Digit Magazine Review of Blackmagic Design IntensityThis card costs $250 and has one port for HDMI in and another for HDMI out. I can think of two good uses for it. One is using a consumer-oriented LCD screen for HD monitoring.
The other is for posting an HDV-shot piece in high definition. You can always dig HDV through firewire, but the format is MPEG-2 based with interframe compression. MPEG-2 is a rough codec to edit with. If you dig your HDV footage with the Intensity, then while capturing you can encode the video into the DVCPro HD codec or Apple's Uncompressed 8-bit or 10-bit codecs. The DVCPro HD codec doesn't require a lot of bandwith--it's around 100mb/s vs DV's 25mb/s. So a G-RAID would be adequate to playback DVCPro HD material. Once you go up to Apple's Uncompressed setting for HD you are talking a serious RAID setup, such as described in the DV article Build Your Own HD Workstation that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
There are some limitations to this product. It's doesn't support 24 fps because AFAIK the HDMI standard doesn't. It supports 1080i, 720p, and 480i (not 480p) video sources. It doesn't work on G5's--the only Mac supported is the Mac Pros. No other types of inputs or outputs besides the 2 HDMI ports, but it is only $250. Blackmagic Design does have more expesnive products with HDMI like the Decklink HD Studio.
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