Blackmagic Design Inc., a manufacturer of video editing products, converters and routers for the post-production and television broadcast industries has announced that its DeckLink HD Extreme card has been certified by Digidesign, a part of Avid Technology Inc. for use with Pro Tools|HD 8 and Pro Tools LE 8 on OS X Leopard.

 

Pro Tools is a Digital Audio Workstation platform for Mac OS and Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows operating systems, developed and manufactured by Digidesign. It is widely used by professionals throughout the audio industries for recording and editing in music production, film scoring, television and post production.

 

Pro Tools has three types of systems; HD, LE, and M-powered. HD is the high-end package and is an integration of hardware and software. The hardware includes an external A/D converter and internal PCI or PCIe audio cards with onboard DSP.

 

Pro Tools users can now deploy Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink HD Extreme for monitoring most common QuickTime HD and SD video formats directly from their Pro Tools video track out to high end professional video monitoring devices such as broadcast monitors, large screen LCDs or plasmas.

 

DeckLink HD Extreme enables customers to connect to all decks, cameras and monitors via its SDI, HDMI and analog video capture and playback, combined with both balanced analog and AES/EBU digital audio.

 

The card will help post production and broadcast users working on design, editing, paint and effects tasks, offering them flexibility to instantly switch between SD and HD video.

 

It includes built in 3D lookup tables that allow customers to simulate feature film stocks, and can also instantly switch to full resolution 2K feature film editing with its new 3 Gb/s serial digital interface (SDI).

 

The DeckLink HD Extreme is available at a price of $995 from all Blackmagic Design authorized resellers worldwide.

 

Gordon Lyon, senior product manager of Post Production at Digidesign said that HD video monitoring is now the norm in audio suites, and Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink HD Extreme provides the perfect balance of flexibility and price for Pro Tools users who want full-quality real time HD QuickTime output.