I really wanted to like this product for my niche use, but unfortunately I cannot recommend it after my experience.
My use for this capture device is to record longform video of live events through HDMI from my mirrorless camera. I bought one and liked it despite some shortcomings (I will get into it below) and then the next week bought a second with the intention of adding up to 4 more to cover several rooms at my live events. The problem that makes this device a 1-star for me is that it is unreliable and can give you a false sense of working correctly, only to disappoint at the end of the day.
My first impression of the device was that it felt extremely cheap in build, but the image it was capable of producing was incredible and so it was worth it to keep testing the device. I initially intended to record to external SSD drives, and here was the first issue. For some reason, recording through USB 3.0 to my external SSDs just would not work properly. I did several test runs, and after an hour straight of recording, the SSD would stop receiving data. Due to limitations of the mp4s being recorded from the ClearClick capture box, once the file gets cut off or the SSD shuts off or the data stops sending to the SSD, the ENTIRE video file is corrupted. The video recording has to come to a clean, intentional stop in order not to corrupt the file. I tried multiple SSDs formatted in different ways, I could not achieve the required recording times for my events. I even tried a thumb drive of 512gb and it flat out would not even record via USB to it on either device.
So why did I end up buying two despite not being able to record through USB for long enough? The record function to micro SD card worked flawlessly in 3 test recordings of 18 HOURS straight. I was so impressed that it could record from sun-up to sun-down in 4k30p 30mbps in my tests that I was willing to compromise and work with micro SD cards and change my workflow to accommodate these capture devices. And the image quality at 4k30p was way above my needs and it was way more efficient (higher image quality at smaller file sizes) than anything else I had used, even the camera itself recording to standard SD cards.
So then what was the problem? After testing both devices rigorously (Multiple all-day recordings to microSD at 1080p and 4k), I took them to my two-day event. Both days were expected to run 12 hours of recording. First day, everything recorded as expected and I was excited that everything went smoothly. Final edits from day 1 were excellent. Day 2, however, I had a major issue on one of the devices. All day, the red dot was blinking on the screen to indicate it was recording, and the time stamp was tracking the length of the video. It was saying that it was recording to the microSD card for several hours, and everything was looking normal. When I got home and plugged in the memory card, every file was 0kb in size. One of the capture devices kept making new files and showing that it was properly recording, but it was producing empty and corrupt files ALL DAY. I even started and stopped the recordings during down time, but each new file still had zero data.
I ran Disk Drill to try to recover the data, but there was no data to begin with. The microSD still works perfectly fine and I’ve tested recording from my camera to the card without issues. This leads me to believe the capture device was completely at fault from the very start of the day.
There is a chance that I just happened to get two devices that could not record normally via USB and one of them happens to create blank files randomly. Unfortunately, I thought it was working as intended and instead got zero coverage for an important event. I felt a false sense of security that these devices were working. Even if I got had terrible luck and I just got two faulty units (or even just one if we ignore the USB recording issues), I will be returning these and I cannot recommend them.
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