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MillimeterTo Infinity and Beyond
Oct 26, 2005 1:32 PM, D.W. Leitner
I know. Not a terribly original column title.
But as I boot my iBook and open Microsoft Word to write this column, I also plug in a compact USB 2.0 flash drive containing my notes about Grass Valley’s upcoming Infinity camcorder. As I complete this paragraph—right about now--I save my Word file to the same flash drive.
(Click here for more on GV's Infinity introduction.)
I use a USB flash drive because I’m moving back and forth all day between two Macs, attempting to finish this column without further interruption. (One of those frenzied days you wish phones could be uninvented.) I might just as easily have saved my Word document to an internal hard disk, an external hard disk, or my iDisk storage on Apple’s servers.
The point is, when using my laptop or desktop, it is entirely my choice where and how I store my data. With the introduction of Infinity early next year, Grass Valley is saying the same thing: You don’t need to save your video data to proprietary tape products or formats. You can “record” video to whatever digital storage you’d like.
Infinity has three, count ‘em, three Hi-Speed USB 2.0 connectors. Handy for thumb-sized wireless Bluetooth adaptors or the flash drive I’m saving this article to. That should tell you, right off, this is a horse of a different color.
There’s also a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port, an HDMI display connector, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. And of course legacy I/O: BNCs for SDI, HD-SDI, composite video, timecode, and AES audio, and XLRs for analog audio.
Under the hood, according to Scott Murray, Director of Market Development at Grass Valley, purrs a PC running open-source Red Hat Linux, essentially a real-time version of Unix. (So that’s what color this horse is.)
Did I mention this is a camcorder?
Progressive-scan, 3-CCD, 2/3-inch. 1080i 50/60, 720p 50/60, 625i50 (PAL) and 525i60 (NTSC). With plans to eventually introduce 24P and 25P.
There’s more: multiple codecs. DV 25 Mbps at both 4:1:1 and 4:2:0, MPEG2 in both SD (4:2:0 and 4:2:2) and HD (4:2:0) including I-frame and Long-GOP formats at several compression rates (note: MPEG2 will be optional), and, in an industry first, JPEG 2000, the intraframe, wavelet-based compression borrowed from still photography.
JPEG 2000 was embraced earlier this year by the the Digital Cinema Initiative, an ad hoc standards group representing all six remaining Hollywood studios, who proclaimed JPEG 2000 as the agreed-upon compression for future digital theatrical presentation.
One of JPEG 2000’s characteristic advantages over conventional DCT compression like DV is that noticeable drop-outs appear as areas of soft-focus instead of chunks of blockiness. Instead of dividing the image into 8x8-pixel encoding blocks like DV, the wavelet algorithm compresses the entire image as a whole based on multi-resolutional analysis.
As a result, JPEG 2000 is also intrinsically scalable. A single codec produces both full-sized and low-res proxy images, in contrast to DV and MPEG2, which necessitate two HD codecs, one dedicated to proxies.
Infinity will generate .j2k bitstreams at 25, 50, 75, and 100 Mbps and support both SD (4:2:2, 10 bit) and HD (4:2:2, 10 bit, full 1920 width). Intraframe compression will inevitably make it the better choice for nonlinear editing over interframe Long-GOP MPEG2 and MPEG4.
Like any IT-based video camcorder—Panasonic’s HVX200 and Sony’s XDCAM HD come to mind--Infinity will embed its output in standardized MXF (Material Exchange Format). MXF file wrappers enclose both “essence” files such as .j2k compressed video and “metadata,” often described as data about data.
MXF enables all types of digital video, compressed and uncompressed alike, to be treated just like any other type of digital file, whether a Microsoft Word file like the one I’m writing now or a massive database. That’s why at last April’s NAB, Quantum introduced an IT data linear tape drive, the SDLT 600A, as a replacement for conventional VTRs. But that’s grist for a future column.
Back to Infinity (and beyond). Panasonic’s Jan Crittenden Livingston made a remarkable observation at the recent ResFest in New York. Noting the advantages of Panasonic’s Flash-based P2 storage in the new HVX200, she pointed out that a DVCPRO HD head drum assembly costs $8000 and tape drive another $8000, costs eliminated in the HVX200 (though there is a conventional DV drive). Which is how Panasonic can offer VariCam functionality in a small package and price.
The same holds true equally for the Infinity camcorder, which Grass Valley intends to sell for $20K. Forgoing tape technology, Infinity incorporates unprecedented IT-based connectivity, described above, and two choices not seen before in any camcorder:
1) Two slots for consumer-grade compact flash memory, and
2) An internal drive for Iomega’s innovative REV removable 35 MB hard disk, the size of a 3x3 Post-it stack.
In an unusual arrangement, Infinity’s internal REV drive contains read/write heads, while each REV hard disk cartridge contains a single 2.5-inch platter and spindle motor.
Infinity will accept both off-the-shelf consumer REV disks ($60) and also the new REV PRO disk ($70) co-engineered with Grass Valley, with improved caching to enable simultaneous dual-stream recording and playback.
As I said in my last column, the idea is: any acquisition strategy you want. Your choice of storage, not the manufacturer’s.
To Infinity and beyond--our universe of professional camcorders just got a lot more interesting.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.