Bluefish444 I/O Solutions for Your Business

Bluefish444 is an Australian-based manufacturer of video input/output solutions. Its focus is almost solely on advanced SDI and HDMI I/O cards and accompanying software, and the company offers options for video professionals and developers. Bluefish444 I/O cards are among the priciest, but Bluefish444, nonetheless, has a customer base of more than 21,000. Most of the customers are businesses. Bluefish444 is repeatedly the first to break many grounds, and its innovations have introduced new ways of doing things for many companies.

Bluefish444 was the first to supply uncompressed 4K UltraHD SDI I/O workflows. It was the first to deliver real-time uncompressed 4:4:4 SDI I/O for digital intermediate workflows, the first to offer Adobe Premiere-enabled 4K SDI live capture, and the first to provide a 4K SDI playout solution for Premiere, Avid Media Composer, and Assimilate SCRATCH.

Bluefish444 cards are also superbly built. They're famed for what Bluefish444 calls the "Bluefish444 Advantage"—a combination of acquisition quality, driver stability, and hardware reliability.

Bluefish444 Advantage

Bluefish444 maintains SDI acquisition quality from a camera regardless of bit depth or resolution. Bluefish444 cards operate on a 12-bit video processing engine, and 8-, 10-, and 12-bit 4K/2K/HD/SD files are processed with equal 12-bit precision during capture, preview, and master. 12-bit processing provides four times the quality of the more common 10-bit processing—4,096 discrete values of red, green, and blue per pixel in contrast to 1,024 per pixel. Bluefish444 has been developing this proprietary 12-bit engine continuously for more than a decade.

Bluefish444’s Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X drivers have also been developed continuously for the last decade and are recognized for their reliability. They’ve been adopted by other brands to ensure reliability in mission-critical applications, such as live sports. Professional and developer Bluefish444 cards use the same drivers and APIs for consistent performance.

Bluefish444’s industrial manufacturing process meets the same standards as those of the US military for IT hardware manufacturing. The assembly process is verified by government bodies and has ISO 9001 accreditation and RoHS compliance.

Varied Business Uses

Bluefish444 cards are mainly used in post-production facilities and by companies specializing in live events. However, they’re also widely employed by other business types.

For example, California-based Reboot Entertainment used Bluefish444 solutions to digitize thousands of video tapes for mobile consumption. The company ran multiple conversions simultaneously for 18 hours per day and achieved high-quality results while also recording metadata. Reboot’s Walter Procek comments, “The analog-to-SDI conversion is flawless. The Bluefish444 product specialists and support staff are a pleasure to work with, both informative and insightful.”

Mumbai’s C21 Digital Entertainment, which provides encoding, transcoding, dubbing, and authoring services, incorporated Bluefish444 cards for capture/recording and capture/encoding. C21’s CEO, Suraj Chandna, says, “We have multiple manufacturers’ video I/O cards. But we use the Bluefish444 Epoch for 70% of our capture requirements because it produces the best captured picture quality. It’s very easy to use with its bundled Symmetry software for I/O. We rarely have problems and when we do the tech support is great.”

Malaysian motion control service company Giant Asian Robots relied on a Bluefish444 card to capture uncompressed output directly from the camera at a higher resolution than was possible for them otherwise. They compliment the card: “It worked well for us as an on-location recording/playback tool… delivering us the picture quality we needed with no fuss in very hot, humid, demanding location conditions. It has never given us any trouble.”

Post-Production and Live Event Uses

azPTP, of Phoenix, Arizona, is a full-service film and video production company that recently upgraded to the Epoch | 4K Neutron from an earlier model, the Create | 3D Ultra. “We have moved to shooting and delivering more 4K and HFR footage, and it was time to upgrade to a card that could handle the increased data rates more efficiently,” says head of azPTP, Curt Pair. He praises the card’s ability to handle the new resolutions available in Adobe CC, and adds, “In particular, we’re quite pleased with the 4K UHD support and HDMI 1.4 monitoring, which was a … bonus. We don’t have a 4K production monitor at this time, so support for lower-cost HDMI monitors was essential. Like the Create card, support for 10-bit color was not something we wanted to lose when upgrading to a 4K card.”

