Nice capture, my fav idol and fav outfit so far. 
I also have a BlackMagic Intensity Pro (I bought it for imas caps, yes I know that makes me certified insane lol) so I can do some requests in the future, but right now I need to work out what I'm going to use for the recording drive. People have mentioned using a 3-5 disk sata raid array but it appears your doing something else, so I was wondering what your using?
At the moment I have to cap at 720p using mjpeg, but ideally I want to do it uncompressed and then encode it later.
I can also provide you with online storage for videos as well if you like, but its an anime site, so not sure if that would be a problem or not lol.
Well, this'll be a long post, but it should answer virtually every question I could expect from you.
I do professional support (although due to Japan's crisis, I've resigned from Siliconera temporarily and my contacts told me they are unable to use the video I normally provide due to blackouts) so my equipment is actually borderline professional.
SAS is known as Serial Attached SCSI - You might have heard of SCSI - I'm using the next generation of it. Businesses use it for stuff like servers. I have the second generation of hardware (Which is SAS 2.0) and have had it for a year and a half now.
If you read the notes, you'd notice I'd state 3 figures - a raw write (at abbout 14GB for 135 seconds of video), a compressed lossless (which is 4.5GB compressed) and a master at about 500MB which was used to make the youtube video.
(For an idea, for the video, to read the raw capture correctly, you need to wriite at about 110MB/s - for an idea - A SATA 2 drive will read and write about 70 and wind down to about 40 when about to hit full, a good SATA 3 will do 110-150MB/s when empty. My SAS does 180-190MB/s, and scales down to about 160MB/s when it's about to hit max.)
(Although I have no idea how it handles sustained, which is what matters since capture cards don't ever let up - I only just ran the test now since I ended up with a SATA 3 drive as part of the setup by acciden so I might try record later on it, just to see if it can handle a sustained raw write, although I doubt it, because I ran it on differenting partions on the same drive, and it variated wildly, even though the drive is mostly empty (one has an OS and the other has a couple of programs))
I don't use a RAID setup - I only actually have one drive attached currently - which provides all the speed I need right now. I'll be adding further drives when I move to the 1080p60 space as well as 2k/1080p3D, but that will be at year's end, due to the fact it'd cost me about 2.5k US to do so.
The reason I went with the SAS is because attaching drives causes the speed to scale up at a near linear rate - (Two drives will net me about 350MB/s, 3 will net about 500MB/s and so on) and I can attach up to 8 drives to mine, and those speeds are maintained even as the HDs get full (The loss is about 25% just as it caps out), are rated to last with a 5 year warranty, and unlike SSDs, have a lifespan rating of a million + hours, not 500k write commits.
The downside? The SAS controller card is about 500-800 US depending, and drives are about 500-600 each for 600GB. I write mine off as a business expense and amatorise the costs accordingly.
You get business grade equipment though, so it's a cost/reliablity thing, and since I use it as a business tool, I sort of need it at the reliablity side of things. Being able to do im@s on the side without even thinking about it's a big bonus though.
I wouldn't insist on getting such an expensive setup - for me, I don't get the luxury of wasting time doing multiple shoots, and the people I support are annoying insistent with their specifications, so I build in a significant tolerance to make sure the only wall I hit is the hard drive running out of space (ie, my own damn fault for forgetting to move recorded data previously to working drives)
I'm fairly sure 2 or 3 SATA 3 HDs would do the trick at RAID0 reliably, although you will need to monitor for frame drops and have a place to store to keep the drive set working fast enough. I can't help there since as you can guess I don't need to worry about it
(And please don't whatever you do, use USB3 (either via the Intensity Shuttle or by a USB3 adaptor for HD or whatever or worse, both at the same time) for recording - this is due to the fact that most USB3 implementations do it WRONG - and consequently have issues.) unless you really can't avoid it, or you find one that does it right. It's a hit and miss thing at the moment, and from what I've experimented, I've haven't seen a hit yet.
I would recommend looking into some sort of abiliity to write raw though - I found the mjpg codec really REALLY annoying - mostly becauuse the field swap causes all sorts of issues (for some odd reason, it'll reverse depending if you're using the x86 or x64 version of the codec playing havoc on how it looks to other people) and encoding it can result in the field swap being the wrong way permamently, depending on the codec you're using and the system setup encoding it.
I run a i7 970 (as of last week), so my encodes are (From a 14GB raw write standing start) to that 500MB file about 2 hours, but more importantly, I can encode it in near damn anything I like, without something being funny about it. Your mileage may vary depending on your CPU of course.
Bear in mind if you REALLY have your heart set on the SAS, you'll need a PCIe-4 or 8x slot on the board - This will affect you badly particularly if you SLI and even worse so if you're capped to 16 lanes (Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) or the i3-15- i7 8xx series) - in fact, it's actually impossible if you do more than a 2way SLI, due to archectural issues preventing you even if you have the physical slots (which you most likely won't) because certain lanes are allocated to SATA 3, USB3 or onboard equipment.
Most recent SAS cards support SATA 3 raided up as well, although it's kinda of a waste.
If you have an AMD chipset (AM2+ or AM3?) that supports the Phenom X4/X6s you're luckier - they implemented the full PCI-e lanes (44 lanes off the top of my head?), although finding one with enough physical slots could be an issue.
Most current motherboards have some sort of RAID support, although how well it works out is dependant on how good your board is, more or less. You may need to get a card for that, but it's also significantly cheaper, and more likely to fit.
Anyway, if you want to host the files, I'm happy to provide - I won't be uploading 14GB monsters (At 1.4mbit up, it'd take about a day, and I'vve got streaming to do so...) although depending on demand I may send the 4.56GB files up. The 500ishMB doesn't seem a bad idea, and we can always link the youtube for previewing purposes, I guess.
I'd just want to see people make MADs (The videos that have been showing up on channel are me using MAD allocated footage), but that's because I've been doing such support since L4U's heyday.
I'll be picking up various requests once I actually finiish my programming work, which is in a few days. (I've been really, REALLY busy, and using this time to detox my head out of coding.))
