On the video side: HD video is everywhere you look, but working with it live may seem like a far-off fantasy. Enter the Intensity video card. If you’ve got a supported PC or Mac with a free PCI-Express slot, you can mix HD video live for just US$249-349. Max/MSP/Jitter whiz Anton Marini tests the card for CDMusic’s sister site Create Digital Motion:
Review: Real-time, Uncompressed HD Mixing On the Cheap, with Decklink Intensity
The possibilities are tantalizing. Anton uses an HD converter to mix a Mac laptop with visuals generated by a Mac desktop. With the right configuration, you might also mix two external HD streams, and/or output to HD using the card. On the PC side, this could even be portable, using a lightweight SFF PC. Now, if they’d just give us ExpressCard. If you do video as well as music, let us know what you think of the story.
(Side note: the card lives at Polytechnic University, which has what’s turning into a powerhouse program for interactive media. As it happens, it’s also been host to regular Max “patching circles” for any of you in New York. Now, we did actually leave the building last night as a small fire had broken out in the building. We didn’t start the fire, though.)