyclean
Member
I was just curious as to what type of equipment people here use to capture video from ps3 and 360? Any help would be much appreciated.
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Video Capture from consoles
- Thread starter krispyclean
- Start date
For the best quality you want to be able to record with either a lossless codec or non-compressed, and for this the Blackmagic Intensity Pro is excellent. It can record from HDMI (no hdcp of course, so only 360 will work) and component. You'll need a big and fast RAID array though.
If you don't plan on using the recording for stills, a HD PVR from Hauppauge can do the trick nicely. It's connected by USB2 and records component only and compresses everything to H.264, but it's very convenient.
If you don't plan on using the recording for stills, a HD PVR from Hauppauge can do the trick nicely. It's connected by USB2 and records component only and compresses everything to H.264, but it's very convenient.
krispyclean said:
Blimblim said:
If you're looking for something a bit cheaper than the two mentioned You could go with Hava. I no longer have my 360 but when I did I used a Hava Platinum.
http://www.myhava.com/products.html
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=hava+platinum+hd&x=14&y=16
Here is some video I recently recorded with it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k6z1NtG2W0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_93yzWf1eM
I think it only captures dvd quality but thats good enough for me.
Blimblim said:
I'm currently using black magic for the office, but would like to buy something more affordable to use it at home for leisure and random captures. Can you tell me what kind of hardware would be needed to use the Hauppage?
EDIT: Also, what kind of program do you use for recording/snap capture?
The beauty of the HD PVR is that any PC with a USB2 port will do, basically. As far as I can tell only the bundled application will be able to record stuff. There is an unofficial but nice MAC app too.Varth said:
Of course you'll need a powerful CPU to reencode the TS (H.264/AAC) to something more manageable, unless you plan on doing nightly encoding
I know you were talking about HD captures, I was simply giving a cheaper alternative. As far as the pci card, I had one (Avermedia) but it wouldn't work due to the lack of TV outputs on my HDTV(haven't seen TV outs on any HDTV)Blimblim said:I was obviously talking about HD captures. If you are only planning on doing only SD a simple BT848/BT878 based pci card costing less than $50 is good enough
The last time I used their motionjpeg codec the result was terrible. I guess it's better now. That's good to hearForsete said:I'm using the card Blimblim mentioned, Blackmagic Intensity Pro. Works very well, however I see no problem capturing in MotionJPEG with it. The quality is like so:
Picture from captured video using MotionJPEG.
This way you can just capture to a regular internal SATA harddrive.
element
Member
Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro
Best option there is right now and only $199. This is a huge change from the Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro which is $1600 and gets pretty much the same quality.
Best option there is right now and only $199. This is a huge change from the Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro which is $1600 and gets pretty much the same quality.
Apharmd Battler
Member
WOW!
Got an Intensity Pro and it's awesome.
Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNT0jJzIWLI
Look at it in HD of course... and keep in mind that the original version is even better quality than Youtube...
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Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNT0jJzIWLI
Look at it in HD of course... and keep in mind that the original version is even better quality than Youtube...
.
So I needed an HD capture solution for my site, iPlayWinner.com and decided to go with the Happauge 1212 HD PVR about 2 months ago and couldn't be anymore pleased. Works great and the quality is amazing. I use it to capture Street Fighter 4 videos and stuff like that.
ElectricThunder
Member
Forsete said:
When you say you can use a regular old sata harddrive, do you mean that this is fast enough to capture hd video?
Right now I'm using the ADS Pyro AV Link to capture 480i DV video using component from my xbox 360. Quality is fine and it works really well with Sony Vegas Pro. But I want to go for HD if I don't have to buy a bunch of hard drives for a raid.
So, for instance, say I want to just capture at 1280 by 720p using the HDV codec, will my old sata drive be enough?
Sorry to hijack the thread, OP, but i have the same problem as you do. 
Hey Blim. You say that the fact that it compresses everything to h.264 is a bad thing?
Does it use low bitrates? I guess it does internal 1-pass hardware encoding (as opposed to offloading that to the CPU), since it uses the USB port to dump the files on disk?
I know that full uncompressed video is the best way to record (and then convert to anything else later), but that Hauppage doesn't sound that bad... And it would save me on the reencoding proccess (which is what put me off video encoding back when I did regular, SDTV video encodes).
I don't know, you just sounded too negative about it, when the points you highlighted as bad (USB, h.264 and component only) don't really sound that bad to me.
Blimblim said:
Hey Blim. You say that the fact that it compresses everything to h.264 is a bad thing?
Does it use low bitrates? I guess it does internal 1-pass hardware encoding (as opposed to offloading that to the CPU), since it uses the USB port to dump the files on disk?
I know that full uncompressed video is the best way to record (and then convert to anything else later), but that Hauppage doesn't sound that bad... And it would save me on the reencoding proccess (which is what put me off video encoding back when I did regular, SDTV video encodes).
I don't know, you just sounded too negative about it, when the points you highlighted as bad (USB, h.264 and component only) don't really sound that bad to me.
