Is raw, uncompressed capture possible on current macs?
Is it possible to capture raw content on an Apple M1 Max Macbook Pro. In terms of other hardware, I have a an Elgato HD60 X, as well as a RetroTink4K. My goal is to be able to capture uncompressed VHS and Hi8 content. I asked Bob at RetroRGB and he wasn't aware of a means of doing so on current M1 macs and he recommended I ask here. Thanks in advance for any help.
17 Replies
Sadly there's no good app like VirtualDub for Mac. The only way to do that would be using BlackMagic's capture app w/ a BlackMagic card.
M2 and up can encode prores on hardware, which while technically not mathematically lossless, you can do 4:4:4 and it's as good as you're ever going to need, especially from an already-degraded medium like vhs/hi8
Thanks so much for the response. Can I encode PRORES with the ELgato HD60 X?
4:4:4 sounds like a great option
I personally ran into some issues when recording ProRes on my M2 Pro mac mini, but that was also a much older build that had a lot less support for Apple Silicon. Might have also been that I was recording to an external SSD over TB4 which should have been fine
I just kept having encoding lag at 4k60 with whatever the lowest ProRes color format stuff is. I should really run a test with the new updates
Ahh good to know
GG @ness93, you just advanced to level 1 !
What software did you use to encode?
OBS
I think it was version 29 at that time
What hardware did you use for capture into OBS?
I don't remember the capture card off the top of my head
Might've been the Avermedia Cap4k which can only do 4k30, in which case that means that I was also recording at 30fps and still had issues
Copy that, and thank you
I have an ELgato HD60 X - curious how that woudl fair in OBS
*I'm curious how that would fair in OBS
Well the capture card isn't going to affect the performance of the encoding done in OBS, just what resolution, frame rate, and color formats are available from that capture card source
And latency from the source to the OBS preview (not the latency for passthrough)
that makese sense
Would the UltraStudio 4K Mini (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudio) a good option? Or is that overkill? I'm on a 2021 macbook pro so won't be able to use one of the internal cards.
probably the way to go
Please excuse my following up here like 2 months after the initial post. Thanks for any assistance.
awesome, thank you
price-wise, if it's still $1000, that's perhaps very overkill
Atomos Ninja Inferno or Ninja V & a 1TB SATA SSD will get you the same thing for your purpose (4K HDMI capture to prores) much cheaper
Yeah looks to be about $1100 for UltraStudio 4K Mini. I will check those options out - thank you!