C-CUBE and Sony are talking according to todays IBC virtual news, which has a lot of information, and can be read here;
ibc-daily.co.uk
Friday 11th September
Format wars have had their chips!
C-Cube Microsystems (Room H) has effectively ended the current
Panasonic versus Sony video format battle with the introduction of
DVxpress-MX, a single chip codec that allows seamless content
transcoding between DV formats, including DVC Pro 50, and MPEG-2.
Standing at the head of a trio of chip manufacturers who have declared
their support of Panasonic's acquisition format DVC Pro here at IBC (with
Divio Inc and Zoran Corp), C-Cube has trumped all its competitors with a
highly programmable chip.
"The difference we offer is dual stream decoding, support for MPEG,
support for DVC Pro 50 and support for an alpha stream." says director of
firmware John Ju.
C-Cube has already invested 100 man years in MPEG product research
and development, and it created surprise amongst technology users with
its support of DV compression.
"Our focus is trying to streamline the process," says senior PR specialist
Malley Melissa.
"Customers believed C-Cube was strictly MPEG, but we saw that digital
video can't grow without a single interoperable platform.
"In teleproduction departments, like real time news, they might gather in
DVC Pro and have to go into analogue and then encode to MPEG-2. This
wastes time and picture quality."
The MX chip is a follow-on development from the DVxpress introduced six
months ago, and which introduced frame-accurate MPEG-2 editing. The
simultaneous two-stream decoding with alpha stream will allow content
editors to work with any combination of DVC Pro 25 and 50 megabit
streams along with any two to 50 megabit MPEG streams.
The prospect certainly excites Chris Daubney, the recently promoted
managing director of Panasonic Broadcast Europe
"C-Cube has created a true breakthrough product by offering the industry
both DV and MPEG compression within a single chip," he says.
"Mixed format editing and DV to MPEG transcoding offers the most
significant advance we've seen for enabling all-digital video production on
the desktop. Adobe desktop editors now have a new opportunity for higher
levels of creativity as well as richer output," adds Bruce Chizen, senior VP
and GM of Adobe's Graphics Products Division.
C-Cube has also revealed it has held explorative discussions with Sony. In
addition to the demonstration of DVxpress-MX (by senior engineer Max
Chien, above), C-Cube is also featuring set-top box technology for Web TV
applications. |
