Not an effort to persuade anyone to buy RDUS, the mangiest dog I've ever owned. But this is interesting nonetheless.
Digital Video comes to market one frame at a time
KEY FRAME JOHN MCINTOSH
A funny thing happened on the way to implementing the new Digital Video format: It
turned out to be a boon
for still photography.
Although the primary function of Digital Video (DV) is to deliver
better-than-Beta-quality video, the first product that combines DV and the FireWire
bus, Radius Inc.'s PhotoDV card, can capture digital still images from DV camcorders
directly into Adobe Photoshop and other image editors.
Dirck Halstead, Time magazine's senior White House photographer, uses Sony
Corp.'s DCR-VX1000. He predicted that capturing still images from DV sources for
multimedia presentations, Web sites, occasional hard-copy prints and newsprint
reproduction will soon be commonplace.
Indeed, Halstead said a 604-by-454-pixel PhotoDV image should be "good enough
for online use now" and that "the same images would probably stand up in two- or
three-column newsprint use." This is remarkable image quality for frame grabs from a
video camera, slightly better than that available from low- to midrange digital still
cameras.
Waiting for I/O
PhotoDV enables one important aspect of the DV format, but it's like an unexpected
present: We're happy to have it, but we need
other things first. The pressing need now is for full I/O-capable DV. PhotoDV, while
groundbreaking, takes us just one step (or one
frame) closer to the full capture and playback DV advocates are waiting for.
In 1995, Sony, Panasonic and other electronics companies announced the DV format,
promising performance that would surpass Beta at a fraction of the cost. In addition,
DV data could be transferred directly to a computer via the IEEE 1394 interface
(which Apple has implemented under the FireWire name). DV promised to change the
way we work with video by providing direct digital transfer with no quality loss or time
wasted digitizing and logging footage from analog tapes. Today, both Sony and
Panasonic make DV camcorders with digital I/O ports for 1394 connectivity. By
year-end, DV camcorder sales in the United States should exceed 500,000 units. On
the computer side, FireWire products from Adaptec Inc. and Miro Computer
Products Inc. are due this summer, although the initial Miro offering will be for video
capture only.
On the horizon
Radius will add more capabilities to PhotoDV via software upgrades, beginning in June
with MotoDV software for video capture. Although the company demonstrated video
capture and playback at the National Association of Broadcasters show in April,
there's still no word on when these capabilities will hit the streets.
PhotoDV is far more than a frame-grab utility; the image quality it produces is a
function of advanced features such as selective
deinterlacing, while its autocapture and autonaming make constructing QuickTime VR
panoramas faster and more convenient.
As Radius adds more features to PhotoDV (particularly QuickTime VR tools), it will
have a unique and extremely powerful DV application. PhotoDV may well become the
first DV application that actually exceeds our expectations.
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