Building a capture rig with a PCIe card?
 

Hello all,

I stumbled upon this forum while researching Canopus and BlackMagic devices for analog video capture, spent some time browsing around for the past week, and have now decided to re-purpose some old equipment I have lying around into a rack-mounted capture PC for my live video projection rig! (honestly, pretty excited to go back to XP, haha)

Currently I'm limiting myself to PCIe cards, because I already have an old MOBO with a Q6600 and 4 GB of RAM (plus a power supply to boot!) that I'd like to re-use.

I've got my eye on a ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon X1800 GTO (or XL) PCIe card, because I can only find the round 9-pin "Domino" breakout adapter cables for sale...none of the "rectangular" adapters that seem to pair with X600/800/1300/1900 series.

Does this seem like a reasonable system? Anything I'm overlooking?

One issue that I'd like to find a way around is outputting to S-Video *while* doing a capture.

- Is my best bet to find some manner of scan-converter to get the DVI-I outputs to S-Video?
- Alternatively, would it be possible to run a second video card with S-Video? (say on a PCI connector) Or will this muck up my capture? (I take it capture can be finicky and laying another set of video card drivers on top of those for the X1800 seems iffy...)

Or am I better off scrapping this whole system, buying a cheap mobo with AGP, processor and RAM and grabbing one of the more available AGP AiW cards? (if any exist that do S-Video in AND out simultaneously...?)

The purple box and domino box are interchangeable. In fact, the domino is fatter, is can be harder to insert on some cards. The purple break-out box / dongle rarely has issues. I also find that domino ugly. The output cable bundle is more important, because it can be harder to find that the input box.

Why not split the input with a distribution amp of TBC with embedded amp. FYI, I'm about to put up my TBC-1000 for sale, and I may also be willing to part with my VP-299 distro amp. Both of these do what's needed. That's the route I'd take. I used to do stuff like this, reason I have the gear I do, but no longer. PM me if interested. The TBC-1000 is $350 and not sure on the VP-299 pricing. It's new, so probably $250.

DVI to s-video is going to be downgrade from digital to analog. Why do this? What I'd miss here?

You can't run two captures in the same box. (Sure, yeah, it's possible, with specialized equipment that costs more than your car, approaching mortgage values. Probably not what you want.) What would be the point to capture it twice anyway?

Thanks for the quick reply!

I think my meaning was obscured. I'm only going to be doing a single capture (which will indeed be coming from the output of a TBC->distribution amp chain) - I just want the ability to route video from the PC back into my video-maniuplation rig via S-video. I know I could swap dongles when switching from capture to playback...but I like to go for the more elegant solution that doesn't require me to root around in the back of a rack all that often ;)

As an aside, I've found much luck using two Blackmagic Ultrastudio Express Thunderbolt cards to ingest 2 SDI streams simultaneously via a proprietary software (the simply named MovieRecorder, haha) in codecs up to Prores 4444 on a MacPro at work. Solid capture, but then again - no analog to digital conversion going on!