New Hardware Announcement: ExpressCard-HD 480p/720p Capture for Laptops

December 1st, 2009

Digital Foundry is pleased to reveal its latest hardware, allowing for full HD capture on the go. ExpressCard-HD is an upgrade designed for video games capture in any environment, featuring support for analogue component at 480p and 720p resolutions, with 1080i to follow.
Simply plug in the ExpressCard34 upgrade into your notebook, attach the analogue component break-out box, and you’re instantly capturing superb quality video. No external boxes required are required to house the capture card: your laptop is instantly turned into a battery-powered pro-quality HD recorder.
While an HDMI capture solution may have been initially the more obvious choice, the selection of analogue component allows for the widest possible compatibility with all mainstream gaming devices. ExpressCard-HD supports 720×480 and 1280×720 resolutions, allowing for hassle-free connection to Nintendo Wii and Sony PSP in addition to all makes and model of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
To give an indication of quality at HD resolutions, here are two shots taken from Assassin’s Creed 2 running on the Xbox 360. Click on each thumbnail for the full-size shot.

Full 720p capture at 60 frames per second is possible with Digital Foundry ExpressCard-HD, though our customary support for multiple frame-rates is also included. If the game runs at 30, why capture at 60?

ExpressCard-HD is equally at home with 480p component sources, capturing at 720×480 at up to 60 frames per second. In these shots, our Xbox 360 is running in normal 4:3 mode. It’s important to note that analogue component always runs at 4:3. When playing a widescreen game, the screen simply stretches the image outwards. ExpressCard-HD does not do this - you’ll need to resize the image itself elsewhere in your workflow.

As you can see, ExpressCard-HD’s 480p support works just fine, meaning no issues capturing Wii or PSP. Set the HD consoles to run at 480p, and you can also capture using very weak CPUs. Indeed, even an ExpressCard-equipped netbook should be viable here. Again, click on the thumbnails for full-size shots.

ExpressCard-HD produces phenomenal results based on the same kind of tools as used in our TrueHD and HDScope products. There’s full support for the CineForm codec, AMV Codec and UT Codec Suite. We would recommend CineForm as the most space-efficient compressor - something that’s crucial when recording onto a bandwidth-limited device such as a laptop hard disk drive.
System specs? For 720p60 capture, we recommend a 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo equipped laptop running 32-bit Windows XP, with at least 2GB of RAM. A discrete graphics card is also recommended; even something as lowly as an NVIDIA 8400GS will do the trick. Support for Intel integrated graphics is being tested. However, this will require a stronger CPU as the processor needs to emulate the hardware overlay provided for “free” by a dedicated graphics chip. Support for 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 may follow.
The on-screen preview window supplied by ExpressCard-HD is of crucial importance as the hardware itself offers no video passthrough option. There is simply no room on the board. However, there is a full-screen option on the capture tool itself. This, combined with the video output typically found on all laptops, serves to give you much the same effect as a dedicated passthrough. Notebooks equipped with HDMI video outputs are particularly well set-up for this task, as audio is integrated into the output.
For a wider selection of sample shots, please click here. ExpressCard-HD is expected to be ready very early in 2010. Please contact info@digitalfoundry.org for more details.

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Update: PS3 Media Playback

August 24th, 2008

First of all, kudos to Sony for producing what I think must be the first 1080p60 AVC file to playback on PlayStation 3. Posters on the AVSForum tipped me off to the 1080p download available at WipEout HD website. Encoded at 20mbps with peaks at 49mbps, it’s a worthy workout for the PS3 - but it’s a shame that the gameplay footage has so much v-lock screen tear.
The video is also noteworthy in that I could not match this performance initially whatsoever, despite matching its encoding profile as closely as I could using x264. It turns out that the video divides the image into ’slices’ which PS3’s Cell CPU decode in parallel… and x264 doesn’t support slices.
However, the Mainconcept Reference encoder does and while it’s horrible to use compared to x264, I quickly had 1080p60 material playing back nicely. I’ll have to consider updating the Devil May Cry demo on DigitalFoundry.org to replace the existing VC-1 encode as I get the same quality at a lower bitrate and AVC is clearly more suited to the PS3’s media playback capabilities. That’s if I can find someone with the full version to do the encode for me, as the demo version watermarks output and I’m not paying $1,999 for an encoder that is inferior to x264 in just about every way.

PlayStation 3 WipEout HD supports 1080p60 (with one or two interesting technical tricks I might go into at a later date) and the AVC video Sony produced for it is well worth downloading and checking out on your own PS3…

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Why CineForm Rules Supreme

September 12th, 2007

When I first started to approach other companies in the games industry with a view to licensing the Digital Foundry hardware, typically the only negative responses tended to be…

1. Why do you CineForm HD compression? Nobody else does and we want to use Final Cut Pro.
2. Why use compression at all? We want precision quality (this is a common attitude with games developers, who would fall in love with CineForm if they put it to the test!).

Well let’s tackle point two first, with a very simply exercise. Take a look at the image below from an Xbox 360 Gears of War cut-scene. One image was captured completely uncompressed. The other was taken with CineForm HD. We’ve zoomed in on a specific part of the image and blown it up to 200%. This proves conclusively that while not mathematically lossless, you lose virtually nothing by using CineForm and you gain so much - easy integration with multiple editing systems, relatively tiny file sizes (anything up to 15:1 compression), plus you can capture onto a single 7,200rpm SATA drive. No more need for stupidly expensive SCSI RAID arrays.
Want some more quality tests? Download this ZIP package of shots. Open an uncompressed HDMI image in Photoshop. Zoom in to 300%, 400% - whatever you like. Import the CineForm version of the same image, CTRL-A, CTRL-C and CTRL-V into your uncompressed window. Use CTRL-Z to undo the paste, then again to re-do it - rinse and repeat. Now you’re switching between the two images at a stupendously magnified rate. Impressive eh?
It’s all the more impressive considering the chosen subject matter. Video games have little in the way of natural blurring (eg camera focused on the foreground, background out of focus) so it’s notoriously hard to compress. Secondly, there’s the sheer level of detail in games these days - another compression nightmare. And thirdly, two of the three games in the test package run at 1280×720 at 60 frames per second. Every frame is different, making compression even harder. But CineForm copes easily with any eventuality. No other codec I’ve tested can.
Point one now. Nowadays, CineForm HD is now pretty much the only cross-platform HD codec on the market. Digital Foundry HD AVI captures can be losslessly rewrapped into the Quicktime MOV format (the bitstream is literally identical) and now both PC and Intel Mac owners can use our captures. Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro - now pretty much all editors can make use of superior HD assets, with Avid the only hold-outs.

Gears of War on Xbox 360, cropped and zoomed in to 200% - uncompressed on the left, CineForm on the right - not that the human eye can really tell the difference. And the really scary thing? This was taken at CineForm quality level ‘High’… there are two more settings offering an even better quality match. We simply don’t need to use them.

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