Field Acquisition - Handing the Options Back to the User, by John Naylor

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Field Acquisition - Handing the Options Back to the User

by John Naylor, August 11, 2006

Director, Infinity Program

If you look at any broadcast center today, you will see that operations are dominated not by tapes but by servers. The same point increasingly applies to news studios. Tapeless delivery is already with us.

The bottleneck comes when tape-based acquisition comes up against tapeless post-production and delivery. There has to be a stage when the content on tape is loaded, in real time, into the tapeless environment. In news, where every second counts, this is a big problem. There is not a news director in the world who would not love to get rid of this bottleneck, the time wasted while taped rushes are loaded.

What is needed is a way to acquire content that does not need to be transferred in real time into the editing and post-production system before you can do anything with it. That means replacing the tape drive in the camcorder with some sort of nonlinear recording system, which has a companion reader directly connected to the base network.

If you are going to invest in such a system, though, it needs to be clearly superior to tape-based acquisition on every front. There are some positive aspects about using tape, not the least of which is that it is very inexpensive. So inexpensive that tape can be retained - even unofficially - by journalists until they are absolutely sure that a story is secure.

You probably already have a commitment to a tape format, which means that the whole of your infrastructure is geared to a particular compression scheme. Even if you would like to move to tapeless acquisition, you will not want to lose the benefit of your investment in the surrounding equipment: you and all your team know how it works and you may have no reason to replace it.

Other manufacturers already offer tapeless acquisition systems, but they only answer some of the questions, not providing a completely satisfying answer.

Solid-state recording has, until now, only been available at a price. Proprietary memory cards are so expensive that they have to be immediately recycled, losing you all the security of holding on to the raw footage until the story is done. Some users are forced back to real-time transfers to tape just to provide that security!

Other proposals use optical disks, which are more competitively priced, although still not exactly throwaway. The disk formats are proprietary, so to connect a field acquisition disk into an edit network you need a special player, for a significant cost. And by their nature, optical disks to not have the same bandwidth as magnetic disks, so true random access can be more challenging than it might seem at first.

But while these systems have gone down the proprietary route, the IT industry has been leaping ahead, with products becoming smaller, cheaper and more powerful. The iPod, for example, has become such an icon that we sometimes forget that it is actually a 40 GB disk and powerful processing, small enough to carry in a pocket, and rugged enough to carry on working while you do.

Network power is increasing, too. Consumer computers support gigabit Ethernet and wireless networking. These are bandwidths that can happily sustain video rates. So why has no manufacturer harnessed these developments in IT power and added the application-specific requirements of the broadcast world?

This is the background behind Infinity, a new range of products - and indeed a new concept - launched by Grass Valley at IBC2005 and already securing the interest of many of the world's leading broadcasters.

Our breakthrough came with a collaboration with Iomega, well-known as a manufacturer of consumer-level but high-quality disk drives. The Zip drive was a classic, of course. Its latest line is the Rev, a hard disk built into a sealed container to make it removable, but with a very healthy 35 GB capacity and extremely fast data rates and access speeds.

It proved to be ideal for broadcast applications. Grass Valley worked with Iomega on a special, highly ruggedized version of the disk pack and called Rev Pro, but each share the same mounts so the disk packs are readily interchangeable and functionally identical. To put it another way, if a crew is out and suddenly needs more recording media because the story has developed, they can get it from a computer supplies store rather than sending back to base.

The cost is broadly comparable to a Digital Betacam tape, so you can treat Rev Pro packs in the same way. You will probably recycle the disks where you can, but will not worry if journalists hold on to them for a while. Basically, the disks are a consumable item, not a capital investment.

The Infinity Camcorder looks sufficiently like other ENG/EFP camcorders not to frustrate an experienced operator, but in place of a tape drive there is a slot to load the Rev or Rev Pro disks. Capacity of the disk is two hours at a typical standard-definition rate, or half an hour in HD. More on recording formats in a moment.

Alongside the Rev slot on the camcorder are slots for Compact Flash cards. This is not proprietary solid-state memory at proprietary prices, but the standard Compact Flash memory, as used in digital stills cameras and widely available at the equivalent of around U.S. $50 a gigabyte.

The third element of connectivity is that the camcorder also has a gigabit Ethernet port. So if you happen to be near a network you can stream material off faster than real time, even while you are shooting, or record live to the server network. With a Wi-Fi card you could file rushes from any convenient hotspot, and with municipal area WiMax networks on the horizon, you could broadcast live from anywhere in a city using just the camera.

There is one more important point to understand about Infinity. It is definitely not a new recording format, just a better way of recording existing formats. If you have an established workflow with DV, DVCPro or MPEG-2 compression, then all you need do is select the appropriate codec on the camera.

Infinity also incorporates JPEG2000, which we believe could represent the future of field acquisition because it offers a number of benefits over existing compression schemes. First and foremost, it is very efficient, producing better quality at lower bit rates than other schemes. Because it compresses the whole picture at once, there is no possibility of the blocking artifacts that are so visible when DCT compression algorithms are under pressure.

Second, JPEG2000 is an intraframe compression scheme, so online editing is much simplified with less pressure on the computer, and without the complications and compromises that long Gop compression brings.

Third, by its very nature JPEG2000 creates low-resolution browse versions alongside the broadcast quality compression. That means that even if you only have access to a very slow data connection you can deliver editable footage quickly with the full resolution material following.

I have focused on the recording formats and media of the Infinity Camcorder, but I should talk a little about the camera itself. Again, Infinity is designed to fit into your operation, not force you to change it. The camera front end is a full professional 2/3" detector: no need to replace your existing stock of lenses.

Second, the camera benefits from 40 years of know-how in making great looking TV pictures, with 14bit A/Ds and 22bit image processing. This means the camera is capable of capturing sparkling HD as well as SD pictures: the standard camcorder is switchable between 525 and 625 line standard definition, 720p at 50 or 60 frames and 1080i at 50 or 60 frames. Different video standards can be recorded onto the same media.

As well as the recording media and gigabit Ethernet, the camcorder also has a Firewire and three USB 2.0 ports for metadata and other applications. A PDA-like user interface allows the camcorder to be set up and operated, and gives access to additional facilities like the built-in audio router. The camera can also be controlled over the network, for example to initiate transfers.

The Infinity family also includes a Media Recorder, a VTR-like device that allows content recorded on Rev or Compact Flash to get into a conventional workflow. But for most applications a simple Rev base station or flash card reader directly connected to the edit station will be enough to give full random access to the content, a further significant saving in equipment costs.

There are plenty of choices when planning field acquisition: artistic decisions about lenses and other peripherals; HD or SD; the balance between quality and cost in choosing a compression scheme; compatibility with the rest of the workflow; speed and convenience. With Infinity from Grass Valley you are free to make those decisions yourself, without being forced into any choice because of the hardware. However you want to play it, Infinity will make it happen.