im@s2 manual blue screening - A quick adventure and some notes.

[nyachan]

Then again, since nico isn't in the US, it might pay to keep it around, in case youtube (which is subject to US law) suffers another set of screws curtesy of the US government.

actually...
http://www.niconico.com/
It's been around for a little while though I guess not many people have noticed haha. They recently promoted it at NYAF/CC though! It kind of feels like a NND/YT hybrid where some videos are on YT and others are on NND running with the translated outside thing (and with a different set of comments from this server's viewers). Oh and JP NND accounts do work for this site as well so no need for an extra account! Premium on this one is 25 cents too? I'm not sure on that. It seems to allow you to stream via their site or what-have-you, not sure if it carries over to avoiding economy mode.

[animagic4u]

Correction, I'm not sure if anyone said it, but to upload in HQ you need a premium.
Otherwise anything you upload looks like crap.

[Nii-san]

Nico requires you to pay to upload video. Considering you need to make various arrangements, it can prove tricky.

My role is sort of unique - I don't actually do video editting, since most of my work is based around proof of concept as well as support and supply services. I'm not a MAD maker, but I support a few of them.

Well, to be honest, you might (key word is might) manage with a compressed type. They can vary from the Hauupage PVR (Although I don't personally like it) and a few others which is about 300 US, to the Intensity H264 encoder (but that's 500 dollars but it takes everything but the kitchen sink and can be carried around in your pocket, but it's a quality piece of on the go equipment.)

It really depends on your hardware and what slots you have available.

I don't use a mac, but if you have one with thunderbolt (once again, a recent thing) I've been advised by a few people I know they'd marry their thunderbolt enabled Intensity Extreme, only because it's more reliable than the USB3 Intensity Shuttle for lossless work, but still has the 'pick up and go' qualities and can be used with their SSDs for lossless on the fly. That's about 300ish as well, from my knowledge.

Generally at the entry level of pixel perfect recording, you're almost always looking at a PCI-e card (Short of using the Intensity Extreme)

The most efficent is the Blackmagic Intensity Pro (And at 300 dollars it's cheap!), and for basic 3D and 1080p/2k you're looking at the Extreme 3D (1k). At the top end of town (at several thousand dollars) AJA are pretty much king of the mountain, and they also (for the low low price of just 5000 US) sell a converter which literally changes one signal to any other single you damn well please while giving HDCP the finger.

There's others (including I think Avmedia who do a suprisingly good RGB/D-sub solution which I've worked with and is very nice, if PC work is your deal, but it's expensive. Research your options, particularly if you want to record classic (240p or lower) or Arcade games.) although I stopped playing at the low end of town years back. The BMI was when I got it back in 2007 a godsend (although at 600 US, which back then converted to about 800 AU. Ouch!)

... but don't mind me. I really would like that swiss army knife of signal converter hardware, and I enjoy playing with video, particularly in the creative and the big leagues. Being able to stream in HD has a few other advantages too, particularly when it comes to having people help you play Japanese RPGs in, well Japanese.

This is all assuming you have a computer that's in the last couple of years. You might struggle with anything older than a quad core (I remember when a good 3000kbps encoded video took 8 HOURS per run, and had to do it twice for the two pass and the video length was somewhere in the vicinity of 5 minutes) simply because of the time required to encode all the raw data.

Now, if you have the patience you can live without a faster computer, or if you have a spare which means you can leave your encodes to run overnight while you do your work.

If you don't have a PC that won't drive you nuts (or you don't have one with a PCI-e slot on hand), and you still want in, personally I would advise (if you could afford it) a Sandy bridge i7 computer, well configured (which will set you back about 1000 all up and built) and load a BMI into that, and maybe a SSD or a RAID card + several HDs (not sure which one's cheaper).

If you don't like it enough, at least you have a computer that'll do well for a while yet, and you can play FPSes, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 or something.


As for programs, I can't condone piracy in any manner, but to start, try using virtuadub. It's fairly good as a starting point, and then you'll need to find a good h.264 encoder. Unfortunately the options I have (Carbon Coder for batch encoding and watch folders and Adobe Premiere Pro) are uh, in the vicinity of several thousand dollars and are probably not a good idea unless you can acquisition them.

I built my PC this past summer, it's got the Intel i7-2600k, 4GB Corsair XMS3, and two Nvidia GTX 550 Ti in SLI. I have an open PCIe slot so I'm thinking the Blackmagic Intensity Pro would be fine. I don't need mobile solutions since I'm doing this at home on my PC, but mostly because my laptop is garbage compared to my PC. and the only thing I'm looking to work on for the time being is iM@S.

As far as software is concerned, I have the Adobe CS5 Master Collection, so I do have Premiere Pro for encoding. In addition to this, you're saying I should try virtuadub right?

