Grass Valley Pegasus - Reviewer’s Guide October 2007
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2.2 The Pegasus Advantage
In almost all situations up till now, there were only three solutions available for capturing high-quality, high-
resolution video on a PC:
1. Capture via a video editing hardware board, as uncompressed data. This method requires vast amounts of
storage, within high-performance RAID arrays. Satisfying these hardware demands requires an expensive
investment for such a simple task.
2. Capture via a video converter and scaler to a FireWire port. This method reduces the source material’s visual
quality to standard definition DV.
3. Capture with software-only solutions, either as uncompressed data, which can result in sacrificing frame rates
to maintain capture on lower end systems, or you can capture to a compressed format. The problem with this
solution is that in some cases, you may not get video overlay or be forced to reduce the performance of your
graphics card output to be able to capture. In any event, PC resources must be shared between the capture
software and the PC software you want to record output from. This method also does not solve the problem of
obtaining footage from external devices.
With Pegasus, you eliminate these tradeoffs. Pegasus not only captures in the same resolutions employed by most
high definition sources, but the resulting data is much smaller in file size and capable of being manipulated and
edited on any current PC. The Canopus-engineered HQ codec has been designed to preserve the best possible
picture quality without sacrificing editing performance.
Canopus HQ supports a maximum resolution of 1920x1080, and by compressing the full HD resolution without
using a pre-filter to down-sample the signal, the codec is able to preserve the frequency characteristics of the
original signal almost perfectly. In other words, compressing HD data in this way can yield a saving of 20:1
without any significant loss in quality. That’s a big saving considering that just one second of uncompressed HD at
1920x1080 is around 140MB!
In addition, when capturing PC graphics output, Pegasus records everything it sees, including full motion video
overlay and 3D renderings from animation software or games – no need to reduce your PC’s video acceleration
settings.
The Canopus HQ codec is extremely flexible and configurable, providing not just easy-to-use pre-configured
profiles (Online Fine, Online Standard), but also customizable settings in terms of picture quality and bit-rate.
For example, when capturing a 1440x1080 60i video signal, its full size is 750Mbps. To limit this to 200Mbps, the
maximum size value should be set to 27%.
