All BlackMagic's 4K capable cards have terrible small whining fans - so that's not an option for me.

I've checked Magewell Pro Capture HDMI 4K. The specs are:

Support for 4:2:0 8-bit capture formats: NV12, I420, YV12

Support for 4:2:2 8-bit capture formats: YUY2, YUYV, UYVY

Support for 4:4:4 8-bit capture formats: V308, IYU2, V408, BGR24, BGR32

Support for 4:4:4 10-bit capture formats: V410, Y410

Three questions:

1. Does 444 mean I will be able to record to 10-bit 422 ProRes in OBS or 444 means strictly 444?
2. Will I be able capture HLG from Panasonic GH5? Do I need some special support of HDR video by the capture card or is it just the matter of setting correct color space in editing software?
3. Any other options out there? Magewell is somewhat expensive.

For some years I’ve done local lanparties here in my little 1 million population country. There has been somewhere around 150 participants, we have played some older and newer games and it has been fun.

Last year i also did some streaming for event’s tournament (in estonian language) and got surprisingly quite few people watching. I got some feedback saying that it’s pretty fun and all that but there is something missing, it lacks a little bit of that „live“ effect. Unfortunately I’dont have much time to play these days, but I really want to do something extra for local community this year to add a little excitement.

So the plan I want to realize is like this:

Up to 2-3 cameras in sync with eachother, one of them totally wireless with video and sound. Commentary table with 2 mics, lavalier or headworn type which could be used in the schools halls and corridors where events usually take place. Create tv-show or sportslike viewer friendly experience with live editing.

The resources i have: ’Laptop with usb3 port. (haven’t bought yet, need one with good usb3 interface and nvidia chip) ’PC computer with usb3. ’Firewire camcorder hv20 with analog output (firewire connection has 3 secs of lag so can’t be used) ’GH2 ’H4N ’Firewire external sound card with 1 XLR and 2 Hi-Z line inputs (H4N can be connected through line input) ’1 lav mic(works only with h4n 3,5 input, not Hi-Z / line ones) ’Rode videomic

The budget i have is somewhere about 2000€. All gear must be availible for shipping to Estonia (no extra tax inside EU) The things i think i need to buy but are not totally sure about are:

’USB3 HDMI Capture card. It would be good if i could connect two cameras into one, or i might need to use 2 capture cards. But is that even possible? Does USB interface allow such bandwidth? ’Used camcorder with CLEAN hdmi output and usable as usb webcam. I know some Canon camcorders are useable with USB, but i don’t have any idea about delay’s and sync, would be very useful feature nonetheless. ’2 lavalier or headworn microphones for commentary table ’Wireless hdmi video and sound transmitter with minimal to no delay (uncompressed signal is a must?) ’External sound card with more inputs or analog mixer (h4n itself might be enough in some situations) 'usb webcam (do these things have delay?)

The programs used will be Open Broadcaster or Xsplit, but can also be something else if it’s not too expensive. I have done research about allmentioned things myself and later I try to post some of my own conclusions after i have sorted all the links. At the moment things feel a little overwhelming, but it’s ok. ;)

At the moment the thing I haven’t figured out is how will i be able to monitor the cameras if i should buy 2 capture cards. I want to avoid buying Blackmagic ATEM just for monitoring function. I need a some way to monitor capture card inputs without showing them on Xsplit stream window. Basically, I need to preview the camera feeds that you'd throw live before you switch to them. At the moment it’s not possible with Open Broadcaster, Xsplit has a preview scene function in beta 2.0 at the moment which can be a workaround i guess. But maybe there are some other program to monitor capture cards inputs? I think Wirecast supports it, if can’t find any workaround then I might be forced to buy it..

There is also an older thread with also some good discussion: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/6391/web-streaming-hdmi-recording-2-3ghxs/p1

I would be most grateful if you would share me your advice and knowledge to make this Starcraft dream of mine happen. = )

Did any one experienced about enlarge a photos using screen capture. What are the necessary steps. Using retina macbook pro, I previewed the photos, zoom in then using command+shift+4 to capture . Look like it do the trick, but I was not sure.

Your inputs would be appreciated.

