PCI Bus Master Accelerates Video Editing

Rainer Mauth

Fast Multimedia's new video editing board, AV Master, is one of the first PCI cards that efficiently deploys PCI bus master technology. It uses Philips' new SAA 7145 Pantera chip as a PCI bridge. The card masters all data transfer actions on the bus and directly reads and writes to memory (via DMA) without CPU control. To minimally clog other peripherals' access to the bus, the board caches up to 512 KB in video memory and then bursts the data on the bus. The resulting data transfer rate of 5 MBps enables a compression rate of 4:1, which produces broadcast-quality video.

AV Master integrates an on-board audio codec and audio sample rate converter and does not require an additional sound board. Its on-board synchronization of audio and vide o data streams guarantees flawless dubbing in full stereo quality (44.1 KHz, 16 bit).

The board ships with Ulead's 32-bit video editing software, Media Studio 2.5. AV Master supports rendering of up to three concurrent video layers and has active video filtering built onto the board. Fast's MediaCache software smoothes jerky playback of Video for Windows (VfW) clips through a sophisticated caching algorithm ("read-ahead") and considerably enhances the playback quality of VfW files.

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Where to Find

AV Master........................DM 1500.

Contact:  Fast Multimedia, München, Germany
Phone:    +49 89 5020 60
Fax       +49 89 5020 6199
Internet: 
http://www.fast-multimedia.com

Circle 1032 on Inquiry Card.

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Media Studio

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