MAcrosystem AG (Germany) recently announced several new hardware options designed for the Bogart OS Casablanca Video Editor.  These products are NOT released yet in North America (NTSC) - they have just released in Europe/Asia under the PAL system.  We can expect further news of their availability in North America in the coming weeks and months.

This information is pulled from the Macrosystem AG website which is posted in the German language - via the Google Translate software (errors possible).

You can read this translation yourself via this link: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macrosystem.de%2Fde_de%2Fnews.html

NOTE:  Each of these forthcoming products requite the use of the Bogart V5 OS (Operating System) which has also not yet released in North America. This OS has released in PAL (Europe/Asia).

Render Booster - this is an item that has been mentioned publicly and has the interest of several in our community.  From what I can understand - this is (over-simplified) a device you plug into your Bogart OS  Casablanca via the supplied USB extension cable and it's job is to speed up processing (rendering). 

This will apparently allow much more speedy conversions of finished videos into files that will play on Windows & Mac computers, as well as dramatically speeding up the time for compiling/creating DVDs from SD and HD video footage. I heard as well (from a post by MSAG CEO Jorg Sprave) that Render Booster "features state of the art de-interlacing, scaling and encoding. So yes, the entire down conversion is different if the RenderBooster is used. "  This suggests that down-conversions from HD to SD for an SD DVD would experience much better quality-results!

Analog Audio Interface - From the translated text this device connects to your Bogart OS Casablanca via USB also.  It provides not only XLR Mic input (balanced audio), 1/4" unbalanced mic/line level but also a pair of Phono/RCA inputs which are said to deliver better quality results than the analog ports on the S3000/S6000 series.  The device also enables the S3000/S6000 series to access analog outputs from your editor to a sound amplification system.

TT Shuttle - this device suggests to me a much enhanced version of the old Twistor, a jog-shuttle device that was released for use with the Casablanca KRON.  But this new TT Shuttle has 15 differen

t keys that apparently have different functions across the Casablanca Menus.  The jog-shuttle wheel is something that may impress many folks who do lots of frame accurate trimming and splitting. 

Again these products are NOT released yet in North America (NTSC) - they have just released in Europe/Asia under the PAL system.  We can expect further news of their availability in North America in the coming weeks and months.