Digital Rapids announce CarbonHD technology

Digital Rapids have announced the release of CarbonHD, a new hardware (64bit PCI card) and software platform for the automated capture, playback, encoding, and transcoding of live high definition and standard definition video and files formats.
The CarbonHD platform will power the next generation of Digital Rapids products due out in Q1 2004.
CarbonHD is a format agile hardware capture and playback solution, it can capture any format of video delivered over SDI in either 8 or 10-bit formats. Format agility allows CarbonHD to capture or playback video in any format in real-time, this means that high definition video can be captured as standard definition video or as a different high definition video format, conversely any file that has been stored to disk can be played back at another other resolution or format. Live, high quality format conversion can be performed on any format/resolution of video.
CarbonHD hardware also features onboard JPEG2000 (wavelet) based hardware compression allowing it to capture video in uncompressed, lossless, or lossy formats reducing storage and system requirements.
CarbonHD software is a native Windows XP application designed to provide advanced post production and broadcast features in an intuitive, easy to use interface. CarbonHD software features deck control, deck emulation, automated capture and transcoding of video into compressed formats such as Windows Media 9 and MPEG, as well as an automated delivery system that can distribute video and audio data to remote sites via ftp.
"We are excited to announce the CarbonHD platform," said Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids. "The concept of format agility means that you no longer have to be tied to a particular format or resolution, you can capture video and work in one resolution and deliver your final media as any other resolution or format. This allows the facility to control the quality of video and the cost of storage while retaining the ability to print back to the formats their customers require.
“The ability to print to advanced delivery formats such as WM9 opens new markets for high definition video by further reducing storage and bandwidth requirements, making it possible to work with high definition video over existing networks. This will bring cost of working with high definition video within the reach of even the smallest studios."
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