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Video capture is a key component in virtually every Digital Foundry article we produce. Since 2007, our mantra has been to grab every last pixel pumped out by console HDMI port in order to produce evidence-driven analysis - and back in the day that involved working with companies specialising in medical and military imaging in order to create bespoke capture solutions that simply didn't exist at the time. But things have changed: PCs that used to cost us thousands to build back in the day have been replaced by commodity devices offering excellent quality at a very low cost - which sums up Blackmagic's new £350/$499 Video Assist quite succinctly.In essence, it is capable of grabbing virtually any HDMI signal up to 1080p at 60Hz, compressing video on the fly using Apple's broadcast quality ProRes codec. It's battery-driven with a five-inch 1080p touchscreen, and as long as there's no HDCP content protection encryption on the signal, everything records effortlessly onto high-speed SD cards. Mainstream capture devices like Elgato's creditable HD60 cost £120/$180 but require you to attach a moderately powerful PC. The Video Assist blows it out of the water quality-wise, it's entirely self-contained, and also supports broadcast standard SDI - that's a stunning spec at this price-point.
Of course, this device isn't aimed at gamers - the fact it supports gaming consoles at all is actually quite fortunate, bearing in mind the lacklustre support for RGB HDMI found in most of Blackmagic's other budget-orientated capture products. The target market for this machine is actually professional videographers using DLSRs - the idea is to circumvent sub-optimal out-of-the-camera h.264 compression and use the HDMI/SDI outputs to acquire superior quality video. Base image quality jumps from the camera standard 8-bit YUV 4:2:0 used in h.264 to 10-bit 4:2:2 - on top of the vastly improved compression ProRes offers.
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