Any feedback on Magewell capture cards?
 

Was looking at the Magewell cards and the seem to have overall good reviews. I was looking at this one in particular:
http://www.magewell.com/products/pro-capture-hexa-cvbs

What good reviews? :question:

Video forums are full of complaints about both Magewell and Blackmagic cards, for SD capture.
- For HD via HDMI or component, sure, great.
- For SD, it's about as good as an EZcap/Easycap (EZcrap/Easycrap) card.

There are some SD workflows that can apparently feed the signal through HDMI/component, but it requires DVD recorders that may add a layer of processing noise. And to date, I've only seen PAL users going down that route, as NTSC often forces upscaling on that output.

For this and similar Magewell cards, I didn't see much negative out there, whereas the Blackmagic devices seem to get torn apart everywhere. Looked specifically at BH and Amazon and some other reviews.

Yes, I have played with HDMI output before via the Toshiba DR430 and others and and there is certainly some mostly unwanted processing, but it isn't terrible.

They do offer these as well but there's definitely scaling going on (and who knows what else?):
https://www.amazon.com/RadioShack-1500548-HDMI-to-Composite-Converter/dp/B018D2OOXA/

The search for the miracle device continues :)

If a miracle device did exist, I'd probably already own it. :P

It's still a matter of "some of this, some of that" (multiple hardware devices in a workflow), probably not the most ideal OS, but it gets the job done as best as can be achieved. After that, it's the land of Avisynth.

I'd love to have a capture card that integrates true line+frame/field TBCs (with adjustable strength, ie JVC v.s ES10 line performance), has advanced proc amp controls (both YUV and RGB), advanced deinterlacing (QTGMC in GPUs), 4:2:2 hardware compression for lossless/MPEG/H264 (and ProRes422 would be a bonus), with choice of container (AVI, QT, MKV, MP4, MPG), using a specialized highly sophisticated (proprietary is fine) capture software interface (yet lean like ATI MMC was, so as not to caused dropped frames like NLEs do). And that's just the SD.

Am I forgetting anything? :hmm:

For HD, probably everything I could think of and more, and honestly quite a bit of it already exists in current HD offerings. However, I must say, what good is capturing HD beyond HDTV channels? The source is digital, and can almost always be acquired, so re-capturing seems daft. The only time you capture digital is if you don't have access to the source. In a professional setting, how often does that happen?

And again, of course, it needs mention again, the problem is all the HD cards really suck at SD work, worse than a cheap $15 USB knick-knack made in Chinese sweat shops. It's pathetic.

@premiumcapture: the card you mention is a more or less Pro card, just like BMD hardware, they expect a good quality video signal, so nothing wrong in that matter, i have good experience using a Panasonic VCR/DVR combo ES35V.
So important, is to have a good source in the first place.
btw.. ProRes422 isn't lossless, but you can use it to capture on BMD hardware, and put it in .MOV format, and later any other compression in post.
A lot also depends on your PC hardware, storage capacity, and through-put speed, where you decide for.