Brainstorm Multimedia, headquartered in Madrid, Spain, offers real-time 3D graphics, virtual studio, and augmented reality solutions to worldwide clients. Brainstorm uses Bluefish444 cards for many of its products. Most recently, the firm has integrated the Bluefish444 Epoch | Supernova CG and Epoch | Neutron into its latest products to allow for multi-channel live SDI capture, and for fill and key SDI outputs to deliver graphics in real time. The Supernova CG enables the company’s customers to choose between configurable fill and key I/O combinations for different workflows. The Supernova CG and Neutron offer HD/SD bypass relays, allowing on-air systems to manage power failures, power outages, and other unforeseen circumstances.

Turkish KIZIL Electronics combines its PikoTV encoding/decoding software with Epoch | 4K Neutron cards into solutions for transmitting real-time UltraHD 4K content over satellite during live events. Attests a KIZIL testimonial: “We use Linux in our products, and with Bluefish444 supplying a complete Linux SDK for development, we were able to develop UHD 50 fps 8 or 10-bit video capture and playback utilizing two Epoch | 4K Neutron cards.”

AlphaDogs is a post-production facility and design studio in Burbank, California. AlphaDogs also has a separate division called Digital Service Station, which offers independent producers a one-stop solution for importing and exporting material from tape to hard disk and back to tape. Founder, Terence Curren: “The Digital Service Station acts as a self-serve ingest and output opportunity for editors with NLEs and no access to videotape machines. As a consequence, they can do a lot of capturing from videotape. The Bluefish444 IngeSTore software and Epoch | 4K Supernova S+ card utilized in the system allows us to capture multiple streams of video at the same time, which reduces the ingest time on large multi-tape jobs. We use the card for mass tape capture jobs. One recently involved capturing hundreds of hours of Gulf War footage from HDCam tapes. We looked at a variety of products, but the bundled Bluefish444 IngeSTore software and hardware combination was the only reasonably priced solution for multiple streams of capture that fit our needs. It can record simultaneously while editing in Adobe and Avid NLEs, which is very useful for multi-tasking. And the company has been responsive to any communications we had and were extremely helpful in setting up the product, initially.”

A large overhead public screen was installed in the City of Greater Dandenong, in Australia, to display sporting events, news, and other content around the clock. The screen was intended to be a popular addition, so a high-quality solution was desired. Urban Screens Coordinator, Thomas Dawe, wanted something that would simply “just work” without any bugs or headaches, and he went with Bluefish444 and the CasparCG video server to deliver content to the screen for pre-roll. “We were impressed with the high build quality and reliability of the Bluefish444 hardware,” says Dawe. He also comments about future projects and how his eye is already on Bluefish444. “We’re looking at migrating to SMPTE 2022 IP delivery for our next major overhaul of the system. With the new [Bluefish444] KRONOS [developer] video cards featuring SFP connections on the horizon, it looks like Bluefish444 are one step ahead of us. They will definitely get our first look-in when we start rolling out that technology.”

The Lineups

Bluefish444 features a variety of professional cards for Windows, Mac, and Linux across its Epoch | Neutron, Epoch | 4K Supernova, and Epoch | 4K Supernova S+ series.

The Epoch | Neutron range offers up to 6 SDI I/O options and HDMI monitoring in a small form factor, and features solutions for SD-HD, 3G-4K, and 4K+ workflows.

The differences between the Epoch | 4K Supernova and Epoch |4K Supernova S+ ranges are in length and that the latter also has SDI monitor BNC connections. Otherwise, both Supernova ranges are the same, offering up to 8 independent and simultaneous channels of 3G/HD/SD-SDI input or output for up to 4K workflows. The Supernova models are SDI-centered and not equipped with HDMI connectivity.

In addition to these, Bluefish444 recently announced the new KRONOS cards, which support multi-channel 4K 60p, High Dynamic Range (HDR), High Frame Rate (HFR) SDI, and SMPTE 2022 for video over IP workflows.

Bluefish444 cards integrate well with many software applications, Thunderbolt™ enclosures, and other devices. Complete lists of compatible products are available on Bluefish444’s website.