What computer system to purchase
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There isn't one best card on the market. It depends on your needs. Blackmagics are very popular and work well as long as you know that their drivers are going to support your needs
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Blackmagic drivers are actually very good, the support however is aimed at current and emerging technologies. On a mac you have 3 sort of active capture systems- quicktime 7, Qtkit and Avfoundation. With Qtkit and AVfoundation the blackmagic gear works perfectly. With software that use the old quicktime capture system the support is not as good. This makes sense, quicktime is being depreciated and it is more important to provide support for the current and upcoming frameworks. Using qtkit I have never had any trouble with any possible format of the blackmagic capture stuff. I am getting into Avfoundation and so far the results are the same. I do not have so much experience working on windows with the BM gear but I have not had any trouble with using gstreamer, ffmpeg or quicktime 7 on windows. These libraries will be the base capture libraries for a lot of software.
Avfoundation on OSX is really good, it misses a few features but it is really optimised for modern video cards and the apple codecs like pro-res, this goes for recording and playback. Unfortunately Avfoundation and Qtki are not cross platform so I think Isadora would have to change dramatically to take advantage of these new frameworks and it would only be for mac.It is very specific but it could be great if Isadora integrated blackmagic capture support via their SDK (this is not a strange thing really). It would mean much better support for their hardware than relying on the aging quicktime framework.In the end I think the blackmagic capture gear is some of the best we can get, it is very flexible and reliable if used correctly and they offer models extending to 4k capture in 444 RGB and all the way down to SD video with pretty much every connector you can imagine. You just have to get the model that is right for you.The mac pro is for sure the best bet, but wait until the new ones are out- that means thunderbolt capture though unless you fork out the cash for an expansion chassis. -
Just to comment on this comment:
"so I think Isadora would have to change dramatically to take advantage of these new frameworks and it would only be for mac..."I am actively investigating into how AV Foundation can become the active playback system for Isadora on the Mac, without disturbing the means of playback on the PC. I have a target date in mind for this that will be no sooner than the end of October, but it's clear this is the direction in which we must go.Best Wishes,Mark -
Hi,
OpenCV capture implementation would be interesting on the pc side.Using blackmagic cards I get better performances using openCV capture than directshow capture.BestMehdi -
@Mehdi are you using a vanilla version of opencv? When you say you get better performance is the image quality better with opencv? Does it use less resources? Or give you higher more stable frame rates with more or the same resources? The default built in windows library for capturing with open CV is the ancient VFW video for windows. If you don't use that (set with a flag) you are using directshow in opencv anyway.
