Use Blackmagic for Uploading Video to Your iPod, YouTube

Although that might have been your first guess, the truth of the matter is that there's nothing even remotely related to the likes of Lord Voldermort, Sauron or other fictional dark magicians about the Blackmagic. No dark spells or enchantments are used. It's simply the power of technology, which allows users to record video content from a wide variety of sources directly to one's computer.

As we can understand right from their names, the Video Recorder and Video Recorder SDI allow users to capture either analog or SDI video (SDI stands for serial digital interface, if you were wondering what's the deal with this acronym) from VHS, Video-8, video cameras and more, directly to the H.264 file format as used by iPod, iPhone, Apple TV and YouTube.

The device is also quite easy to use, since all you have to do is select the specific device you want to capture for and the included Video Recorder software will automatically set the size and quality. On the other hand, should you want to transfer video to a custom device, you can always enter the resolution and data rate you need for your media files, and Video Recorder SDI will take care of all scaling.

Furthermore, for recording videos automatically, you can set the duration and it will stop at a specific time.

And for even more convenience, if you're uploading movies to YouTube, then you can select to auto segment files into 9 min segments, or if you want to put captured videos on CD's you can also select to segment recording into MB sized files.

Now, for some tech specs. The standard version of the device from Blackmagic design features YUV Component, NTSC, PAL ans S-Video video inputs and stereo consumer level RCA audio inputs, while the Video Recorder SDI has been equipped with a 10-bit video input and a 8-channel audio recording capabilities. Both versions provide support for the 625/25 PAL and 525/29.97 NTSC SD resolution file formats, while the SDI version is also compliant with SMPTE 292M, SMPTE 259M, SMPTE 296M, ITU-R BT.656 and ITU-R BT.601.

The best part is that the two devices are not even that expensive, as they retail for around 120 and 300 US dollars (the SDI version), but the truth of the matter is that that these things are not exactly recommended for all the users out there, at least if they're not crazy about constantly uploading video to either their iPods or YouTube.

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