[Setsuna]

I built my PC this past summer, it's got the Intel i7-2600k, 4GB Corsair XMS3, and two Nvidia GTX 550 Ti in SLI. I have an open PCIe slot so I'm thinking the Blackmagic Intensity Pro would be fine. I don't need mobile solutions since I'm doing this at home on my PC, but mostly because my laptop is garbage compared to my PC. and the only thing I'm looking to work on for the time being is iM@S.

As far as software is concerned, I have the Adobe CS5 Master Collection, so I do have Premiere Pro for encoding. In addition to this, you're saying I should try virtuadub right?

Well, that's new (and sort of what I'd recommend actually) although due to SLI, you'll need to check the PCI-e lane total and how many lanes that second card is running in.

This is where I get very slightly technical (and goes to show how much research I put into stuff like this) and I can't make it any simpler.

There are a total of 16 available PCI-e lanes (the board can physically hold more, but this is how many will be running at the same time) on the Sandy Bridge i7 platform. This is for all devices barring the first video card, which gets an additional +8 lanes.

(This is down on the 32 lanes +8 that the i7 9xx series runs on, and the 32+16 that the AMD chipset runs on)

Normally this isn't a problem, unless your motherboard does the following:

8x+8x for Video card 1 + 8x for Video card 2 + 0x + 0x + 0x (If there's a 5th slot.)

This is a straight out 'Check your motherboard manual' thing. If it DOES do that, you'll have to find out if it's automatic (namely a slot detection) and if so, how to tell it to NOT do that and tell it to distribute the lanes so the BMI is always with the 1x it needs.

Mechanically supporting PCI-e and pulling the data out of it are two very seperate things. Boards will crash if you try using more throughput than can be supported.

If you're running a sound card out of an additional PCI-e slot, your allocation may look more like this:

8x + 8x + 4x + 1x (assuming 4 slots total) or 8x + 8x + 4x +1x +1x

That's doable (if you have the space.) although it leaves your expansion options a little limited.


I have no idea what your board configuration is, but PCI-e management matters. It's more for future notes, particularly if you intend to run a RAID/SAS dedicated card (The moment it loses the full PCI-e lane access, the board WILL crash causing a Kernel Panic and/or blue screen) and the cards will often WARN you in the manual over such an event and to plan accordingly.

It might also be worth noting if you experience crashes during the record process - your solution MAY be to pull out the SLI support card.

Even with all of that, I still would advise PCI-e over USB3.0 though. USB 3.0 is flakey from reports, even though the Shuttle supports 480p. (The card doesn't)

That's mostly for later - you should have native RAID support on the board, and you can use that (or a single SAS on SATAIII) to start with.


As for the software side, I suggested Virtualdub only because I don't really like Adobe Premere Pro for basic operations - If trimming frames and slapping a watermark is what you need to do, you probably can do it far faster on Virtualdub than on Premere Pro, really.

I didn't pay for the copy I got (It's a site licence copy that was gifted to me by a business when I first started and still do a bit of freelance for.) and to be honest, I don't like it very much, since it is usually overkill (and clunky too which is a bad combination when you're in a hurry.).

With encoding, I don't use (and never have) used anything from Adobe for encoding - I cut my teeth using x264 via command line, then moved to Carbon Coder after another freelance job scored me a licence (as payment) and although overkill, is by far the most brain dead easy solution for h.264 encodes while being scarily effective. If it wasn't a couple of thousand, I'd strongly recommend it to well, anyone. It's designed for broadcast studios for mass, rapid and automated distribution.

I still use x264 by command line occassionally, mostly for Touhou type work.

Watch folders (ie if something shows up in it, it'll automatically encode then execute any instructions you put on it), all sorts of encoding options and automatic uploading (It does ftp only though) with all sorts of suboptions is pretty useful, although for most part, the real fun is in the administration side which manages the automation. If you can get your hands on it... *cough*

There would be only ONE thing I want to find (and I sincerely doubt that anyone made such a program) and that is to have a program that can be placed on watch, and upload a video to youtube while reading a txt file (in XML I guess) to automatically populate the description and what have you.

But that's me being lazy, and getting way ahead of your requirements at this point.

You'll want to check the PCI-e lane situation (just in case) then pick up the card and maybe a SSD/enough HDs to get the speed you want. Just note what I said about space and cost and stuff.

But you should do relatively well for encoding. You might also want to look into broadcasting games live, and for that I'd suggest Wirecast. (Maybe Xsplit has learnt to behave, but last time I tried it, it liked hijacking the BMI drivers, which is a bad bad idea...)

[TheTanStar]

I built my PC this past summer, it's got the Intel i7-2600k, 4GB Corsair XMS3, and two Nvidia GTX 550 Ti in SLI. I have an open PCIe slot so I'm thinking the Blackmagic Intensity Pro would be fine. I don't need mobile solutions since I'm doing this at home on my PC, but mostly because my laptop is garbage compared to my PC. and the only thing I'm looking to work on for the time being is iM@S.

