User manual

5
RenderBooster User manual
1. General information
1.1 Welcome
Thank you very much for purchasing the RenderBooster.
We are grateful for your confidence and we hope that this
product will live up to your expectations.
The RenderBooster will give you the opportunity to use your
Casablanca video editing system even more effectively than
before.
Feel free to contact us for further questions or if you would like
to give us suggestions for improving the product.
Whenever you contact us, please have your customer number
or the serial number of your device at hand so that we can help
you more quickly.
MacroSystem Digital Video GmbH
Industriestraße 11, 96317 Kronach, Germany
E-mail: [e-mail]
Fax: [phone]
Up-to-date information on MacroSystem products can be
found on the Internet: www.macrosystem.de
If you have specific technical queries, please contact our
technical support. Please do not forget to mention the serial
number of your device or your customer number each time you
contact us, if you know them.
Support Hotline, Germany
Phone: [phone]
Monday through Thursday between 10:00 am and 5:00 pm
Friday between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm
You can also visit our support forum on the Internet:
www.macrosystem.de/forum. In the forum, you will be able
to find assistance, step-by-step directions, and tips and tricks
for MacroSystem hardware and software products.
1.2 The background story
Many Casablanca aficionados vividly remember the “Render
Accelerator Option” for the original Casablanca editing system.
It was basically a faster processor, making the time intensive
effects rendering more speedy.
Since then (1996), CPU power has dramatically increased. The
Motorola processor in 1996 was clocked at 25 MHz, now the
top of the line “S 6000” has 3.3 GHz – and multiple cores, too.
This (theoretically) makes it thousands of times faster than the
then-state-of-the-art original.
But rendering speed is still lacking. Not so much for rendering
video effects – even in high definition, there is almost no more
related waiting time. Plus, the background rendering allows the
user to continue his work while the calculations are done in the
background.
The new challenge is called “transcoding”. Since today’s world
has not settled on just one video standard, it is absolutely
common, even essential, to convert a video file into other
formats for compatibility reasons. There are many different
camcorder formats to begin with – and it is often desirable to
create a Blu-ray disk, a common DVD, plus a few different PC/
Mac/Smartphone compatible files from a finished project.
And this is where today’s rendering time is painful. Making a
Blu-ray compatible HD video stream out of HD footage takes
a long time, even with fast CPUs. And it gets worse: Making a
DVD that looks good is a challenge – the “down conversion”
is a complex task. The common software codecs always offer
compromises – fast rendering usually means lower image qual-
ity. A difficult trade off.
1.3 The product
MacroSystem has now tackled these issues with the new
“Render Booster” – a device that plugs onto a USB port just
like a thumb drive. The small, elegant stick packs a lot of hard-
ware power – it basically is a small computer on its own, with
a highly specialized processor. It handles just the transcoding
(the de-interlacing, the scaling, and the encoding), nothing else
– but it does that in a state-of-the-art quality, and far faster
than high end mainstream processors. A true specialist.
1.4 The speed
The Render Booster can transcode any HD project into Blu-
ray, DVD or H.264 (TS) formats. The required time is about 1.2
to 1.4 times the runtime of the video. A 60 minute project will
require just between 72 and 84 minutes of rendering time. This
time includes the transcoding (faster than real time) and the
“overhead” (massive amounts of data have to be copied back
and forth).
Compared to a standard “S 4000 Pro”, this means that making
a Blu-ray in Arabesk is about 12 times faster with the Render
Booster.
1.5 The image quality
That is a dramatic speed increase for sure – but there’s more.
The quality of the hardware transcoding is superb, far better
than the common software encoders used not only by Bogart,
but by many other PC/Mac based editing systems too. This
allows a new quality mode for HD Arabesk projects – you can
now get 90 minutes of pristine Full HD AVCHD material onto
a double layer DVD media (45 minutes onto a single layer