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AMD is releasing the new FirePro SDI-Link cards—revealed on September 9th in Amsterdam, Netherlands—that offer video production studios real-time, GPU-accelerated post production and broadcast pipelines requiring Serial Digital Interface(SDI) input and output. In layman’s terms, these cards allow video from video cameras or servers to be processed and sent along very quickly, which is useful in settings such as video production and live TV broadcast studios.
The key element in the video transmission is the SDI interface. SDI is a family of video interfaces that production studios use to transmit uncompressed and unencrypted video data, and optionally can carry embedded audio and time code data as well. Typically, coaxial cables are employed, which can be up to 300 meters long—plenty long enough for most any TV studio. These cables then hook up to a workstation computer via PCI Express (PCIe) SDI cards and are then processed on specialized graphics cards (the GPUs).
During live broadcasts, studios require a solution that can take video from these SDI cables, run post-production such as flashy 3D motion graphics effects or interactive weather maps, and send it off for broadcasting… all with as little latency as possible. To do this, the GPU and SDI cards have to communicate with each other very quickly. This is where the new FirePro SDI-Link cards come into play.
