Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterFields & Frames
Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
At IBC 2005, open source, IT-style capturing and editing finally came to video production with Grass Valley's introduction of its Infinity product line. Directly challenging the two major players and their nascent recording technologies, GV's open standards play (complete with its new “Power to Choose” tagline) could be the beginning of considerable change in an industry better known for battles over whose proprietary technology would rule. ▸ “It began to seem that at every NAB we had to face another new format,” says Scott Murray, director of market development at Grass Valley. “The choice about which format to support became momentous, as it locked a broadcaster in for years, whether it was the best decision or not.” ▸ “The format wars are over,” claims Murray. Now, Infinity camcorder users will be able to choose codec (DV, HD, SD, or even JPEG 2000), compression rate, and media (removable Iomega REV drives or pro-grade Compact Flash RAM) on the fly. With built-in FireWire, USB, and Gigabit Ethernet I/O, both camcorder and deck easily tie into a data-centric infrastructure. Whether this spells the end of the format wars or not, Grass Valley has finally staked out a position beyond its previous “me too” status behind Sony and Panasonic. Now, it's up to those industry leaders to embrace, reject, or find some third way to respond to this sea change. ▪ In late September, the iGrid 2005 convention in San Diego hosted what was described by one of the organizers as the “first realtime, international transmission of super-high-definition (SHD) 4K digital video” over gigabit IP networks. ▸ The 4K video, streamed between San Diego and Keio University in Tokyo, was also mixed for sound: An editor in San Diego, along with sound mixers working from ILM's Skywalker Sound in the Bay area, together worked on a realtime, 24-track uncompressed audio mix to picture. ▸ “[Skywalker Sound] sees this as a way in the future to deliver their services to an elite clientele,” says Laurin Herr, president of Pacific Interface, and the organizer of the 4K demo. ▪ Can you believe how quickly top-tier storage technology is plummeting in price? In an October meeting with Wall Street analysts and a member of the video trade press, storage maker Dot Hill revealed that its new Riva II RAID controller will enable at least 1400MBps reads and 800MBps writes over InfiniBand when it is released in 2006. Maybe those numbers aren't too surprising; after all, you can get that with a big SGI rig. But the Carlsbad, Calif.-based company expects entry-level systems based on the technology to run anywhere from $10K to $15K, a considerably lower tab. The company doesn't sell directly, rather OEM'ing to folks like Maximum Throughput, who demo'd at the event. Max-T CEO Giovanni Tagliamonti — who wouldn't comment directly about his company's plans with the new technology except to say it was “very interesting” — did note that Dalsa now deploys Max-T's zippy Sledgehammer HD!O with rentals of its Origin camera for direct recording of streaming 4K files to the disk array.
