Blackmagic Design H.264 Format Video Recorder

Before purchasing, I contacted the company to make sure it would work with an older Powerbook G4 (1.67GHz) I had set aside and thought would make a dedicated encoding machine. They were not sure whether that machine had USB-2 (It does) and It turns out that the video converter works great with the Powerbook. As the instructions state, these older machines are not capable of displaying the full frame rate, but that does not impact the encoding.





Over the space of about two weeks I have converted our entire (large) collections of VHS tapes over to H.264, which is a huge saving over the time it would have taken to bring them in as DV and encode them to H.264 using iMovie or something similar. I have a Sony Media Converter and had tried that for a few TV shows, and it is a painful route because H.264 is a resource hog. However, this unit converted them in real time and at a quality that is on-par with the original tapes. What I did was:





1. Connect the VCR to the video converter by RCA jacks (it does support component or s-video, if you player does).


2. Connect the video converter to the laptop USB-2 port


3. Install and update the software.


4. Select Full Res and then change the bit rate from 2.0 to 3.5MBPS**. It does not make a huge difference, but I have a lot of hard drive space.


5. Check how long the movie/show plays for, add 1-2 minutes, and type that into the auto stop box on the converter.


6. Start the tape and then press the big red record button.


7. Walk away and leave it to record.


** Options are available to tweak sound, color, brightness and cropping, but in most cases I just used the default settings.





It really is that simple and the quality is great. I have seen a number reviews complaining about how bad the HD quality is when this is not designed for use with HD. You can record from HD sources, but if the unit tops out at 3.5MBPS, it is not going to handle 1080p or 720p for that matter without some losses even though the AppleTV configuration option is available. You have to use the right tool for the job and this is superb for standard definition quality inputs such as VCR or most none high definition television signals. Having said that, if you accept it has limitations you will be happy with the price performance of this little units, even with HD signals, if you are planning to view it on an iPod/iPhone or something similar. Consider that more advanced encoders such as those by canopus can costs hundreds of dollars more, and generally require a two step process to get them in to H.264, and without a H.264 accelerator, that step can take huge amounts of time compared to this realtime unit.Blackmagic Design H.264 Format Video Recorder