Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 8, 2006. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Bluething and Redthing are SDI-to-DVI converters. The feature set of the two boxes is identical, apart from an audio de-embedder that is found only in Bluething.
What distinguishes the converters is the up- and down-converter in standard broadcast quality. Unlike other converters, Bluething and Redthing use a “240 Point 3-Dimensional Sin(x)/x Spatial and Temporal Filter” to scale image material instead of bicubic filtering, as is also used by standard broadcast converters.
The up/down scaler converts all SD and HD-SDI signals to the native resolution of the DVI monitor. All common resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 are available as monitor resolutions.
The user can specify the filters and converter parameters via an Internet browser interface. The converters also process anamorphic SD signals.
The heart of the devices is an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), a kind of programmable processor that can be equipped with new functions via firmware updates. This makes it possible to provide the device with new filters later, which the processor can then apply in real time. A real-time function already integrated is user-defined lookup tables, which enable calibrated colour display.
The converter will presumably be available from the end of October; a price was not yet known.
In addition, Bluefish presented a plug-in for 3ds Max with which it is possible to control Bluefish cards directly from within 3ds Max. There are three uses for this in 3ds Max:
The output of rendering,
the output of previews and
use as mapping.
When outputting the preview, you do not have to wait until the preview has been completely calculated. Each frame is immediately output on the video card as soon as it is ready.
Furthermore, all Bluefish cards are now certified for Adobe’s OpenHD standard, which confirms the smooth interaction of Bluefish cards with Adobe products.
Further Links:
- Bluefish444
