This article was originally published at www.display-central.com
Bluefish444, a manufacturer of high performance I/O cards, was at NAB showing off how its new card, the Epoch 4K Supernova, which can be used in 4K workflows (see video). To illustrate this, it set up several demos. One featured a Sony F55 4K camera whose output was fed to the 4K Supernova card and displayed in real time on a 4K monitor at 60 fps. That is not as easy a feat as it may sound. Not very many can do this at 60 fps.
They also had a 4K theater where they showed two different 4K workflows, again using the Epoch 4K Supernova card. One demonstrated the use of Assimulate’s Scratch, which is a program that offers real-time, client-attended toolset to marry dailies, conform, editing, color grading, titling, 3D compositing and finishing into a single, consistent interface. They are now launching a new version 8 that allows for 4K/60 processing, supported by the Bluefish card, which has a new driver that can support the 4K/60 YUV format. IN the theater, they show the use of this program playing back on a TV Logic 4K monitor.
They are also showing Adobe Premier Pro CC, where again, they have been able to show editing and playback at 4K/60 using this new version from Adobe.
The Epoch card also has a software update that now allows for more flexibility in it use. For example, the processing can be partitions to support 4K/60 operations, or it can be used for a number of 1080 operation, like ingesting four streams simultaneously. The tool is called Ingestor which is compatible with some of the third party plug-ins like Avid Media Composer or Adobe. Another use is the ability to edit one 2K file while simultaneously ingesting two 2K files over SDI and recording them as uncompressed video or Avid DnX HD. The big benefit is the ability to do these tasks in parallel, whereas they would have had to be done in series before, so a big efficiency and time saving. –Chris Chinnock