I'm confused and surprised that a card rated up to 95mb/s is crashing with a hack that is at 44mb/s??? Has anyone else experienced this? It also crashes on my older Transcend Class 10 16GB cards but not that much more frequently. Completely lame given the cost differential between these two cards.

I'm considering reverting back to baseline, but nervous to do so in the middle of a shoot (the vanilla hack was my first hack on the GH2 so this is still new to me). For now I'm working around it. Any advice or thoughts are appreciated.

The short story: 31-OCT, the day the Portuguese Budget for 2013 was approved. People gathered in front of the Parliament to say we're being governed by thieves. Not very original I know, but it's a great place to shoot video and take pictures (well at last until it degenerates into mayhem which is rare around this parts but not unheard of until very recently). This is how I worked it.

1) The extremely simple setup:

GH2, screen folded back as a monitor, Transcend 32GB class 10, Samyang 7.5mm fisheye (my favorite video lens), set and forget to hyperfocal, ISO 400 I believe, SS=1/25s. Flowmotion 2 was used as I never know before hand how much video I'm going to capture or how many photos I'll be shooting, so I need something that is very good quality but doesn't make me have to change cards when something very important is happening. If the card is pre-formatted (the extended, not the quick format) it has never failed me to span.

2) The capture:

This is all about getting there up front and trying not to shake the camera. The police until very recently (and only after a 1h stone shower) has been instructed not to charge, so it's an easy job, you just dodge the TV reporters and other amateurs like me. So, here's my first mistake: the aperture is fine, this lens is sharp as an axe, but should have upped the ISO and set a faster SS because in these situations you are always bound to get bumped and it shows in wobbles after software stabilization.

3) Defishing the Samyang:

Load the MTS into AE. Export as image sequence. Use a batch (http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/69869#Comment_69869) to defish the images and import the output again to AE now as image sequence. The defishing was done using the Panini projection. It's loads more natural on people than Rectilinear, it preserves a lot more corner resolution and still manages to keep a few lines straight. This was the first export and not reasonably quick because the synthesis part takes it's toll: ~2-3fps.

4) Stabilizing:

Throw AE's Warp Stabilizer on the footage. Set the "Smoothness" to 15-25% (it will require much less cropping later) set borders to "Stabilize, Synthesize Edges" (again a lot less cropping) but drop the "Synthesis Input Range" to 0,2s otherwise you'll bog AE. In this kind of footage there is usually little point in using a higher value. Skim the footage looking for black borders and try to resize and reframe it so that they don't become evident. Note: defishing after stabilizing should make more sense as you would have more image to work with (defishing crops it) but from a few rough tries, the AE stabilization isn't clearly as effective when working on fisheye footage. This was the second export and a very long one: below 1fps.

5) CC & Denoising:

Used some of ColorGHear's gears, notably GHrain killer to kill a bit of noise and blockiness, but the footage was already very clean from the start and little color correction was used, just a little bit of levels adjusment. This was the third export and I believe it was even longer than the third due to the noise reduction filters: below 0.5fps.

6) The "so long" part: video effects, tracking and subtitling:

Translations were pretty quick, the hard and long part (at least until I found out how to smooth it) was tracking. It was fastidious to track people's features, takes a long time and needs constant review and adjustment. In the end I found out a few tricks (like increasing the tracking area) and smoothing the tracking points. This eased the job a lot and gave much better results. In the end I had to do it sometimes up to 3x until I was satisfied with it. In the process I had to learn a lot about tracking, smoothing, 3D objects, texting, transitions and light sources. This was the forth, the quickest and last export, probably around 10fps.

7) Audio mixing.

This was the part I was more ignorant about, but turned out to be pretty simple. Even though it's pretty rough, the footage is little demanding with so much crowd noise. It was as simple as importing the last video export from AE into Premiere, importing the original sound, importing also "Le Tigre - Dike March 2001" cutting and pasting a few pieces of this track and adjusting the volume here and there to serve the original events while leaving the words of the protesters audible when needed and off I was to the final export.

The resulting video can be found here:

Here are a few pictures of the event.

Anything more you may want to know about any part of the process I'll be glad to detail it.