Issue: Workstations - August 2006

BLACKMAGIC CARDS NOW SUPPORT NEW MAC PRO WORKSTATION

MILPITAS, CA - Blackmagic Design, the maker of video cards and conversion products, has announced support for the new Apple Mac Pro systems based on Intel Xeon processors. All Blackmagic Design PCI Express-based video capture cards are supported as a free update from the Blackmagic Design Website (www.blackmagic-design.com).

Supported products include DeckLink HD Extreme, DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4 PCIe, DeckLink SP PCIe, DeckLink Extreme PCIe, Multibridge Extreme and Multibridge Pro.

Testing by the company has shown that when the Mac Pro is outfitted with 3 x 500 MB SATA disks, internally mounted and striped with RAID 0 configuration, approximately 170 MB/sec disk array performance was achieved. This allows customers to build lower cost HD disk arrays for simple capture and playback tasks. For higher performance editing solutions, Blackmagic Design's testing has shown Apple's Xserve RAID works well as a high performance uncompressed HDTV disk array.

“This is an exciting time for our customers because the processor to memory speed of these new systems is dramatically higher than previously available on the Mac platform,” says Blackmagic Design’s CEO Grant Petty. “This allows more video effects, more layers and more complex design work to run realtime, while providing much higher performance for uncompressed HD and uncompressed 2K feature film rendering.”