Last May, Todd raved about the Epiphan AV.io as an easy plug-and-play tool for screen capture. After personally working with it at multiple shoots over the past few months, I can second its ease of use with a few caveats.
Though other use cases may vary, all of our shoots necessitated that we split the feed coming from the computer: one feed to the original monitor, and one to the AV.io. Where we ran into trouble was in too many adapters. Going from a DVI feed, through a VGA splitter, back to a DVI input on the AV.io resulted in a black screen on the AV.io. To combat this, we added a DVI splitter to our basic kit which gets around that issue. We haven’t had a need for capturing an HDMI feed yet and will update this post when that has been tested.
Another component to keep in mind is that the screen capture files become very large very quickly. At our shoots, capturing with Quicktime in 1080p, a 3-minute recording was about 5GB regardless of the input. Because of this, rather than letting the user go through the entire demonstration in one go, we broke it into smaller chunks to make the file sizes more manageable. After each recording, I’d immediately copy the file over to an external hard drive so that the files would not quickly fill up the limited amount of space still available on my laptop.
Altogether, our current kit now includes the following basic components:
- Epiphan AV.io
- DVI Splitter
- VGA Splitter
- External Hard Drive
- 1 VGA-DVI adapter cord
- 1 VGA-VGA cord
- 2 DVI-DVI cords
- And of course a laptop to do the capturing – we use a Macbook Pro.
