Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle

So, I bought a BM Intensity Shuttle in hopes that it would work on the Alienware m14x because of the USB 3.0 on it. I have spent over 4 hours now, troubleshooting and still get nothing but a black screen. If anyone has one of these and has been able to get it to capture video, let me know please!

BTW, does anyone know what kind of MoBo the Alienware m14x is based off of? Thanks!

 

Hi . . . yes, I have an Intensity Shuttle and just got an m14x yesterday, very surprisingly, the Shuttle is working fine on the m14x. I say surprisingly because I know the Black Magic products are very finicky about USB drivers and hardware, I've used them on desktop system.

I didn't do anything special, just downloaded and installed the latest drivers. I did have to go in to the Blackmagic Design Control Panel in the Windows Control Panel and choose the proper inputs before it was recognized. Also, you have to be sure to set the video capture format in your capture program to be exactly what your video device is sending. For example, I'm using a camera with 1080i output. 1080i 60 does not work, 1080i 59.94 does work . . . you'd think that the drivers would give an error or even auto configure the capture, but nope. The Shuttle drivers should expose all the possible formats it will capture to whatever program you are using. If you are using their Media Express program you need to make sure the project preferences are set so that they match your video device's format.

I'm using version 8.0.1 of their Desktop Video drivers and software.

Hope that helps,
Jeff

 

Any updates on this, or anyone else care to chime in?

I'm planning on buying one for my M14x to do PS3 and 360 video capture, but the price is a bit steep so I need to be sure the Shuttle is fully compatible before I purchase.

To iNTERNETUAL: Have you gotten it to work yet?
To eyevapor: Any problems so far?

Thanks!

 

Hi . . . no problems, have used the Shuttle several times with the m14x, had it running continuously for several hours. Actually seems to work more reliably than the PCIe version a friend of mine has.

 

Any dropped frames while capturing? A lot of people say that you need an SSD or a RAID configuration to prevent dropped frames. Can the M14x HDD handle the load at 720P 60fps?

 

Yes, my shuttle works perfectly fine! I use it all the time to stream Xbox 360 to Justin.tv. I have not tried to capture anything via hdd yet though, but I'm sure it's great as previously responded. Hope all goes well on ur end.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

 

Ah, yes, well I've been using it for just live video streaming, no recording. Recording is a whole different set of issues which are very dependent on the video format and compression. Recording uncompressed HD of any sort requires a fast RAID array. Recording using their hardware compression you can get by with a fast disk for 720, 1080 may require an SSD. They provide a good utility for testing the speed of your storage system, so it is fairly easy to figure out what you need. And pretty much the only time you'll have any dropped frames is if your storage is too slow to keep up. I had an older model BlackMagic card several years ago in a desktop and didn't have any dropped frames when using hardware compression and a 2 disk RAID array over USB 2.0.

 

Interesting... Does this dongle also let you output the video from a game console right onto you monitor with as little lag as possible so as to be able to play a game using the laptop's LCD as the only screen? Kind of a roundabout way to mimicking the HDMI In on the M17x R3, but with recording capabilities should one need them.

 

You can view the output directly in their Media Express capture software, I don't know that it can do full screen. The video feed also shows up in windows apps that support a video in, so there may be other routes. There's a frame or 2 of latency, it will not be as fast an HDMI feed into the monitor.

 

how did you get it working i recently just pruchased the m11x and th shuttle and seem to be having the same problems you did

wheres the best place to get the drivers and firmware?

 

Are you trying to record from PS3? As I understand it, unlike the XBOX360, the HDMI output from the PS3 contains HDCP copy protection and it is not possible to capture that via a HDMI capture device such as the BlackMagic Shuttle.

 

finally got it working with my camera and xbox 360, i didnt know there was a menu in the control panel i was meant to use noone even mentioned it till i found a post from 2 years ago hinting towards it trying to capture is horrible my drive is definitely too slow so ill have to work around it somehow, now i need to work out how to stream lol.