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Bluefish444, the professionals' choice for video capture and playout cards for the broadcast and postproduction industries entered the compression market exploiting the easy plug-and-play integration of Aspex AVE.
Bluefish444
Since it’s foundation, Bluefish Technologies has been the Professionals’ Choice and a technology and market leader in the field of HD and SD digital video content creation and broadcast. The Bluefish444 brand represents uncompromising broadcast quality engineering to produce the highest quality 10-16 bit uncompressed SD, HD and 2k capture cards for Windows XP, Mac OS and Linux.
http://www.bluefish444.com
The product
Bluefish understands that many of their customers require HD output with faster compression than software based encoding solutions can handle. Rage N|Code facilitates high quality encoding of HD MPEG-2 content in real-time, even at full 1920x1080 HD resolution.
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Customer Success Story
Overview
Bluefish444
- The professionals' choice in content creation and broadcast capture and playout.
Challenge
- Offer their customers a different workflow through real-time capture and encoding.
Solution
- Integrated Aspex Accelera AVE as the encoding solution.
Benefits
- Seamless software integration in their managment application.
- Software programmability and future-proof implementation.
- Highest reliability, never miss a frame.
- Highest quality HD compression through MainConcept API.
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The Requirement
Bluefish444 is a leader in uncompressed video capture and playout. However, with HD resolutions requiring more than 5x the bandwidth and storage of SD there is an increasing requirement to improve customers' workflow by performing real-time encode to a more manageable format.
Bluefish required a solution that would easiliy integrate with their existing product line and aquisition software but with a reduced time-to-market. Furthermore, due to the nature of the application, encoding had to be performed in real-time, not a frame-a-second less!
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“We know how to design hardware and we know the timescales. Accelera AVE gave us a significant time-to-market advantage."
"...is exactly what we needed to produce the highest-quality MPEG-2 video without ever dropping a frame."
- Craige Mott, CEO
Bluefish444
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The Solution
Bluefish chose Aspex Accelera AVE as the perfect solution to their problem.
"We knew we wanted to enter the encoding market but also understand how long it does take to develop a hardware solution. Aspex AVE was the obvious choice as it constitues a software programmable solution we could easily integrate within Symmetry. This is how Rage N|Code was born", says Craig Mott, CEO Bluefish444.
Rage N|Code combines Bluefish's HD|Fury and Symmetry interface with the Aspex Accelera Advanced Video Encoder to create an HD-SDI real-time encoding solution. Rage N|Code accelerates the industry leading MainConcept MPEG-2 codec ensuring the highest quality in HD streams.
"We know how to design hardware and we know the timescales. Accelera AVE gave us a significant time-to-market advantage. We simply had to add software features to our existing interface to exploit the encoding power of Aspex AVE allowing us to be the first on the market with such a product.", added Craige Mott.
"Combining the quality of the MainConcept encoder with the stability and performance of Aspex AVE acceleration is exactly what we needed to produce the highest-quality MPEG-2 video without ever dropping a frame."
Unlike fixed function hardware encoders, Rage N|Code is 100% software programmable, providing a future proof upgrade path to other codecs such as H.264/AVC and VC-1/WM9.
Bluefish customers can now benefit of both compressed and uncompressed workflows through a single product. |
A Partnership Approach
“We knew from the beginning that a timely entrance in the compression market required partnering with someone with the necessary expertise. Aspex provided this expertise as well as a partnership approach that supplied maximum support during development as well as after release"
"Without Aspex Accelera AVE it would not have been possible to get there so fast!”
“...We are confident that in Aspex AVE we have made the right choice..."
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The Next Step
Bluefish understands that video compression is here to stay as well as knowing that uncompressed video production offers the best quality and will never go away.
"Providing our customers with a solution that can support both workflows is very important. Knowing the amount of formats available nowadays we are confident that in Aspex AVE we have made the right choice as it gives us the ability to quickly and simply add any other codec...", concluded Craige Mott.
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About Accelera
Aspex Accelera consists of a full length PCI-X or PCI-Express plug in board and the software tools customers require to develop their products. Accelera uses four Aspex Linedancer devices containing 4096 processing elements each, an embedded RISC CPU and an ASProCore Controller. Supports Windows 2000, XP, Linux and Mac OS-X.
About AVE
Aspex Advanced Video Encoder (AVE) is the world's only multiformat HD video compression accelerator to support all three High-Definition video compression standards currently in use: MPEG-2, H.264/AVC and VC-1/WM9. The flexible nature of the AVE framework enables customers to run any codec on the same Accelera platform, providing a future-proof, multi-codec acceleration solution. The platforma is format and resolution independent, providing high quality, low bitrate encoding. Supports Windows 2000, XP, Linux and Mac OS-X.
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