Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is an easy to use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. After you download and install Blackmagic Desktop Video, Disk Speed Test is automatically installed. Run Disk Speed Test, click the START button, and this tool is starting testing the write speed and read speed of the local hard disk on your computer.
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Use the software you love!
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test Download
Intensity works with the software you love to use! Use DirectShow™ and QuickTime™ software, or the World's most popular editing software such as Media Composer™, Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. You also get Photoshop CC plug-ins to grab and output frames, plus real time preview in Fusion and After Effects CC. No other cards support more software on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, so you have the freedom to work with your favorite tools!
DaVinci Resolve
Professional editing, grading, delivery, included free.
DaVinci Resolve combines the world’s most advanced color corrector with professional multi track editing so you can move between editing and color grading with the click of a mouse! You get professional editing tools like ripple, roll, slip and slide along with context sensitive trimming tools that make it fast and easy to edit your story together. DaVinci Resolve’s legendary image quality and unlimited color grading tools let you create looks that aren’t possible on other systems. DaVinci Resolve is included free with Intensity so you can start using the same powerful tools used on more Hollywood feature films, television shows and commercials than any other!
Media Express
Capture, playback, organize, manage media.
Media Express is included free with Intensity and is packed with features to help you easily manage and organize your video when you don’t want to deal with the complexity of using more complicated editing software. You can install Media Express software on every computer you use for either Mac OS X, Windows or Linux. Media Express includes loads of smart features that make it simple to work with compressed and uncompressed video in 2D and even 3D! Media Express is also perfect for working with applications like Final Cut Pro X and After Effects software that don’t capture video on their own.
Final Cut Pro X
Edit in Final Cut Pro with Intensity, while using the highest quality uncompressed video, or choose DVCPRO HD and ProRes 422, which are higher quality and faster than native HDV. When playing back video, you get full RT Extreme™ real time effects, all with sample accurate AV sync. Intensity supports many of the advanced Final Cut Pro features such as 10 bit rendering, RT Extreme™, and support for ProRes 422, HDV, JPEG, DV, DV50, DV100, 8 & 10 bit uncompressed media types.
Avid Media Composer 7™
Avid Media Composer has been the choice of professional editors for over 20 years. The Avid Media Composer family of software, including Avid Symphony and Avid NewsCutter, provides fully integrated support for Intensity. Capture and playback in full uncompressed quality, or directly in Avid DNxHD or other popular compressed video formats. Media Composer 7 has fast and familiar operation and it’s new 64 bit architecture plays back complex layered effects in real time. Intensity lets you capture, edit, monitor and playback with Media Composer 7, making it the perfect choice for professionals who need the best Avid workflow on Mac OS X and Windows 8.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC
On Windows, Blackmagic's full resolution (1920 x 1080) professional quality compressed HD codec can capture JPEG AVI files in real time using Premiere Pro. Unlike HDV and DVCPRO HD which uses reduced resolution 1440 x 1080 video, Blackmagic's Online JPEG maintains the full resolution 1920 x 1080 resolution of HD video without the huge file size of uncompressed HD video. Blackmagic's Online JPEG is so efficient that full motion 1080i HD video can be recorded at only 12 MB per second vs. a massive 119 MB per second for uncompressed HD video.
After Effects CC
Intensity even allows high end design and effects work, great for the special effects you've always wanted in Independent Films, use After Effects CC, Combustion™, Photoshop CC and more. Intensity also includes an RGB QuickTime™ preview output for After Effects and Fusion. And, you can always preview on the video-out interactively as you design and then play pre-renders using real time ram preview. When rendering your project, processing quality using the Blackmagic codec is full 16 bit, so you always get the advantage of uncompressed video.
Adobe Photoshop CC
Intensity includes special Photoshop plug-ins, so you can directly capture and output still frames from within Photoshop. Outputting Photoshop graphics from Intensity lets you see the correct color and the effects of video interlace and field movement. Intensity uses the correct video levels so you can't get illegal 100% RGB video levels eliminating, surprises when graphics are displayed!
Sony Vegas Pro
Sony Vegas Pro works seamlessly with Intensity Shuttle for an incredible SD and HD editing experience! Use powerful video effects and versatile audio editing tools while previewing your work in real time even with full HD projects! Capture up to 10 bit uncompressed so you can start with the best possible image quality for your Blu-ray Disc creation or Windows Media 9 content distribution.
Live VJ
If you’re a live VJ using software like Resolume, you can use Intensity for capture and playback right out of the box! You can capture and play back any QuickTime and AVI video files, as well as Flash animations and text overlays with your WAV and AIFF audio files!
Streaming
Intensity is fully compatible with popular video and audio streaming software so you can get your live stream to thousands, even millions of online viewers! On Mac, stream live video with Flash Media Live Encoder, Wirecast and Livestream Producer. When streaming on Windows, you get compatibility with Flash Media Encoder, XSplit Broadcaster, Wirecast and Livestream Producer. Stream high quality video of live events, webcasts, educational seminars, presentations, concerts and more!
QuickTime and WDM
Intensity supports QuickTime on Mac, and WDM and DirectShow on Windows so you can capture high quality video straight into other audio or video applications so is compatible with virtually all software on Mac and Windows! Intensity includes Blackmagic Design’s Desktop Video SDK free of charge for Mac, Windows and Linux. The Desktop Video SDK provides both low level control of hardware and high level interfaces which allow you to easily perform common tasks. It even lets you develop once and then instantly deploy your solutions across other high end broadcast DeckLink and UltraStudio products from Blackmagic Design.
Thunderbolt™ capture and playback in HDMI and analog.
Just how fast is that new drive you have hooked up to your Mac? Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is one of the free disk benchmarking tools available for your Mac and can help you get the low down on the speed of your Mac's disk, and help you to speed things up a bit.