As far as software is concerned, I have the Adobe CS5 Master Collection, so I do have Premiere Pro for encoding. In addition to this, you're saying I should try virtuadub right?

Just to put my 2 cents in: If you really want to record HDMI from a PS3, there is one card that will break HDCP that I know of (Only through a loophole using an old driver though, so it's legal). That card is the AverMedia AverTV HD DVR if you're interested in it. The loophole apparently will work using Virtuadub to record, but since I personally don't have it, I can't vouch for it actually working.

[Setsuna]

Just to put my 2 cents in: If you really want to record HDMI from a PS3, there is one card that will break HDCP that I know of (Only through a loophole using an old driver though, so it's legal). That card is the AverMedia AverTV HD DVR if you're interested in it. The loophole apparently will work using Virtuadub to record, but since I personally don't have it, I can't vouch for it actually working.

If  I recall correctly, that didn't pass through a completely uncompressed signal though. The HDMI bonus gets defeated by the fact you're stuck with a compressed signal (It was a hardware thing, from memory.) and even so it was capped off at 1080i.

I might be wrong about that though, since there's a lot of cards out there...

[TheTanStar]

I believe it captures uncompressed video, since it uses the CPU for encoding. If it was done through hardware, there wouldn't be a CPU bottleneck on the encode; This is most apparent when performing a live encode using Lagarith or HuffyYUV which no hardware encoder that I know of supports.

[Nii-san]

Well, that's new (and sort of what I'd recommend actually) although due to SLI, you'll need to check the PCI-e lane total and how many lanes that second card is running in.

This is where I get very slightly technical (and goes to show how much research I put into stuff like this) and I can't make it any simpler.

There are a total of 16 available PCI-e lanes (the board can physically hold more, but this is how many will be running at the same time) on the Sandy Bridge i7 platform. This is for all devices barring the first video card, which gets an additional +8 lanes.

(This is down on the 32 lanes +8 that the i7 9xx series runs on, and the 32+16 that the AMD chipset runs on)

Normally this isn't a problem, unless your motherboard does the following:

8x+8x for Video card 1 + 8x for Video card 2 + 0x + 0x + 0x (If there's a 5th slot.)

This is a straight out 'Check your motherboard manual' thing. If it DOES do that, you'll have to find out if it's automatic (namely a slot detection) and if so, how to tell it to NOT do that and tell it to distribute the lanes so the BMI is always with the 1x it needs.

Mechanically supporting PCI-e and pulling the data out of it are two very seperate things. Boards will crash if you try using more throughput than can be supported.

If you're running a sound card out of an additional PCI-e slot, your allocation may look more like this:

8x + 8x + 4x + 1x (assuming 4 slots total) or 8x + 8x + 4x +1x +1x

That's doable (if you have the space.) although it leaves your expansion options a little limited.


I have no idea what your board configuration is, but PCI-e management matters. It's more for future notes, particularly if you intend to run a RAID/SAS dedicated card (The moment it loses the full PCI-e lane access, the board WILL crash causing a Kernel Panic and/or blue screen) and the cards will often WARN you in the manual over such an event and to plan accordingly.

It might also be worth noting if you experience crashes during the record process - your solution MAY be to pull out the SLI support card.

Even with all of that, I still would advise PCI-e over USB3.0 though. USB 3.0 is flakey from reports, even though the Shuttle supports 480p. (The card doesn't)

That's mostly for later - you should have native RAID support on the board, and you can use that (or a single SAS on SATAIII) to start with....

The motherboard I use is the ASUS P8P67 EVO, and in the manual it says that when running dual VGA, both those PCIe 2.0 slots run at x8.

I don't have any other cards plugged in, but both cards each block one PCI slot since they are so massive. 

No worries though, there is one unblocked PCIe 2.0 x1 slot above the main VGA slot, so that's where I'm looking to put the Blackmagic Intensity Pro; doesn't get in the way of anything.

...As for the software side, I suggested Virtualdub only because I don't really like Adobe Premere Pro for basic operations - If trimming frames and slapping a watermark is what you need to do, you probably can do it far faster on Virtualdub than on Premere Pro, really.

I didn't pay for the copy I got (It's a site licence copy that was gifted to me by a business when I first started and still do a bit of freelance for.) and to be honest, I don't like it very much, since it is usually overkill (and clunky too which is a bad combination when you're in a hurry.).

With encoding, I don't use (and never have) used anything from Adobe for encoding - I cut my teeth using x264 via command line, then moved to Carbon Coder after another freelance job scored me a licence (as payment) and although overkill, is by far the most brain dead easy solution for h.264 encodes while being scarily effective. If it wasn't a couple of thousand, I'd strongly recommend it to well, anyone. It's designed for broadcast studios for mass, rapid and automated distribution.

