Infinity - Supporting the User's Choice of Workflow

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Infinity - Supporting the User's Choice of Workflow


August 11, 2006

ENG has now been a practical reality for 25 years or more. When first introduced it replaced film-based acquisition, which was a real limitation for news and fast-paced production, demanding a lengthy lab process before the content could be viewed. However, the demand for speed never ceases, and today we find even real-time ingest from videotapes into the post-production workflow a major bottleneck. Random access, nonlinear editing is now universal. Now broadcasters want an acquisition system that delivers a random access medium directly, something that can be plugged right into the workflow. Options for the Recording Medium There are a number of obvious storage solutions that do not rely on videotape. These include: magnetic disks optical disks solid-state memory devices direct interconnection to a server or workflow network, by a wired or wireless network. Magnetic hard disks were the first to be tried, as long as a decade ago, without achieving any commercial or practical success until now. This is odd, as a magnetic disk is in many ways the obvious solution. Capacity is high thanks to the rapid increase in areal recording density; bandwidth is equally high; and costs are falling rapidly. Optical disk recording is used in at least one currently available ENG/EFP solution. Its popularity demonstrates that spinning disks can be used successfully in camcorder applications. However, there are bandwidth limitations inherent in optical disks that can restrict their practicality in random access applications. At least in their current implementation, optical disk recording for professional video applications uses a write-once medium - rather than the cost-effective recycling of tapes - and uses a proprietary disk and recording format, tying the user to the products of a single manufacturer or its licensees. Solid-state recording has the massive advantage of containing no moving parts, and therefore drawing significantly less battery power than any spinning disk or tape mechanism. It also offers excellent random access. The downside is that capacities are still relatively limited. One leading manufacturer offers solid-state recording for professional use, at both standard and high definition, but its proprietary solution is priced such that the memory cards have to be reused instantly. Recycling recording media is good practice, of course, but producers and news directors like the reassurance of having the raw footage on hand at least until they are certain they have all the content they need. To do this with a proprietary solid-state recording system requires a level of investment in memory cards that is often seen as excessive. Networking the camera has not been done to date. That it can be done can be seen from the consumer world, where it is standard practice to connect a DV camcorder to a desktop editor via an IEEE 1394 (Firewire or i.Link) connection where it acts as a source, albeit tied to real-time transfers. There is no reason, though, why a camera which itself has random access storage should not be connected directly to a network, which, if it has sufficient bandwidth, would allow faster than real-time transfers. Gigabit Ethernet is now widely available across a broad range of products, including the standard computer platforms used for nonlinear editing. Reviewing these options, there is a common linking factor. Proprietary systems, designed for professional video applications - tape, disk or solid state - all have limitations in terms of bandwidth or cost that restrict the user's choice of workflow. Yet all the fundamental requirements in terms of capacity, bandwidth and reliability have been solved by the IT industry for other applications. The conclusion is that, on this level, proprietary systems are not serving us well, and embracing the world of IT will enable broadcasters to achieve finally the workflow benefits they seek, without compromising quality or flexibility. This is the background to the Infinity programme, a Grass Valley initiative to develop a family of products that combine the company's well-known skills in broadcast engineering with the best of today's proven commodity IT technology. This combination, blending specialist experience with computer technology, has come to be known as "IT immersion." Choice of Compression To appreciate the benefits of IT immersion it is easiest to look at the Infinity Digital Media Camcorder, and see how it delivers real choice at every stage of the process. At the front end, it is a Grass Valley camera, built in the same factory and using the same technologies and components as Grass Valley studio cameras like the LDK 6000 WorldCam, the popular choice around the world for studio and outside broadcast HD work. Using Dynamic Pixel Management, the Infinity camcorder can originate in any of the common standard- or high-definition formats. If you need to, the camera can even be switched between SD and HD after every shot. From the optical block, the signal is converted to 14-bit digital for initial signal processing. The next stage is to encode the signal. Virtually every broadcaster in the world will have a preferred ENG format already set, and if Infinity demanded that this was changed it would be failing to provide choice to the user. For this reason, it includes codecs for a number of formats. Standard in the camcorder is a range of DV-style codecs. MPEG-2 can be added with an optional plug-in module. The Infinity camcorder also includes a codec for JPEG2000, which many believe will be the compression format for the future. While DV and MPEG divide the image into blocks for discrete cosine transformation to achieve the required compression efficiency, JPEG2000 benefits from a much more modern approach. This treats the whole picture as a single block for processing, and uses wavelet transforms to compress the image. JPEG2000 offers highly efficient encoding, even at HD rates, producing a visibly more satisfying result. Even when under the severest pressure, it can never generate the objectionable blocking artefacts that are familiar with MPEG and DV compression. Finally, JPEG2000 is an intraframe compression scheme, so any concerns about editing long-GOP formats is again eliminated. This is the first level of choice offered by Infinity, then. Users can add Infinity camcorders to existing technical infrastructures, matching today's codecs precisely. As the application develops, so the user can migrate, from standard definition to HD, and from older compression schemes to JPEG2000. Choice of Media As discussed earlier, the IT industry has a number of readily available storage subsystems on offer. Because these are typically created for a very much larger market than broadcast, they are already proven to be highly reliable, and are available at significantly lower cost than special-purpose solutions developed for our niche market. The Infinity camcorder offers a number of these. First, built in to the camcorder is a Rev Pro drive. This is based on the Rev desktop storage solution developed by Iomega, which uses removable 35 GB magnetic disks sealed in a housing that also contains the motor and head electronics. The act of plugging a disk pack into the drive causes it to provide a self-cleaning process as it spins up to speed, guaranteeing very high reliability. But because the disk pack is sealed it can stand up to very difficult environmental conditions, including extremes of temperature