Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/hd/specs/
oh momma... daddy wants.

Not at all new, but they are nice looking, not to mention relatively cheap.

I wish they would loosen up and either support linux or release the info needed for others to write linux support (or Irix for that matter). I'm using AJA cards instead for the linux support. These cards a good bit more expensive, but blackmagic just doesn't care about anything but the mac/windows desktop.

Well, the total lack of professional video applications for Linux (aside from smoke/flint) might have something to do with it...

-zolo

There is Shake, Houdini, Maya, RaveHD, several NuCoda products, Bones from Thomson Grass Valley, Oxtel Imagestore 300, and many others, and this is ignoring the numerous people who are doing embedded systems.

Now, AJA, DVS, and Bluefish444 all support linux, but they all cost an arm and a leg. The Aja cards are over a grand for plain SDI cards, and the DVS cards are $5k for plain SDI cards. Bluefish is somewhere in between I believe.

I'm guessing that compositing and 3D apps by themselves aren't nearly lucrative enough of a market for video card companies to support Linux. If popular editing apps like Avid, Vegas or even Premiere Pro (shudder) had Linux ports, the sheer numbers would make driver development much more worthwhile for the card vendors. Just a guess...

Well, there is Cinelerra (shudder).

That said, there is more than just editing software. Any company that wants to use BMD cards in an embedded system might well be buying hundreds of cards a year. I realize that this isn't considered high volume by BMD (I believe they don't consider any order less than 10k units to be high volume), but the cost to allow companies to get the specs under NDA and have a person to provide part time support can't be all that high. AJA and DVS certainly find it worthwhile. They even give OEMs and embedded systems people a discount on the products.

I bet that AJA and DVS customers would flood to BMD for new product designs based on pricing as the discount either AJA or DVS give still doesn't bring the cards down anywhere near to the cost of the BMD cards.