HD capture card

[magician]

Does anyone know of a HD (720p or better) capture card that works with MediaShout on Windows 7?

We currently have a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, but no presentation software is in its short list of supported applications. It used to work on our old XP machine, but now all we see in MS is a black screen.

[jonack]

What do you need to capture? Most of the black magic cards have a break out that allows you to capture any flavor of signal (SD or HD) with audio. The BM cards also have a simple capture program that you can use too.

Just as an aside: you won't be able to use the same computer for using MediaShout and capture a video stream at the same time. Often presentation software take over the cards completely and won't allow other programs to access them.

[magician]

We want to take the output of another computer and overlay song lyrics with MS. There's no need to record it, and no need for audio. We already have a Blackmagic card with the breakout cable, I can get the video to appear in the BM utility, but not in MediaShout.

This setup used to work in MS4 on 32-bit XP, but since we've upgraded to a 64-bit Win 7 box, it hasn't been working. I think it has something to do with DirectShow / Media Foundation, but I have no idea what to do about it. I've given up, but I really don't want to downgrade the machine to XP. If anyone can help me get it going, it would be much appreciated, otherwise I'll just get another device that works, as I can redeploy the BM card.

I know hardware keying is the way to go, but would rather spend $300 on a good capture card than $3000+ on a hardware device or alpha key package. It's for VJ images, not live camera, so a small amount of latency is not an issue. I'm currently doing this in SD over IEEE1394 with a Handycam, but as I'm scaling part of the image over a triplewide screen, it looks really crumby, so forget about the cheap Dazzles, Pinnacles etc. it needs to be high def.

[KeckCreative]

We want to take the output of another computer and overlay song lyrics with MS.

These are just curiosity questions... Why? What's the output from the other computer? Do you have separate people controlling background images and lyrics with lots of background changes occurring within lyrical phrases? I'm assuming building the backgrounds (still or motion) into the MediaShout's song pages was not an option?

[magician]

Yes, we have a second operator controlling the background images. This enables us to change the videos in sync with the lighting and the dynamic of the music, which often isn't when the words need to change. It's also becoming part of a multi-screen ProVideoPlayer system. So we want to shift all the graphics and videos to PVP, and just use the MS PC for keying song words.

[ministrytech]

You can do this natively over your network if you have ProPresenter and the advanced module. Then PVP controls all backgrounds in Propresenter as a network node.

Just FYI, in case you weren't aware.

[magician]

We've already looked into it. Unfortunately, PP doesn't support the advanced mapping function

[northerntech]

Do you have the latest Win7 driver from Blackmagic, since it sounds like you've had the card for awhile? We have an Intensity Pro in an HP with Win7 and it works fine. When using it with MediaShout 4.5 we select Video from the Select Background dialog (Graphic, Animation, Video) and it offers a Cirrus-Logic adapter we didn't even know we had, but the Blackmagic card is a choice on the drop-down list. Works fine after that. As far as I know the bundled capture software is not used at any point in the process.

[northerntech]

Just to clarify my one point above: what I should have said was, we don't use the capture software as part of the process such as you would if grabbing video from a camera for purposes other than MediaShout, but whether having that capture software installed on the computer adds some small component that makes the rest of it work is unclear. MS is the only software that is actually running in this process.

[magician]

Yes, I downloaded the latest software on my most recent attempt (Desktop Video 8.0, Apr 11). Although I just noticed that a newer version came out last month.