DVxpress..............................
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In the Chip
One of the year's biggest developments in the area of MPEG-2 editing is the release of the DVxpress family of chips by C-Cube Microsystems. A DVxpress card, in fact, forms the basis of 601's MPEG-2 capabilities. With DVxpress, C-Cube has put a programmable video-compression engine on a single add-in board. The card, according to the company, contains a micro-SPARC RISC core and offers special hardware for video I/O, motion estimation and compensation, DCT, IDCTs, variable-length encoding and decoding, video scaling and compositing, and audio capture.
"The benefits of digital video are obvious and well known," says Joe Sutherland, product marketing manager at C-Cube. "But you need compression to make digital video work." One of the major drawbacks to MPEG-2, he notes, has been the high cost of the encoding and decoding hardware. C-Cube's single-chip architecture has brought this cost down; moreover, MPEG-2-compressed video provides a serious savings in bandwidth over M-JPEG. This, in turn, will allow nonlinear vendors to offer multiple-stream editing, real-time special effects and other features now found only on the big-ticket systems in nonlinear editors selling for $1,000 to $2,000, he says.
C-Cube offers the DVxpress 7110 for the high-level consumer market (this chip is expected to form the basis of those "$1,000 to $2,000" systems); the DVxpress 7112, a professional version for systems that will sell in the $10,000-and-higher range; and the newly released DVxpress-MX, which provides transcoding between the DV and MPEG-2 formats. "We see the market migrating to two formats-DV on the acquisition side and MPEG-2 on the distribution side,"Sutherland says. "These are the formats that are becoming dominant for their applications. What is driving us is the need to provide a seamless bridge for end-to-end digital production, allowing users to mix the formats together or make a transition between them."
DV Everywhere
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