If you have tried to find out the speed rating of a disk by checking a manufacturer’s website, you're likely to find yourself stumbling through a mess of marketing gobbledygook, citing performance numbers with no context.
That's one reason why I make use of a number of benchmark utilities for testing the performance of various aspects of a Mac, including how well the internal or external storage drives perform.
With a number of benchmarking tools to choose from, one of the first ones I grab to get a quick look at overall drive performance is Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.
Pro
- By far, one of the simplest drive performance tools to use.
- Quick results, almost in real-time.
- Geared towards video professionals, but will work for anyone.
- Free.
Con
- Doesn't provide extensive performance information.
- Limited configuration options.
- No data logging for comparing multiple speed tests.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test started life as a free utility included with any of Blackmagic Design's video and audio products for the capture, playback, and editing of multimedia. The free app became popular with Mac enthusiasts as an easy way to check the performance of their system drives, Fusion drives, and SSDs. And while Blackmagic makes the app freely available to anyone, you can still see in its design the emphasis on video capture and playback needs.
Using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
It used to be necessary to hunt around the Blackmagic website to find the Disk Speed Test tool, but Blackmagic has released the app to the general public through the Mac App Store, so the days of hunting down the utility are over.
Once downloaded, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app can be found in the Applications folder. Once you launch the app, the Disk Speed Test appears as a single window with two large dials, looking vaguely like analog speedometers. There are separate speedometers for write speed and read speed; speed is registered in MB/s.
Between the two dials is a Start button, pressing this button will start the speed test. Just above the Start button is a button for changing the settings, including selecting the Mac volume you wish to test, and the size of the test file that will be used.
Will It Work? And How Fast?
Just below the two main speedometers are the Will It Work? and How Fast? results panels. The Will It Work? panel includes a list of common video formats, ranging from simple PAL and NTSC on up to 2K formats. Each format in the panel has multiple options for color bit depths, and individual read or write checkboxes. As a test is being run, the panel will fill with green checkmarks for each format, depth, and read or write speed that the volume under test can support for video capture and playback.
The How Fast? panel works the same way, but instead of simple checkboxes, it will display the write and read frame rates the drive under test can support for each of the formats.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test Settings
Before you're tempted to click the Start button, click the Settings button, located just above the Start button. When you do, you'll find options for selecting the target drive for the speed test, an option to take and save a screenshot of the test results, the ability to select the size of the test file, and access to a help file, should you need it.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test Software
Using the Select Target Drive item will bring up a standard Finder file dialog box, allowing you to locate the drive you wish to test. One problem you may run into is if you select the startup drive, you may see an error message that Disk Speed Test can’t be run on the selected drive because it is read-only. This isn’t a bug, just a bit of a logistics problem. Disk Speed Test is run with the same user privileges as the login account you're using, and the app doesn't have the ability to ask to raise permission levels by asking you for your password. The workaround is easy enough; when you wish to test your Mac’s startup drive, simply select your own home folder as the directory to be tested. You should then be able to run the speed tests without issues.
Test Size
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test For Mac
Blackmagic refers to the test size as the stress size. It’s really just the size of the dummy file the app will use for writing and reading. The choices are 1 GB, 2 GB, 3 GB, 4 GB, and 5 GB. The size you choose is important and ideally, it needs to be larger than any cache a hard drive may include in its design. The idea is to make sure the Disk Speed Test is actually testing the write, read speed to the platters of a mechanical drive or the flash memory modules of an SSD, and not the faster memory cache used in the drive's controller.
If you’re testing the performance of a modern drive, I suggest using the 5 GB stress size. In addition, be sure to let the test run through more than one write, read cycle. If you're testing an SSD, you can use the smallest test size, since you aren't as worried about an onboard cache.
Testing a Fusion Drive
Finally, if you're testing a Fusion drive, remember that a Fusion drive is usually not the best candidate for being the storage target for video recording or playback since it's difficult to predict where the video files will be stored, on the fast SSD or the slow hard drive. Nevertheless, if you would like to measure the performance of your Fusion drive, use the larger 5 GB stress file size, and watch the speedometers closely. When you start the test, you'll likely see relatively slower write and read speeds as the first couple of tests are written to the slower hard drive. At some point, your Mac will decide the test file is one you're using often, and move it to the faster SSD. You can actually see this occur on the write and read speedometers.
The Actual Test
Once you have the settings just as you want them, you can push the Start button. The test starts by writing the test file to the target disk and then reading the test file back. The actual time spent writing is limited to an 8-second test, at which point the read test starts, also lasting for 8 seconds. Once the write, read cycle is completed, the test repeats, writing for 8 seconds, then reading for 8 seconds. The test will continue until you click the Start button again.
The Results
The results are where Blackmagic Disk Speed Test needs the most work. While the Will It Work? And How Fast? panels provide key information that video professionals need, the two speedometers that measure performance in MB/s only show the current instantaneous speed. If you watch the speedometers during a test, they jump around quite a bit. And the speed displayed when you hit the Start button is just the speed at that one moment in time; you get no report of average speed or peak speed.
Even with this limitation, you do get a reasonable ballpark figure for how fast your drive is performing.
Final Thoughts
We like Blackmagic Disk Speed Test as a quick guide to how well a drive is performing. I use it often to measure how various external enclosures perform with the same drive installed in them. Disk Speed Test works well for quickly seeing how well a storage system is performing, and while the app is part of my benchmarking tools, it isn't the only one I use for testing storage performance.
We would like to see Blackmagic add the ability to log peak and average performance during a test, but even without these two features, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test should be part of every Mac enthusiast's suite of benchmarking tools.