Thomson intros Pegasus PCI-Express Card for SD and HD storage

Thomson has introduced Pegasus, a new low-cost PCI-Express card for PC workstations. The company says the new Grass Valley Pegasus PCI-Express card offers real-time capture of SD and HD video, as well as VGA screen playback. The trick is the Grass Valley HQ software codec from Thomson is now available as a hardware encoder, enabling HD capture to be performed in real-time.

The Pegasus card comes complete with image capture software and a Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) for system integrators. “This Pegasus card offers HD quality video capture, but without the prohibitively high storage overhead,” says Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Thomson’s Broadcast & Professional Solutions business unit. “This new capture card will enable a broad range of professionals to produce the quality they need to satisfy their clients’ demands while allowing them to work with both SD and HD source material.”

Capturing HD video is very data-intensive, requiring expensive RAID storage. The Pegasus card uses the HQ codec, with its sophisticated compression algorithms, to provide huge storage savings without sacrificing picture quality. The Pegasus PCI-Express card leverages a specially designed HQ-based hardware encoder chip to capture images natively at up to 1920 x 1080/60i and 1280 x 720/60p resolutions. It can also natively display digital signals on a PC at up to 1280 x 1024/60p without down converting the image, and capture video from HDMI, DVI, S-video, and component sources.

In addition, because Pegasus can capture the PC screen display in HD quality, the Grass Valley Pegasus card is the perfect tool for creating training videos and instructional DVDs. The input quality is so clean that subsequent conversions to other distribution formats – for example, to mobile phones or the web – are cleaner too; and created much more efficiently.

The Grass Valley Pegasus PCI-Express card is priced at $999 MSRP and is scheduled to ship on November1, 2007. For a limited time, Pegasus will be bundled with the Canopus ProCoder 3 compression software package for only $1,199 (a savings of $300 off the suggested retail price).

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