“Depending on the product, we use a one or two card solution. For example, there are the DigiSuite LE or LX products, which could be standalone cards. Our newest configurations are the DigiSuite LE Max, LX Max or DTV Max. The Max part is what adds 3D functionality to your capabilities. These are 3D effects, not 3D animation. It is also the capability to export in real-time for DVD authoring.”

“Compressing the video, once finished, has always been one of the tricky things. How do I get my content to a streaming file or DVD? So we provide some enabling technology for that. Fundamentally, we’re thinking of editors on the DigiSuite side of things.”

Nathan: When you speak of compression, do you use your own products or third party technology?

Tony: “For that, we use the Real and Windows Media encoders. We meet each other halfway. In hardware, we perform some of the intensive encoding. For example, we work at full resolution video (720x480 or 720x486), which is too large for typical streaming applications. So we need to resize that down to 240x120 or to a size of your choice. We resize and convert the color space to an RGB color space in hardware. We do these processes faster than in real-time.”

“Then, we pass that resized content to the Real or Windows Media encoder (or both) to do the final compression into their formats. We don’t call our export process real-time because we are dependent on those software codecs to complete the compression. But as a case in point, if you choose something that’s qualified for 56.6 Kbps modems, a small image size, 10-15 fps and one stream, we could probably do that faster than real-time. But if you choose four or five streams simultaneously, then we won’t do it in real-time. It will be two to three times real-time, meaning a one minute playback will encode in two or there minutes, depending on the efficiency of the codecs involved.”