MagicSoft's low-cost CG software works with an expanded variety of HD video capture cards

Magicsoft’s UltraRed graphics software can handle simultaneous previewing, creating, displaying and controlling of projects for logos, tickers, crawls, image sequences, analog and digital clocks and playback of AVI DV clips.
The software, based on a set of DirectX classes, runs on the Windows XP platform and uses an NVidia video card for real-time GPU rendering. Now, however, Magicsoft, based in Bucharest, Rumania, has expanded support of the UltraRed to the BlackMagic Design “Intensity Pro” and Deltacast “Delta-hd” HD video capture cards as well. Each hardware manufacturer has a broad selection of cards supporting SD and HD video resolutions.

MagicSoft CG works in standard or high definition, analog or digital, and the keying can be either internal or external, via the BlackMagic Design and Deltacast cards. The hardware requirements for HD (up to 1080i) are a video board with NVidia chipset better than 7800GT, a memory bus of 256 bits and a minimum 256 MB video memory; a motherboard with Intel chipset 975; a processor with Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 or better; and a minimum of 1024 MB of RAM.

UltraRed graphics are 24-bit (TrueColor) with an 8 bit alpha channel (256 transparency levels.) Anti-aliasing for TrueType Fonts and anisotropic filtering for images are implemented using the GPU. Objects can be animated by moving, rotating and changing color. Objects also can be moved on a Z axis, eliminating the limitations of layer-oriented programs. Rendering for both Preview and OnAir is done by GPU, so powerful CPUs are not required.

The list price for UltraRed Professional is $1,095; for UntraRed Enterprise, $1,395. The HD upgrade for both versions is $695. A demo version is available from Magicsoft’s website at: www.magicsoft.tv.