To: BillyG who wrote (29076 ) 2/3/1998 4:10:00 PM From: DiViT Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 50808
02/02/98 Inside Multimedia (c) 1998 Phillips Business Information, Inc. DVD camcorders Senior DVD execs from Matsushita ( Panasonic ) were in town last week to give the company line on DVD-RAM. Although the company didn't reveal any new products it showed, for the first time, photographs of its concept model of a DVD-based camcorder. This may not be too far away. Mutsuo Takenaga, executive technical manager at Matushita, said that real-time MPEG-2 encoders based on the company's DSP technology would be available "very soon" - he produced a chart showing its appearance by the end of 1998 , although an AV codec was not slated to appear before 2000. DVD camcorders need not wait for the arrival of 4.7Gb DVD-RAM: 1 hour of MPEG-2 video can be stored on current 2.6Gb discs. Meanwhile the TV production journal Broadcast reports that the BBC is working with Japanese and US broadcasters to develop a DVD camcorder. It says that NHK has shown a prototype camera at Japanese TV technology fair InterBEE last November. DVD for all It is surprising how quickly the tools are arriving for low-cost DVD authoring. The arrival of affordable DVD recordable drives should spark a revolution. Already Sigma Designs reports that, in the US, applications for computer-based training, distance learning and interactive kiosks are being ported to the DVD format. Another important market is education, where learning materials can be put on a server and broadcast to schools. Sonic Solutions has added to the list of affordable tools with DVDit! - an easy-to-use tool for corporate audio/visual professionals and desktop video enthusiasts. The application is made up of a QuickTime/OMF to MPEG-2 software video compressor, a DVD navigation and multiplexing engine and a UDF formatter. These work seamlessly together to convert Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and QuickTime movies into DVD-Video files and disc images. QuickTime doesn't support MPEG-2 just yet, it only supports MPEG-1 video playback. All you need is a Power Mac with 64 Mb of RAM. The joke is that you probably won't be able to deliver it on a Mac for quite some time, although that probably isn't so important. It's a Pentium world out there. The price is $895. There's an excellent free primer on mastering DVD titles which is downloadable as an Acrobat file. See www.dvdit.com. Conference DVD on the PC: Making it Work for Consumers 24-25 February, Newark, California This will be the second DVD conference hosted by the Software Publishers Association. It continues SPA's effort to promote industry- wide compatibility for DVD-ROM product development and engineering. For further information, contact: Glenn Ochsenreiter at +1 202 452- 1600, ext. 327 (glenno@spa.org), or Geoff Tully at +1 310 476-8347 (geoff@tully.com). The SPA DVD-ROM Initiative Web site is at: spa.org .