Bluefish444 today announced that the Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE, an affordable high quality, real time encoding HD MPEG-2 video compression system for all high def video resolutions, is shipping. Introduced at IBC 2006 in Amsterdam last month, the response to RAGE N|CODE has been overwhelmingly positive.
Applications for this new solution include HD archival for studios and broadcasters, high quality, accelerated HD MPEG-2 export from Adobe Premiere Pro, multi channel SD compressed ingest, live streaming applications, post production and digital content creation, and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray authoring.

Based upon the Bluefish444 HD|Fury single link HD/SD SDI I/O card, Bluefish444's Symmetry acquisition, review, and play-out software, and incorporating Aspex's Accelara HD MPEG-2 Encoder PCI-X card, the new Bluefish444 system offers plug and play acceleration of MPEG-2 encoding inside many popular third party software applications such as Adobe Premiere Pro 2 and Autodesk Cleaner XL.

The Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE maintains the same user interface as these applications, so users are not required to learn new workflows or configuration options to take advantage of the higher performance. With the Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE, users are able to ingest from live uncompressed sources such as HD/SD cameras and tape decks.

Unlike fixed function hardware encoders, Bluefish444's system is fully software programmable, providing the comfort of flexibility, scalability and a future proof upgrade path to additional codecs such as H.264 and Windows Media/VC1.

In high performance mode, the Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE provides faster than real time HD encoding (1920 x 1080i60) with CPU loading of around 60% and no loss of quality. For applications where significant host CPU resources are required, the Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE HD can also be run in a fully offloaded mode, reducing host CPU loading to 15%-20%. With the Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE system, users can select the highest quality encoder settings with little loss of performance.

Key features of the Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE system include:

  • Real time HD MPEG-2 encoding
  • Multi channel real time SD MPEG-2 encoding
  • Accelerates the industry standard MainConcept MPEG-2 API
  • Transparent acceleration of popular applications
  • Support for Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, Autodesk Cleaner XL, Sony Vegas, Adobe Encore 2.0, and Sonic DVDit
  • Completely flexible, supporting all MPEG-2 settings using the existing application interfaces
  • Supports all profiles, levels, resolutions, frame rates and MPEG-2 options
  • Real time streaming from live SD/HD sources
The Bluefish444 RAGE N|CODE system retails for $14,990US.

www.bluefish444.com