Review on 🎥 Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro 4K I/O Card: Capture & Playback Ultra HD at 30fps, 1080p at 60fps by Eddie Burgess

Update: I thought this worked fine, but in fact, recording with OBS 26.1 inserts a black frame from time to time, resulting in a crash in the video I'm creating. I don't understand the issue with Blackmagic's MediaExpress app, so it could just be an OBS error. However, I will continue to use my AV.IO 4k until the issue is resolved. So be careful, this may not be ideal for use with OBS on Linux at this time. I installed mediaexpress, decklink-sdk and Decklink from Arch Linux AUR and ran "systemctl enable DesktopVideoHelper.service". Then I turned off the machine and installed the card. After rebooting, I clicked the "+" button under Sources, selected "Blackmagic Device" and then just selected the Intensity Pro 4K from the list of devices. I'm so glad I got this card after spending so much time messing around with USB capture devices. While a USB capture device might work fine on its own, USB 3.0 itself is very finicky and I had to try many different USB/PCIe interfaces before I found one that worked. As a bonus, my camera (Sony alpha A6100) outputs 4K 29.97p with a 4:2:2 aspect ratio, which this BlackMagic card can accommodate. In contrast, the best USB capture device I've tried (Epiphan 4K AV.IO 4K, which is more than twice the price of a BlackMagic card) can only do 4:2:0 at this resolution - you will at least need USB 3.1 Gen 2. Another difference between this card and the USB device is that the video input is not shown as a V4L2 device. This is a bonus for me as I always want to use the OBS output as a virtual webcam (via obs-v4l2sink) and never want Google Rally, Zoom, Jitsi, etc. to touch my raw camera input. In particular, Chromium tends to get stuck in a mode where it wants to open my real webcam instead of the "virtual" v4l2loopback webcam, forcing me to jump through hoops to hide my real webcam from Chrome, while I still use them in OBS. With the BlackMagic card, the problem goes away because Chrome doesn't know anything about the BlackMagic card, so the virtual webcam is the only option it can open. However, if you plan to use your camera's HDMI output as a regular webcam, or perhaps want to use it with other applications, a USB capture device might be better. For example, you'll need to recompile ffmpeg if you want to get data from Intensity Pro 4K (although there seems to be an ffmpeg-decklink package in the AUR that probably makes this easier). One of the downsides is that the map isn't marked. inputs and outputs. The HDMI input is the bottom connector (farthest from the D connector), so that's where you want to connect your camera. Another disadvantage is that you have to rely on the dkms kernel driver, so in theory the kernel can change some kind of interface. and the driver stops working. The Decklink AUR pack needs two small fixes, and the pack maintainer doesn't have a BlackMagic card anymore, so there's some risk here. I think the worst case scenario is that you need to temporarily upgrade to the lts kernel until Blackmagic updates their driver or someone takes action to fix the package. be a safer bet. But in the end I'm very happy with the purchase and my only regret is that I didn't buy it sooner, especially before buying my AV.IO 4K (which is also a good device, just very expensive and not as good as the Intensity Pro 4K) .