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 Aspex's Accelara 3000 Advanced Video 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.

Bluefish444’s RAGE N|Code enables MPEG 2 acceleration from the user interface of popular applications utilizing the MainConcept MPEG2 codec. Customers are not required to learn new workflows or configuration options to take advantage of the higher performance. With Bluefish444 RAGE N|Code, they can ingest from live uncompressed sources such as HD/SD cameras and tape decks and experience real time 1920 X 1080 HD MPEG2 encoding.

Unlike fixed function hardware encoders, Bluefish444's RAGE N|Code 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, Bluefish444 RAGE N|Code provides 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, Bluefish444 RAGE N|Code 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 HD 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, Sorenson Squeeze, Autodesk Cleaner XL, Sony Vegas, Digital Rapids StreamZ, 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