and humidity, even being dropped into water. The difference between Rev Pro and the standard Rev disk pack is that the Grass Valley version offers an extended cache to guarantee sustained data rates of 110Mb/s, sufficient for two concurrent data streams from the camera, even in HD, for example to provide two simultaneous signals for direct editing, or to stream content out while recording. Rev Pro is certified for a million read/write cycles. A 35 GB Rev Pro disk offers over two hours of SD recording or 40 minutes of HD recording, and is priced at around the same level as a Digital Betacam tape. Importantly, standard Rev disk packs will also work in the Infinity camcorder and other products, and these can be readily purchased in office equipment or computer stores. Iomega is working on higher capacity Rev drives, and as these become available they will be certified for Infinity and Rev Pro applications. While Rev Pro is likely to be the main recording medium in the Infinity, it is far from the only one available. Some jobs will benefit from the distinct advantages of solid-state recording, whether it is the need to leave the camera in looped recording for a very long time to be sure of getting the shot, or where you need to get a secure picture in very difficult circumstances - a roller coaster, for instance. The Infinity camcorder includes slots for solid-state memory, not in the form of a proprietary card but as standard Compact Flash. This is readily available from digital camera or computer stores at very low prices. A 1 GB card can hold a minute or more of HD, and cards can be hot swapped during recording. Rev Pro and Compact Flash each meet, in their different ways, the fundamental requirements for practical ENG and EFP recording. They offer excellent capacity; the bandwidth to support multiple streams and random access for editing; are readily re-used over a very long life; but are priced such that a broadcaster can afford to retain vital shoots on the shelf for days or weeks before releasing the media for reuse. However, that is not the end of the choices available to the user. The camera also features connections for gigabit Ethernet, Firewire (IEEE 1394) and USB 2.0. These allow a broad range of peripherals to be added, from external disk drives to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The gigabit Ethernet port allows the camcorder to sit directly on a SAN to transfer content at high speed, and the Firewire port allows it to be a source deck to a desktop editor, but with multiple random access streams rather than the linear limitations of a tape-based camcorder. Other products While the camcorder is the most exciting product in the Infinity family, it is not the only one. Most notably, there is a companion device, the Infinity Digital Media Recorder. This is essentially a VTR replacement device, with slots for Rev Pro and Compact Flash media; the usual controls and jog wheel on the front panel; and control interfaces to integrate it into automated workflows. It can be used as a field recorder, preview station, ingest device for editing environments or a playout machine under automation control in news or transmission. Variable speed from -1 to +3 is included. While the Infinity Digital Media Recorder is priced extremely competitively in comparison with conventional VTRs, for many applications you do not need all the functionality it offers and so a simpler solution is required. A Rev Pro drive is available in a number of configurations, including internal drives on ATAPI or SATA and external drives on USB 2.0 and Firewire. The external drives are supplied with Windows drivers and are fully Mac-compatible. Grass Valley news editing workstations and Edius craft editors are supplied with internal Rev Pro drives ready fitted. Whatever the edit platform of choice, adding an inexpensive Rev Pro drive means that recordings from the Infinity camcorder are instantly available without the need to ingest. Content on Compact Flash can be accessed by editors using one of the many third-party card readers freely available from digital camera and computer specialists. Again, these are cross-platform devices, so the Infinity content is available whether you are using, say, Final Cut Pro on a Mac or Edius on a PC. Developing the Workflow Underlining the message of delivering choice to the user, the Infinity system supports, and builds on, the broadcaster's established workflow. Content arriving into the newsroom can be "ingested" centrally - potentially much faster than real time -or it can be handed direct to an editor (working on any platform), perhaps hauled back to the central store later. Grass Valley's own Digital News Production System includes a range of powerful desktop editors, which now include Rev Pro drives built in. But it is important that all production workflows are supported, so that Infinity can be used as a transition with existing equipment, not demand that legacy systems be replaced. The Open Alliance Partner programme is an initiative across the industry to embrace the Rev Pro and Compact Flash recording media, to ensure transparent use of them in all the popular products and platforms in use today. Leading manufacturers such as Avid are already signed up to the OAP programme. In conclusion, then, Infinity offers: very high-quality SD and HD image acquisition a choice of compression formats to match the broadcaster's current requirements and to help the transition to the future integral recording on very affordable Rev Pro disk packs and off-the-shelf Compact Flash the option of external recording on any medium that meets the broadcaster's needs, and direct connection from the camcorder into servers an affordable VTR replacement extremely low-cost disk drives and card readers, compatible with all popular editors on Mac and PC seamless integration into current news and production workflows, whether based on Grass Valley systems or those of other manufacturers. The coming together of broadcast and IT techniques and technologies was earlier described as IT immersion, and the benefits that can bring will continue to grow into the future. Because the Infinity camcorder appears to computer systems to be an IT device, it can be treated as such, and driven from the workflow as well as contributing to it. To take one example of the way workflows might be extended in the near future, consider the way that news stories are assigned. When a news director sends a crew and reporter out to cover a story, it will already have a title and identifier. Using MOS protocol, that information can be transferred to the camera in advance so that, however hectic the newsgathering, there is no possibility of the title or identifier being entered incorrectly. That could be taken a stage further. If the crew is filming a follow-up to a running story, the camera could be preloaded with earlier reports so that the reporter could be reminded of what has already been said, while on the way to the shoot. Scripts, contact details or even directions to the location could be transferred from the newsroom database into the camera to help the journalist and crew get a better report, and get it ready for air faster. The Infinity programme aims to meet the real needs of today's broadcasters by handing them all the choices: technical, operational and workflow. By using commodity IT technologies and products when it really matters, Infinity is truly an open system, allowing broadcasters to integrate it seamlessly into current systems and migrate with it toward the ideal workflow for which meets precisely their specific needs.