Image Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
Make sure you get a monitor and cable that match your video card con-
nectors. DVI cables come with and without the analog circuits connected.
Refer to Appendix M for examples of a range of video-card connectors.
29.12
Video Cards
This is an area that has seen constant innovation for the last dozen or so years. If you have
good video-recording equipment that has a FireWire interface, you may not even need
a video card for ingesting. But if you do, here are some popular video cards.
29.12.1
Osprey
The Osprey video cards are popular with Windows-based systems. You may also find that
video cards supplied by Bluefish, Matrox, and Digital Voodoo are useful if you use
the Windows platform. Pinnacle and, of course, NVidia and ATI also offer solutions
that deliver what you need. Some of the ATI Radeon video cards include VGA outputs for
your desktop and secondary S-VHS outputs for video recording or monitoring.
29.12.2
AJA
At the IBC 2002 exhibition, AJA demonstrated the Kona video card. This was attractive
to broadcasters because it had SDI video output. With the correct drivers installed, up to
8 channels of audio can be embedded into the outgoing bit stream.
29.12.3
Blackmagic Design
At the IBC 2003 conference, Grant Petty (formerly of Digital Voodoo) launched the Blackmagic
Design (BMD) range of video cards. These have made an incredible difference to the whole
video card industry.
The card works in Mac OS X and Windows environments. There is a family of cards
ranging from those that only support SDI or analog video up to the top-end cards that
cope with high definition and multiple formats. The most astonishing feature of these
cards is the pricing. They are an order of magnitude cheaper than the average price of
the rest of the market. It is possible to build an SDI video device with an $800 computer
fitted with a $250 video card and write some software to do things like captioning and
graphics overlays. Building video servers for about $1000 per channel with commodity
hardware negates the conventional wisdom that video-server hardware is expensive.
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