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MillimeterNAB 2005 — Delivery
Mar 1, 2005 3:46 PM, By Trevor Boyer
Just as DVD has settled firmly in place as the delivery medium of choice for most studios and video departments, new formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc are on the horizon, ready to deliver higher quality and higher capacity.
These are coming at a good time, as DVD burners and media seem to have reached their speed limit at 16X. “The discs can only spin so fast,” says Mark Strobel, vice president of sales and marketing at Primera, a leading manufacturer of automated CD/DVD duplicators. Past a certain speed, Strobel says, the discs split right down the middle.
Looking to the future, Primera plans to support one or both of the emerging formats — whichever format has enough momentum behind it in terms of applications and users, which in turn means the media will be cheaper compared to the contender format. In the meantime, the company offers a new solution to make traditional recordable DVDs more robust. The Accent Disc Laminator lays a three-micron layer of transparent resin on the surface of inkjet-printable discs, making them waterproof. Previously, this was a very expensive printing process, especially for smaller duplication runs.
Another company in the business of improving the current recordable DVD media on the market is Maxell. The company has started tailoring DVD-Rs to suit its intended application. In January, the company announced DVD-RPro, a premium line of archival media that features Maxell's MaxPro Hardcoat technology that makes the media surface 20 times more dust-resistant and 40 times more scratch-resistant than standard DVD media, according to the company. The MaxPro coating might ultimately be used in DVD camcorder media too. For now, Maxell is applying the coating to its new DVD-R Plus and DVD-R Broadcast Quality lines of 16X media.
At NAB, Maxell will also showcase that it is the sole media manufacturer for InPhase Technologies, the company planning to bring to market a holographic disc storage solution in September 2006. Though the timetable for holographic storage coming to market has been extended in the past, this year Maxell will be shipping beta disc media that holds 50GB, according to Rich D'Ambrise, director of technology for Maxell.
The official first-generation product, however, will hold a whopping 300GB, with storage specs set to multiply after that. D'Ambrise says that holographic storage will find a home in broadcast facilities, which might be willing to skip HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disc entirely. For enterprise storage applications, Maxell is working on a holographic jukebox with StorageTek and Asaca.
Sonic gave a preview of its plans for the upcoming HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats at CES this past January. However, the company acknowledges that SD DVD production is still on the rise. Expect Sonic to introduce updates to its professional standard-def DVD authoring solutions, Scenarist and DVD Producer. Of special interest to video producers looking to add interactivity to their DVDs, the update to eDVD should be interesting. This is Sonic's tool for taking an authored project — it's designed to work with all major authoring tools — and adding web links, links to Excel documents, and links to other files on the DVD-ROM, as well as other interactive features. This is perfect for producers with a business audience that's likely to view DVDs on a computer screen (whether PC or Mac), says Rolf Hartley, senior vice president, Professional Products.
At NAB, Sonic also will showcase its plans to introduce high-definition DVD authoring to producers. The company has entered a development deal with Microsoft to allow HD content authors to create a DVD-like viewing experience for computer users with Windows Media Player 10. Sonic's DVD Producer HD is the application with this functionality, allowing authors to leverage the same type of interactivity that eDVD offers.
In terms of interactive video, it's hard to beat the Web for a venue that's guaranteed to let your viewers take advantage of embedded links and other features. While not launching a new product at NAB, Macromedia will be showcasing the video-related applications of its existing web application, Flash MX. Since video has been integrated into the Flash authoring program, Macromedia's Flash 6 player has become the most ubiquitous video player on the Web, according to the company, with a 96 percent reach. This has opened opportunities for professional video facilities to put their work directly in front of potential clients' eyes as they visit company websites.
