A Captivating Experience.
Black Magic H.264 Pro Recorder
This little box was conjured up by Black Magic Design, who over the course of several decades commencing from 1984, evolved into one of the world’s most recognized and accomplished creators and manufactures of class leading video production technology.
Rather like the Pegasus, this device was marketed as a tool for archiving footage from digital and analogue sources but utilized the more fashionable, space conserving H.264 format to garner its recordings, making it more appropriate for committing content directly to the internet but less reliable and a trifle sluggish for frame accurate editing.
It was the only hardware based to offer full HD 1080p capture at 60 frames per second – the Avermedia Live Gamer provided 60hz monitoring at this resolution but recordings were limited to 30fps while the Datapath – like Avermedia’s logical alternative, the Extreme Cap U3 – could not be considered entirely hardware-centric as it housed no on board encoding chip, relying instead on the host computer’s CPU to process all the ingested video in real time.
The bundled software comprised of Black Magic’s Media Express, which was used to facilitate the recordings and allowed for data rates of up to 20mbps.
Black Magic H.264 Pro Recorder Colors Test
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In practice, quality across the board was superb, with colour reproduction notably more faithful than the Avermedia Gamer and rivalling that of the Datapath and even FRAPS and DXtory. Additionally, frame rates were consistent, audio and video in sync* and macro blocking almost negligible.