Connecting one multimedia appliance to another is the promise of Firewire, and now that the Digital Video standard is scribed in stone, video board makers are preparing for broadcast quality desktop video. Miro Computer Products AG, Digital Processing Systems Inc and Fast Multimedia Inc all presented their DV- compatible wares at Comdex in Las Vegas, but it was Fast that narrowly pipped the others at the post by presenting pre-release information and, according to sources at the show, a better though more expensive product. Since computers were first considered for digital video editing, there has been a gap in the market. After years of quarreling, Sony Corp, JVC Ltd and Panasonic Broadcast & Television Systems Co finally agreed earlier this year on the DV digital video standard, initially for ‘prosumers’ – professionals and affluent consumers – but eventually for the masses just as soon as the industry could get the equipment to work out of the box. DV was a sign that these companies saw that a lack of standards would hurt the industry rather than help their competing businesses and were willing to take the problem seriously – since the standard’s approval Sony and JVC brought out their VFX and GR families respectively, each at around $3,000 and each with the quality of the broadcast benchmark, Betacam SP. Unfortunately, once you step up into the next layer of digital cameras, the ‘standards’ go awry again – and even in DV, JVC appears to have thrown a gratuitous spanner in the works by using a half inch tape where the other two are using quarter inch formats. Fast’s DVMaster builds on the AVMaster – the first video board to PCI Bus mastering, a technology which enables cards to control the PCI Bus rather than rely on the already-overburdened central processor – series with a Firewire codec from Sony. Estimated street price is somewhere on the comfortable side of $2,000. Little is known about Miro’s DV 100 except that it will expand on its highly popular DC range. DPS had its $1,000 PCI-based Spark Perception board, which comes with Adobe Systems Inc’s Premiere and Adaptec Inc’s Firewire board. All are looking to Intel Corp’s MMX multimedia extensions to bring up the available power for video processing and one DPS employee even suggested that software codecs might be the mid- term future for video editing. DV is an acquisition and editing format – that is, it’s for ‘prosumer’ broadcasters and you won’t see DV software on the shelves just yet. It was defined by the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers earlier this year (see computerwire.com/mf/ref.htm) and claims negligible generation loss and a constant data rate of 3.5Mbps. Built with multimedia in mind, it enables two signals, audio, video and data, to flow along up to 63 daisy-chained devices at one time. More important to camera operators, the DV standard raises luminance and chrominance data rates to such a level that the accepted bandwidth is comparable with Sony’s Betacam SP and Panasonic’s MII – and many users of DV and Betacam SP report it is difficult to distinguish between the two. DV-compatible devices are also supposed to be hot pluggable, enabling the user to add or remove devices while everything else is on, and bi- directional, although in Sony’s case the company has left out the ‘receive’ chip for fear of digitally perfect pirates – an issue yet to be resolved.
