Best choice for capturing YPbPr over USB?
 

I apologize if this is out of scope for this forum. I'm trying to capture analog video from older video game consoles in as high quality as possible, without the use of dedicated upscalers/linedoublers like the Retrotink).

I'm currently using the GV-USB2 to capture S-Video in VDub, with huffyuv compression, and processing in VDub2, sometimes with avisynth if I'm working with 480i content.

S-Video is quite good for the most part, but all of my consoles support YPbPr or RGB either natively or with mods, and I use HDRetrovision cables to convert the RGB signal to YPbPr when necessary.

I'm hoping there is a USB capture card that will allow me to follow the same workflow I'm used to with VDub, but with the slight quality bump of "Component" video. I have read on this forum that the Blackmagic Intensity Shuffle (USB3) could be a good option, but I haven't seen enough discussion to feel fully confident purchasing one. I know there are many great options for PCIe, however my setup requires a laptop, so those cards are out of the question.

Any help/suggestions/samples would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all!

Video games' consoles video signal is pretty stable so the BM IS should do the job adequately, just avoid the chinese crap, although most of them are composite but I've seen some non brand cheap component capture devices.

Probably not what most would consider "first choice", but the AJA KiPro will accept component input - it's actually the only analog input it has - and that's a standalone device that can save in up to ProRes422HQ while preserving interlacing, or it can transcode/upscale if you set it to do so. Not sure how that'd look on a video game since I haven't tried it, but should work well. The quirk is that it saves onto drive modules that are Mac Formatted so you'll either need a Mac to pull the files off, or pay for a something like Paragon HFS+ for windows.

This device might actually be what I end up going with. I didn't think about it before but a standalone device would probably be ideal for my current setup. I do have a Mac for work, are the files themselves in a format I can work with in Windows?

Do you happen to own one of these and have a capture handy I could check out?

Yeah, I've got a KiPro. What console are you capturing primarily? I think my only console I have access to with component out would be a Nintendo Wii.

Anything 480i it should handle fine though from a game console since there will be no timebase errors there to consider.

And yes, the ProRes files themselves are easily processed by any of the Windows deinterlacers or nonlinear editors. ProRes was basically designed for nonlinear editing with low generation loss from editing exports in mind. File sizes are similar to lossless captures, but they are 10 bit instead of 8 bit traditional captures and depending if 422 vs 422HQ they are said to be visually lossless, though not technically lossless.

I'll be doing quite a bit of PS2 and Wii capture in the coming months. I've been capturing SNES and N64 as well, but have had audio sync issues with both. I suspect this is a VirtualDub problem though.

-- merged --

Just learned it's the Intensity "Shuttle" and not "Shuffle". Those pesky t's and f's got me.

I do have an SNES which is relatively easy to convert the RGB to component, but I have no idea how the KiPro would handle 240P - guessing it'll just see it as 480i though. Of note, the KiPro can probably also capture 480p over component and it also has HDMI capture, so if you put it through something like a retrotink 2x basic line doubler to get 480p over HDMI, it should be able to record that no problem as well. I have to see if I can dig some of that stuff out this weekend to test for you.

The shuffle was pretty popular. See this.