If you're serious about it:
http://www.digitalfoundry.org/
Also check out the blog there. Very fun stuff for people interested in the technical side of things.
http://www.digitalfoundry.org/
Also check out the blog there. Very fun stuff for people interested in the technical side of things.
krispyclean
Member
I think I'm going to go with the HD capture card someone mentioned. Appreciate all the help
USB certainly isn't a negative for me. It's incredibly convenient in fact. IIRC you can go up to 10 mbits/s with the pvr, it's not bad at all but on games with lots of motion (worse of these are racing games) the compression really shows. Other games give very good results.drizzle said:Sorry to hijack the thread, OP, but i have the same problem as you do.
Hey Blim. You say that the fact that it compresses everything to h.264 is a bad thing?
Does it use low bitrates? I guess it does internal 1-pass hardware encoding (as opposed to offloading that to the CPU), since it uses the USB port to dump the files on disk?
I know that full uncompressed video is the best way to record (and then convert to anything else later), but that Hauppage doesn't sound that bad... And it would save me on the reencoding proccess (which is what put me off video encoding back when I did regular, SDTV video encodes).
I don't know, you just sounded too negative about it, when the points you highlighted as bad (USB, h.264 and component only) don't really sound that bad to me.
vandalvideo
Banned
I prefer to use a jerry rig. Just hook my console up to a high quality DVD recorder, record the footage to harddrive, and transfer that digital footage to my PC through an intricate series of tubes.
Forsete
Member
Phatcorns said:
When I use MotionJPEG compression direct from the card, yes I am able to capture at 1280x720 60fps, no visible frame losses. If its uncompressed then the HDD cant keep up, but with MotionJPEG it has no problem saving the data fast enough.
The SATA drive is just a regular Samsung Spinpoint 7200rpm. I wanted to capture to a external HDD but USB 2.0 was not fast enough, and I never got eSATA to work.
720p 60 uncompressed requires a tad more than 100 MB/s (bytes, not bits). There is no way a single drive can write that much.Forsete said:When I use MotionJPEG compression direct from the card, yes I am able to capture at 1280x720 60fps, no visible frame losses. If its uncompressed then the HDD cant keep up, but with MotionJPEG it has no problem saving the data fast enough.
The SATA drive is just a regular Samsung Spinpoint 7200rpm. I wanted to capture to a external HDD but USB 2.0 was not fast enough, and I never got eSATA to work.
Forsete said:When I use MotionJPEG compression direct from the card, yes I am able to capture at 1280x720 60fps, no visible frame losses. If its uncompressed then the HDD cant keep up, but with MotionJPEG it has no problem saving the data fast enough.
The SATA drive is just a regular Samsung Spinpoint 7200rpm. I wanted to capture to a external HDD but USB 2.0 was not fast enough, and I never got eSATA to work.
Excellent, my question now is, is MJPEG the only compressed format that the Intensity Pro will do? I plan on using Sony Vegas 8 Pro but from what I've seen online, the MJPEG format the Intensity Pro uses is not compatible with Vegas. It's possible the latest drivers have fixed it, but the latest information I can find is from the beginning of 2008.
Thanks for the info!
Josh7289 said:
We've now got 2 TrueHDs here at the office. Couldn't be happier with them. Obviously this is way out of range for any kind of hobby/home use, but if you're doing any kind of real production using game captures then you should really give DigitalFoundry a look.
One question to those who capture their games.
Do people use this kind of adapter to connect the console to both TV and PC ?
There is no lag using this kind of adapter ?
Do people use this kind of adapter to connect the console to both TV and PC ?
There is no lag using this kind of adapter ?
I use a 480p capture card right now, soon I'll double up with the Blackmagic Intensity Pro.
If you want to see my videos (480p examples would be Umbrella Chronicles and RE4 and RE5), check out http://projectumbrella.net/media/videos
If you want to see my videos (480p examples would be Umbrella Chronicles and RE4 and RE5), check out http://projectumbrella.net/media/videos
I decided to go ahead and buy one today because I figured it would just work right, and it does! I'm capturing 720p xbox 360 videos using the compressed mjpeg format. HDMI is much more stable than component. Took me a while to even get component working right.
I can post a little tutorial and such for anyone who wants to know how I do what I do with it. I'll post a nice sample pretty soon too. Still working on it.
Oh, and you need a fast ass computer to play these HD videos. My cousin wasn't able to play any of the samples I sent him without it chugging along. I had to compress them down to wmv hd for him.
I can post a little tutorial and such for anyone who wants to know how I do what I do with it. I'll post a nice sample pretty soon too. Still working on it.
Oh, and you need a fast ass computer to play these HD videos. My cousin wasn't able to play any of the samples I sent him without it chugging along. I had to compress them down to wmv hd for him.
Benjamin_MFF
Member
Flek said:+
Ah, well played. I see that you have been keeping track of the current MPAA trial.
