Blackmagic Design Announces Support for the New Apple Intel-based Mac Pro Systems

The world’s first sub $1000 HD-SDI card and the world’s first full resolution 2K feature film editing solution for Mac Pro with Intel processors Milpitas, CA USA – August 9, 2006 -- Blackmagic Design Inc. today announced support for the new Apple® Mac Pro® systems based on Intel Xeon processors. All Blackmagic Design PCI Express based video capture cards are supported as a free update from the Blackmagic Design website.

Supported products include DeckLink HD Extreme, DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4 PCIe, DeckLink SP PCIe, DeckLink Extreme PCIe, and Multibridge Extreme and Multibridge Pro.

Blackmagic Design customers will be able to purchase these new Mac Pro systems and use any PCI Express based DeckLink card or Multibridge editing system.

In addition, Blackmagic Design’s testing has shown, that when the new Apple Mac Pro is populated with 3 x 500 MB SATA disks internally mounted and striped with RAID 0 configuration, approximately 170 MB/sec disk array performance was achieved. This allows customers to build lower cost HD disk arrays for simple capture and playback tasks. For higher performance editing solutions, Blackmagic Design’s testing has shown Apple’s Xserve RAID works well as a high performance uncompressed HDTV disk array.

“This is an exciting time for our customers because the processor to memory speed of these new systems is dramatically higher than previously available on the Mac platform. This allows more video effects, more layers, and more complex design work to run real time, while providing much higher performance for uncompressed HD and uncompressed 2K feature film rendering,” said Grant Petty, CEO, Blackmagic Design Inc. “These new systems are a perfect match for DeckLink cards and our new Multibridge Pro editing solution.”

Blackmagic Design software for Intel systems will ship later this week, and be available as a free update from the Blackmagic Design website. Once downloaded, any PCI Express Blackmagic Design product can be installed and operated in these new systems.

About Blackmagic Design Inc.
Blackmagic Design Inc. manufactures the world’s highest quality video cards and converters for the post-production and television broadcast industries. The Multibridge and DeckLink family of leading quality video products have changed the post-production industry and made HDTV more affordable for everyone. Blackmagic was founded by some of the world's leading editors and engineers from the post-production industry. This industry knowledge and experience is constantly fed back into our products allowing us to introduce the most amazing, creative tools for the industry.

Blackmagic Design has operations in the USA, the Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.