I still use x264 by command line occassionally, mostly for Touhou type work.

Watch folders (ie if something shows up in it, it'll automatically encode then execute any instructions you put on it), all sorts of encoding options and automatic uploading (It does ftp only though) with all sorts of suboptions is pretty useful, although for most part, the real fun is in the administration side which manages the automation. If you can get your hands on it... *cough*

There would be only ONE thing I want to find (and I sincerely doubt that anyone made such a program) and that is to have a program that can be placed on watch, and upload a video to youtube while reading a txt file (in XML I guess) to automatically populate the description and what have you.

But that's me being lazy, and getting way ahead of your requirements at this point.

You'll want to check the PCI-e lane situation (just in case) then pick up the card and maybe a SSD/enough HDs to get the speed you want. Just note what I said about space and cost and stuff.

But you should do relatively well for encoding. You might also want to look into broadcasting games live, and for that I'd suggest Wirecast. (Maybe Xsplit has learnt to behave, but last time I tried it, it liked hijacking the BMI drivers, which is a bad bad idea...)

So basically I'd get along better with VirtualDub over Premiere Pro if getting your recommended software (namely Carbon Coder) proves to be too challenging? 

...You'll want to check the PCI-e lane situation (just in case) then pick up the card and maybe a SSD/enough HDs to get the speed you want. Just note what I said about space and cost and stuff.

But you should do relatively well for encoding. You might also want to look into broadcasting games live, and for that I'd suggest Wirecast. (Maybe Xsplit has learnt to behave, but last time I tried it, it liked hijacking the BMI drivers, which is a bad bad idea...)

Yeah I'm looking at SSDs, in particular the Corsair Force 3s with SATA 3.0, not sure what size, what would be the minimum size you'd recommend if used strictly for this project?

[Setsuna]

I believe it captures uncompressed video, since it uses the CPU for encoding. If it was done through hardware, there wouldn't be a CPU bottleneck on the encode; This is most apparent when performing a live encode using Lagarith or HuffyYUV which no hardware encoder that I know of supports.

Actually there's been some trickery I've found - some will encode regardless, and pass through the data as 'raw'. It's not, but most non professionals don't notice, and only really becomes apparent when you bench the write throughput or you compare raw sources to each other.

It's kinda dirty actually, and I know people in the business who've been burnt by PCI-e cards which pull it.

[Setsuna]

The motherboard I use is the ASUS P8P67 EVO, and in the manual it says that when running dual VGA, both those PCIe 2.0 slots run at x8.

I don't have any other cards plugged in, but both cards each block one PCI slot since they are so massive. 

No worries though, there is one unblocked PCIe 2.0 x1 slot above the main VGA slot, so that's where I'm looking to put the Blackmagic Intensity Pro; doesn't get in the way of anything.

So basically I'd get along better with VirtualDub over Premiere Pro if getting your recommended software (namely Carbon Coder) proves to be too challenging? 

Yeah I'm looking at SSDs, in particular the Corsair Force 3s with SATA 3.0, not sure what size, what would be the minimum size you'd recommend if used strictly for this project?

Actually, I'd recommend the latest build of the x264 command line over BOTH actually, if you can't get a high end encoder that has quality in mind. The reason for this is simple - command line will let you do anything within its power and will (unless you're asking for something nonsensical) just do it.

When encoding, figure out exactly what your im@s setup requires (After learning it) then script it in a bat file. A lot of the others out there are just guis for the x264 command line anyway, so you might as well skip those and go to the source.

Use whatever you're comfortable with in terms of learning the UI for edit work. Just for encoding (which is grabbing your results and saving it, which in turn is more reason you want more space.

With the PCI-e lanes, it's not a physical thing. If it works it'll work, but there are technical reasons it may not work.

As for the math...

You require 130-140MB/s write.

A 2 minute 15 video should net you somewhere in the 14.7GB (Just say 15GB) per video. (That's me beng rather accurate though.)

The math is completely linear too.

Ideally the bigger the better, but you sort of have to pay for it.

If you're planning to run processing on the drive you'll need some of the space free to do the write and encode work. (With raws you won't have the luxury of loading it all into RAM, and you'll need editting space if you're going to piece together two or more unless you were planning to move all records immediately to another drive)

So if you want to record 5 minutes, you'd need about 40 GB? That should be enough for im@s work (2 clips at a time) or Diva Theatre work.

If you're demoing say a shootemup stage (say Deathsmiles IIX or something) you'll need about 10 minutes reel time, at about 80-100GB.

If you're planning an RPG battle of an hour or something... SSDs are the wrong place to be.