Hardware CODEC from GV/Thomson
 

Thoughts on this product?
http://professional.grassvalley.com/...firecoder_blu/

I'm not sure if this is really usefull to spend 600$ "just" for the encoding.

Maybe I personaly would prefer to safe the money and upgrade to the Nvidia Quadro CX which also accelarates H264 encoding and works great in After Effects.

However, I have to say that i allways was very happy with canopus products.

I wasn't so happy with their proprietary DV AVIs back when I used the DVStorm2. Had to use a little tool to convert them into something other NLEs would read. But they seem to have reasonably good products. It always worked.

According to the specs, it is only Windows capable, so a very limited audience. I'm more inclined to wait for Apple's Snow Leopard's OpenCL that will leverage GPU horsepower into the equation. Microsoft seems to be mum on OpenCL and that is where this device is intended to fill a deep chasm?