First FireWire Character Generator Announcedby Robin LissPublished on Sep 24, 2001 12:00 AM 
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Focus enhancements, a maker of computer to video signal converters who recently acquired Videonics corporation has announced the first ever character generator with FireWire ports. The product will be released under the popular Videonics name. It appears to be an update of the previous Videonics Titlemaker series.
The unit outputs at 720 x 480 NTSC resolution via the FireWire IEEE 1394 Protocol. It accepts a FireWire input. It also has composite in's and out's. The literature did not specify if you could use a composite in with a FireWire out or vice versa. The unit allows for 256 levels of transparency. You can connect it up to your computer via ethernet. This connection allows the user to transfer their titling files to and from their computer. You can do italics, bold, drop shadow and many other text effects. The Videonics literature says the unit can display millions of colors and has 20 different special effects. The new titler also has a preview window so you can create titles on the fly. You can display titles sequentially, in a loop or just one at a time. The unit superimposes any title onto a live video feed and it includes a GPI trigger for triggering the device from another device.
It sounds like this product might be a good solution for anyone wanting high quality titling that can not afford a full computer based titler. The unit has an MSRP of $2,195.