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Speedy Graphics at HD World 2009

Oct 22, 2009 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva

Graphics cards spur new solutions.

At HD World 2009, which was held in New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center Oct. 14-15, it was easy to miss the small PNY booth. But that would have been a mistake, since PNY held one of the first demos of Nvidia's Quadro Digital Video Pipeline. The potent hardware combo looks like a game-changer for small production companies strapped for cash to buy top graphics gear.

PNY, one of the leading Nvidia distributors, didn't plan for the crush of visitors to its booths to see this three-card combo, since this fully integrated, GPU-based solution for realtime acquisition, processing, and delivery of HD video only debuted at last month's IBC 2009 in Amsterdam.

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But word must have gotten around as this combo claims to offer the fastest graphics computation engine for broadcast production-only prices around $5,000 to $8,000, depending upon which Quadro FX card is bundled—the Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, or Quadro FX 5800. The other cards in the Digital Video Pipeline are the Quadro SDI Capture card (enables uncompressed video to be streamed directly to Quadro SDI-enabled GPU memory) and the Quadro SDI Output card (provides the integrated graphics-to-video output, enabling 2D and 3D effects to be composited in realtime with 2K, HD, and SD video).

At IBC, Nvidia and Adobe held a joint demo that used a Quadro FX 5800 card with Elemental Accelerator, a video processing plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 that leverages the card's GPU to speed up video decoding, processing, and encoding. Attendees reported near-realtime results for most timeline effects and much faster MPEG-2 encoding.

At the PNY, Brainstorm Multimedia's virtual studio and 3D broadcast graphics software also saw the benefit of the combined three cards. Brainstorm Multimedia, which has sold virtual studio systems to NBC and the BBC among others, said it could now capture four 1080 HD inputs, composite, and output high-quality graphics, all in realtime. According to Paul Lacombe, president at Brainstorm America, the cards will become a key component in the company's future installations.

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