Those hot – and spicy pricey VideoRISC Compression Architecture chips from C-Cube Microsystems Inc (CI No 2,270) promise to revolutionise manipulation of video – once the company can get volumes up enough to get the prices down. The CLM4600 Broadcast MPEG 2 Video Encoder is designed to encode digital video to less than a fifth the bandwidth of analogue video at resolutions up to 704 by 576 into MPEG syntax for digital cable television and direct broadcast satellite systems. It consists of micro-applications software running on eight VideoRISC Compression Processors for NTSC or 10 for PAL, to provide an aggregate performance of over 20 Giga-operations per second. The CLM4600 takes CCIR 601 digital video as input and compresses it into a subset of the MPEG 2 syntax in real time, at 30 and 24 frames per second for NTSC and 25 frames per second for PAL. The CLM4600 incorporates the Milpitas firm’s proprietary data rate control and masking algorithms, which enable it to provide superior image quality at broadcast data rates of 4Mbs to 8Mbps, and supports inverse telecine for encoding film-based video; it can encode video at a wide range of horizontal resolutions. The CLM4500 Consumer MPEG 1 Video Encoder is designed to compress up to 352 by 288 resolution video into MPEG syntax in real time. The video can be stored on and played from a compact disk, which C-Cube reckons finally extends to video all the advantages of CD: low-cost medium, durability, convenient size, low-cost players, and random accessibility. Windows and Macintosh-based authoring systems will be available from the likes of Optivision Inc, Optibase Inc and Minerva Inc, with others to follow. The CLM4500 consists of micro-applications software running on two processors to encode SIF-resolution – 352 by 240 for NTSC; 352 by 288 for PAL video in real time. The CLM4500 takes CCIR 601 digital video as input, subsamples it to SIF resolution, and compresses it into MPEG 1 syntax. And the VideoRISC Encoder Development Station consists of a seven-slot VME chassis in a tower enclosure with a Sparcstation 2 CPU, a Scorpio real-time MPEG video encoder board, a video input-output board, and a serial compressed video board. The CLM4600 is $10,000, the CLM4500 is $4,000.
