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MillimeterVanguard Awards 2007
Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
Every year, as the days get shorter, Digital Content Producer's editors and contributors get together and compose a list of the year's most groundbreaking new products for video-production professionals. Anything released within the calendar year is fair game. Whether it's a free downloadable media player, a $399 effects plug-in, or a 4K digital-cinema camera, as long as it promises to make an editor or cinematographer more powerful or more productive, the participants will debate its merits.
Then, after exhaustive discussions and voting, the truly groundbreaking is separated from the merely new and improved, and once again, we can present the Vanguard Awards. This year, the winning products represent a particularly wide gamut. Maybe that's because the definition of what constitutes a digital content producer keeps expanding. Your father might be uploading video to YouTube and trying to maximize his compression settings, and your 14-year-old might be doing format conversion. You might be shooting high-definition video and wondering how best to protect those images as they're processed in post and deployed to the Web.
And every year on the blogs, in the magazines, and at the tradeshows, we see a parade of new gear that promises to shift our paradigms and optimize our workflows. That's mostly hype, but not completely. The end of the year is a great time to take stock: Whatever you're currently doing and however you're doing it, there's always a better way. With that in mind, here are this year's 13 Vanguard Award winners.
Panasonic's new implementation of MPEG-4/H.264/AVC for its P2 HD line, called AVC-Intra, is an intraframe-only compression scheme that promises 50-percent bit savings over previous MPEG-2 codecs. All that without long-GOP sequences. Full-resolution AVC-Intra 100 is said to approach D-5 quality at 100Mbps, which offers 10-bit precision, 4:2:2 sampling, and either 1920×1080 or 1280×720 pixel resolution. “Hard to believe coming from a little P2 card, but true,” says Vanguards judge D. W. Leitner. The budget-bit 50Mbps version, AVC-Intra 50, is well-suited for solid-state image capture, offering 10-bit precision, 4:2:0 sampling, and 1440×1080 and 960×720 frames (for 720p and 1080i video, respectively).
