Digital Rapids Intros New Video Capture Cards, Software for Apple Encoding
Digtial Rapids announced two new models of its digital capture cards today, promising enhanced video quality, as well as an update to its Stream software for encoding and live streaming.
The company's Flux HD cards offer hardware-based real-time pre-processing of video that enhance the video signal to work better with compression. Customers can choose between two new models of Digital Rapids' Flux HD PCI boards, the first cards optimized for encoding and streaming to feature dual-link and 3GB/second SDI support.
The Flux-6510 is all-digital and includes SD, HD, dual-link HD-SDI, and 3G-SDI support. The Flux-6550 offers the same digital input, plus support for analog inputs including component (HD and SD), S-Video, and composite video. Both cards support SDI embedded audio. The Flux-g550 also includes AES and analog inputs.
All Flux HD cards come with Stream LE software, which allows for the capture, encoding, transcoding, and streaming of both live and file-based applications. The software can simultaneously output in multiple formats, resolutions, and bit rates.
"Demand for the Flux HD hardware has been exceptional since its introduction earlier this year, and we're pleased to be delivering it. With the outstanding quality enabled by Flux HD's hardware-based image processing and a future-proof path to 3G-SDI production and distribution workflows, Flux HD cards are ideal for the encoding and streaming applications of both today and tomorrow," says Darren Gallipeau, product manager at Digital Rapids.
Digital Rapids is also announcing the availability of version 3.3 of Stream (which includes StreamZ, StreamHD, and DRC-Stream). This version expands support and flexibility for iPhone encoding and enhances iPad support. It also offers users increased control of encoding and output parameters, support for audio-only streams with associated image files, and parallel output to multiple content delivery networks or servers.
Version 3.3 lets users insert script commands into ASF outputs that will communicate actions to the receiving application or player. Additionally, it provides a new captioning plug-in and adds a standby mode that offers fast starting of encoding when a given trigger is received. Version 3.3 is available immediately as a free download.
"While a key feature of version 3.3 is support for our new Flux hardware, we've also added quite a few productivity enhancements for our existing product lines too. While those improvements are fairly diverse, if there's a common theme, it's that we're making many of our output capabilities and workflow features even deeper, more efficient, or more automated," says Mike Nann, director of marketing and communications for Digital Rapids.
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