A Captivating Experience.
Grass Valley Pegasus.
This compact PCI-E x1 card was conceived by Grass Valley, a company specializing in developing and distributing technology and software for video production. Being a former devotee of Canopus (a business acquired by Grass Valley) I purchased one in late 2007 and used it mainly for archiving a combination of Sky HD broadcasts and stacks of slowly decaying VHS cassettes.
At the time it was prohibitively expensive (about £700) and only capable of capturing in a proprietary format evolved by Grass Valley themselves, known as “Canopus HQ”.
Compared to uncompressed avi, its compression ratio was approximately 5:1, meaning on average, it consumed five times less space whilst retaining a picture quality indistinguishable from the original footage, even when allowing for several generations of exporting and recompression. It was also a stable and responsive format during editing.
Unfortunately, the card’s HDMI input was the protocol’s earliest revision (1.0), and proved extremely critical, ingesting signals from a precious few number of sources. When it did work, recordings were silky smooth and utterly devoid of dropped frames over and above those already induced by exceptionally demanding games and benchmarks.
It also accepted a generous range of native computer and television resolutions and its analogue inputs (VGA, component and S-Video) were all but infallible, making it ideal for purists wishing to transfer footage directly and faithfully from historic games consoles as opposed to relying on a compromise of emulation and screen capture techniques.
But its maximum resolution of 1080i (1920×1080 interlaced) at 30hz was technically not full HD, falling short of the “gold standard” coveted by both author and viewer.
Nevertheless, alongside products with similar shortcomings, it was only fair to properly examine its potential. Using “HQ Recorder”, a simple capture application supplied with the card, and leaving every setting at its default value, quality at 720p and 60hz/FPS comfortably matched or surpassed that of every competing remedy, not too remarkable when one is mindful of the HQ codec’s extravagant bit rate.
Canopus’s HQ codec encapsulates all recorded footage within an AVI container, the format was not designed to be streamed online so each file have been provided in the rar archives below. Click once on either the thumb image or corresponding link underneath to download, be warned, these files are large even by fibre standard’s!
Unigine 720p Crysis 720p Cinebench 720p Colors 720p
Files were readily endorsed by Premier, Edius and Sony Vegas with perfectly synchronized audio and editing was a smooth, frame accurate affair.
At 1080i however, things rapidly became untenable. Xbox 360 owners claimed to have experienced great success but despite my creating a custom resolution based on the console’s output, the Pegasus frequently struggled even to recognize the signal delivered by the graphics card.
For the select few titles that produced a picture, there appeared to be no way of preventing the card from attempting to instantly de-interlace the footage it received, resulting in clusters of dropped frames compounded with irksome horizontal and vertical judder.
In conclusion, the Pegasus was a functional but overly expensive and largely inadequate means of documenting the cutting edge gamer’s greatest hits. As a general tool for preserving material from legacy gaming platforms with atypical resolutions and aspect ratios, its powers were far more persuasive.
Pros
- Very high quality results at 720p@60hz.
- HQ codec makes for stable files withf synched a/v
- Multiple analogue inputs accept a wide variety of sources and non-standard resolutions.
Cons
- HDMI input only 1.0, insufferably limited compatibility.
- 1080p@60hz not supported , even for monitoring.
- File sizes too large, conversion and re-encoding essential prior to publishing online.