MOLTEN PICTURES LLC

The Video Parasite
Building the machine Installing software/hardware Testing

THE IDEA

I want to create a portable computer that can be used to capture video from a component or HDMI source. By capturing from the video out stream on most cameras we can intercept the video signal before it gets compressed. If we plan on doing any greenscreen or color correction in post we want to avoid HDV and AVCHD compression from the camera. This rig will let us do that.

THE PLAN

The plan for this project is to use small form factor computing like Mini-ITX boards with a Blackmagic Intensity Pro capture card.

THE PARTS

Mini-ITX motherboard
Celeron 440 CPU
Blackmagic Intensity Pro
Boot off a CF card
Write to external 3.5" HDD via ESATA
Compress with Blackmagic JPG or Cineform codec
Power with 12V battery pack(s)

STATUS

8-19-08
The base system is together. Waiting on PCI-e extender.

8-20-08
Attempting to install OS.

8-29-08
Wrestling with Installing XP on CF card. Breakthrough came when I found that the Sandisk Extreme III 2GB was bootable and formating the disk as FAT made the system much more stable.

9-2-08
OS and Blackmagic installed, Celeron 440 not fast wnough to compress video stream. Succesfully captured uncompressed video to 3.5"HDD RAID 0.

9-18-08
Core 2 Duo 3GHz installed into the system means that I can record compressed video through Media express or Cineform with no priblems. The system build is pretty solid and I need to start doing some tests.

THE EXECUTION

Building the beast Part 1
Installing the software/hardware
Testing