News

Aurora Video Systems announces Fuse-X card for professional audio workstations, and new Interceptor technology (29/7/2005)

The Fuse-X is the latest example of Aurora's continuing commitment to professional audio editors, mixers, sound designers and composers, offering the only zero-latency, in-sync playback solution for compressed video in pro audio environments. Fuse-X is also a high performance video editing card at a breakthrough price. Available for $499 at your local professional A/V reseller or from the Aurora online store, the Fuse-X provides video editors and digital audio workstation, or "D.A.W." users the tools they need to capture, synchronize, and score to QuickTime(TH) video files within pro audio editing applications.

Their new Interceptor(TH) technology works with and is included in the latest versions of Aurora's A/V card drivers. While enabled, Interceptor also performs automatic pixel-aspect-ratio conversion in hardware. This allows legacy, or "square-pixel" (640x480, 320x240, 768x576, 384x288) movies to play full screen at the correct visual aspect ratio to an NTSC or PAL monitor or television. The "Aurora A/V" series of capture/edit cards for Macintosh now includes the entire Aurora "Pipe" family of cards, and the new Aurora "Fuse-X" card for OS X. Hardware aspect ratio conversion is available as a free upgrade to all Fuse-X and PipeStudio owners.

"Our new Interceptor technology is a natural progression in the development of cards specifically for the pro audio market", states Aurora CEO Darryl Hock. "With Interceptor mode enabled on an Aurora Fuse-X or Pipe-family card, D.A.W. users are able to accept video files in a variety of QuickTime compression formats, and play them as-is within Protools(TH), Digital Performer(TH), Logic Pro(TH), and other audio packages." The convenience of accepting a wide variety of formats gives the audio professional more options, and saves him or her valuable time by not requiring a re-render to DV or MJPEG-A. Interceptor playback is currently supported in many QuickTime CODECs, including DV/DVCPro, DVCPro50, Sorenson, Sorenson3, H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, PhotoJPEG, MotionJPEG-A, MotionJPEG-B, Uncompressed 8-bit, and Uncompressed 10-bit.

Depending on compression ratio, some CODECs demand more CPU power or disk space than others, and may not be as suitable as others for use in pro audio applications. Aurora has already qualified DV, PhotoJPEG, and MotionJPEG-A compression types in several D.A.W. applications.

The Aurora AV software installer also includes a standalone capture utility "MediaGrabX" and a rich set of Final Cut Pro 5.0 "Easy Setups". All Aurora AV-family cards are supported in OS X 10.3 and 10.4 and in QuickTime(TH) 6.5 and 7.0.

www.auroravideosys.com