FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Vara’s Wirecast delivers Tiger webcasting with Wirecast 2.0
LONDON, England — May 10, 2005 — Wirecast, the most powerful webcasting
solution for Macintosh, has been updated to leverage the raw power of
Apple’s Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger”.
“Wirecast 2.0 takes advantage of almost every new major features of Tiger
and delivers it in a beautiful package.” says Paul Carnine, President of
Products of Vara Software. “A Core Image Ripple transition broadcast live
in H.264 is a sight to see.”
With Wirecast, you can replace a whole broadcast studio with a Macintosh
for creating web broadcasts, and version 2.0 brings a whole list of
powerful firsts:
First Multiple Bitrate Output on Macintosh
“Our users told us they wanted to broadcast to 3GPP phones and the internet
at the same time,” said Simon Clarke, President of Technology for Vara
Software, “You can use as many combinations of encoding configurations you
like, and Wirecast can generate a QuickTime reference movie that allows
users to automatically choose the best stream for their connection.”
First Chroma Key for Live Broadcast on Macintosh
Wirecast 2.0 offers a high quality, real-time green/blue screen solution.
Have your talent present in front of a green screen and project them into
any scene you wish. “Our students love using this for our weekly school
video. What blew me away was the automatic configuration. We set up our
lighting, pressed ‘chroma key’ and the green screen just dropped away.” —
Julia Renfo, Educator.
First integration of Core Image Transitions / Filters in Live Video
Wirecast has always had beautiful 3D transitions, but now any Core Image
Transition can now be used in Wirecast. Want a pixel perfect Page Curl?
Elegant Ripple? Wirecast makes it easy for you to choose and configure.
Core Image also introduces the concept of GPU accelerated Filters. Want
your video to have a Sepia look — just add Core Image Sepia Tone filter to
the shot and adjust the Intensity as you wish. The best part is as
developers create new Core Image transitions and filters, Wirecast will
just work with them.
Integration with Spotlight, Quartz Composer, and more!
In addition to all of the firsts above, Wirecast also integrates with many
powerful features and applications available only on Macintosh:
Use Spotlight to search within Wirecast Documents. Drop Quartz Composer
compositions right into Wirecast. Export a Keynote movie and you can flip
the pages in Wirecast during a broadcast. Use AppleScript to control your
broadcast.
Powerful, Intuitive, and Fast. Like a Tiger-ready application should be.
“We have put the power of features such as QuickTime 7’s H.264 together
with the intuitive user experience of Wirecast,” said Mr. Carnine, “And
although we have packed Wirecast 2.0 with all these features, we have
actually been able to increase performance. Thanks to Core Video and our
own optimizations, the fastest broadcaster on Macintosh has just gotten
faster.”
Wirecast is built for Mac OS X, 10.3 (“Panther”), requires Quartz Extreme,
and is optimized for multiple processors. Wirecast fully supports QuickTime
and ISO MPEG-4 / H.264 streaming by leveraging the industry standard
QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server. Some features (Core Image, etc) require
Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) and a Core Image ready graphics card.
About Vara Software:
Vara Software Limited, founded in 2003, develops media related software.
Vara Software is located in London, England. More information on Vara
Software is available at www.varasoftware.com.