Blu make use of Bluefish444’s products in development on BluBox
31 July, 2004
In 2003 we decided to move our graphics engine to a DirectX based development platform. Among several advantages was the possiblilty to achieve greater flexibility in developing 2D and 3D broadcast graphics solutions by using a vast body of easily accessibly documentation and code examples.
In our search for a DirectX graphics adapter with SDI output we were introduced to the BlueFish444 series of cards. These cards allow for fast copying of frames or fields from a separate graphics adapter for output via a genlockable broadcast quality SDI output. This was perfect for our development as we were not tied to a single manufacturer and their development cycle for our graphics engine. Instead, in conjunction with the Bluefish444 card, we are able to use either the latest and most powerful graphics card or the most inexpensive one from a varity of manufacturers depending on our needs.
Based on the BlueFish444 documentation and examples, we developed a code module in C++ that copies fields from a NVIDIA based graphics adapter 50 times each second to produce an excellent smoothly animated output.
For the first production using this new setup we have a scene consisting of numbers that are drawn and animated in 3D space that fall to different places on a board, all of which is floating above an animated background. These animations are all performed in a Visual Basic 6.0 application using Direct3D, fields are then copied from the Direct3D framebuffer in realtime to the Bluefish444 card using the C++ DLL. Whilst doing all this animation our application also generates all the sound for the show (Wav), and controls a Philips Videomixer via serial-port.
It has been a great to be able to use the Bluefish444 boards to build a solution for outputting 3D graphics in a professional and high quality format. It have given us the creative freedom needed for producing many different types TV shows.
About Blu
Blu is a Danish TV Production company located in Copenhagen producing several TV shows for the leading danish broadcasters. Blu has developed a system for fully automating TV productions called BluBox.
The BluBox software controls the unmanned moveable cameras and lights, graphics, and music. BluBox also controls the game itself, automatically awarding points and keeping track of scores and time. This flexible concept has been applied to several different types of TV shows – eg The Weakest Link.