Anyway, I am planning to use Elgato's EyeTV hybrid. I used it awhile ago in a pinch when playing some games and recording them. My snes is next on the list of systems I want footage from.
Well, here are my results from the blackmagic intensity pro. Youtube version is ok, but the actual full quality is beautiful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtbRV_Ow_G0
The full quality can be found here: http://www.phatcorns.com/videos/halomontages/Behind the Wheel.mp4
The full quality can be found here: http://www.phatcorns.com/videos/halomontages/Behind the Wheel.mp4
I have the Intensity non pro...and capture at 720p 60FPS to a RAID0 and it works fine. File size is fucking huge as you could imagine....tried taht JPEG thingy and it looked like shit. How do you edit that shit anyway?
Heres a you tube vid COD 4. No sound because I didnt know about the work around to get sound working with the 360 and the NXE update.
for some reason youtube did not give it a HD option, only HQ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf3XkX6BlVo
Heres another I did...just playing around. Sound it outa sync a bit (was using one drive at the time of this capture and it couldnt keep up)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brXFjOe6lwU
Heres a you tube vid COD 4. No sound because I didnt know about the work around to get sound working with the 360 and the NXE update.
for some reason youtube did not give it a HD option, only HQ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf3XkX6BlVo
Heres another I did...just playing around. Sound it outa sync a bit (was using one drive at the time of this capture and it couldnt keep up)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brXFjOe6lwU
I'm using a blackmagic intensity pro as well. I got a dedicated raid 0 with 2 500gb harddrives so I can record 720p 60fps without any frame drops. Some examples:
360 via HDMI cables: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWKR7TTL2_Q&fmt=22 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypl-06vcUHM&fmt=22
PS3 via component cables: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNNENYjiu0&fmt=22
PC via HDMI cables: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRms5fpnPg&fmt=22
My only complaints about the intensity pro is that it supports a limited amount of resolutions and framerates, and the capture program has a limited amount of options too (it's a very efficient program though). Otherwise, it's a great capture card at a very good value.
360 via HDMI cables: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWKR7TTL2_Q&fmt=22 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypl-06vcUHM&fmt=22
PS3 via component cables: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNNENYjiu0&fmt=22
PC via HDMI cables: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRms5fpnPg&fmt=22
My only complaints about the intensity pro is that it supports a limited amount of resolutions and framerates, and the capture program has a limited amount of options too (it's a very efficient program though). Otherwise, it's a great capture card at a very good value.
Ranger X said:
it's a joke right? =( stop hurting me
one of my friend who went out of state for med school said i can borrow his upconverting receiver to pipe my wii through. if it works well that's another solution... and 500$ at least i have to spend (thank god for disposable income right?)
cameltoe said:
hateradio said:
I use ffdshow for all my codec needs in windows. it is a directshow "replacement" that you can then use any editor supporting directshow sourcing. the best answer for me is avisynth. However there's a HUGE curve you have to go through to learn how to use it... it's basicly a scripting language. However after you master it, it's really awsome, especially with all the other hobbiest writing function scripts/plugin/dlls for it that you can use. it's way more flexible than what commercial program offers in term of compatibility with files.
TheUnknownForce
Member
I have been wondering what capture device to use for a while, myself, as I am trying to get my show to be something of higher quality.
My college television station has a Canopus ADVC capture card which works kinda, but for some reason or other, there is audio issues and, subsequently, sync issues with older systems (but not for anything newer than Dreamcast, weirdly enough). As a result, I am now looking for a better capture card and for a cheapish price (Canopus cards run about 200 anyways, so perhaps half that?)
I plan to record with older systems and HD for me is not top priority. What would be the best choice for me? I'm also looking for a camera (been using a crappy JVC for over five years, and now it has a dead pixel), so could the two purchases be conjoined into one?
My college television station has a Canopus ADVC capture card which works kinda, but for some reason or other, there is audio issues and, subsequently, sync issues with older systems (but not for anything newer than Dreamcast, weirdly enough). As a result, I am now looking for a better capture card and for a cheapish price (Canopus cards run about 200 anyways, so perhaps half that?)
I plan to record with older systems and HD for me is not top priority. What would be the best choice for me? I'm also looking for a camera (been using a crappy JVC for over five years, and now it has a dead pixel), so could the two purchases be conjoined into one?
Did any of you intensity owners try this?
http://axts10.web.infoseek.co.jp/kusunoki/kusunokitvhd_smooth/
http://axts10.web.infoseek.co.jp/kusunoki/kusunokitvhd_smooth/
Forsete
Member
Blimblim said:
Yup I saw the data in the manual after I had already tried.
Phatcorns said:
Yup, its either MJPEG or uncompressed.
My workflow is like this. First I capture then I use VirtualDub to re-encode the MJPEG video into XVID MPEG4 (VirtualDub is also able to do some basic stuff like cutting and merging) also cutting the framerate to 30fps. The re-encoded file can be used within Sony Vegas.
I made this short Gran Turismo 5 Prologe trailer that way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEgfALu0iKM