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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (40472)	5/4/1999 4:25:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Respond to of 50808

There's a new technical voodoo in town - it's called "pin and figurine" - looks like somebody hit a vein :-)

To: Stoctrash who wrote (40472)	5/4/1999 4:31:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

MPEG-2 AT NAB: A PRODUCER'S VIEW 05/03/1999 DVD Report (c) 1999 Phillips Business Information, Inc. This year's NAB convention firmly established the future of MPEG-2, the basic building block of DVD content as well as video-on- demand and DTV, with robust delivery of finished programming available at a variety of price and performance points. A broad variety of NAB vendors supported MPEG-2 with products and services ranging from high- speed land line transmission and real-time editing systems to software encoders and simple software utilities. Because the bit rates and frame sizes are both variable, MPEG-2 is the envelope in which all video data can be stored and shipped. Significantly, Sony has thrown its weight behind MPEG-2 with its Betacam SX format, the replacement for BetacamSP. Introduced at NAB three years ago, the Betacam SX format is compatible with both analog BetacamSP tapes and its own 50 Mbps MPEG-2 format. Future Betacam SX products will be HDTV compliant within the MPEG-2 spec. It's this sort of support that ensures MPEG-2 will enjoy a long life in the digital video world. Editing Systems From Pinnacle, FAST, Matrox One key NAB development was the presence of new systems integrating MPEG-2 video into the editing process. Pinnacle Systems, FAST electronics and Matrox all showed real-time non-linear editing systems based on a C - Cube chip set that can handle MPEG-2 and DV streams. These systems produce beautiful images at 50 Mbps; however, only the FAST 601 and Matrox DTV boards offer two streams of MPEG-2 video at 50 Mbps per stream. Pinnacle Systems DC1000 offers a single stream of 50 Mbps video or two streams at 25 Mbps each. Pinnacle upped the ante by bundling the DC1000 with a full version of Minerva Impression, a DVD premastering application. The bundled product is called the DVD1000 and is priced under $7000. Matrox DTV is a faster editing system than either the FAST or Pinnacle systems, with a higher bit rate and faster effects processing, and it is bundled with DVDit! from Sonic Solutions. DVDit! offers fewer robust premastering features than Minerva Impression, but it is perfect for the producer that only needs to output DVD-legal video streams. DVMaestro from Spruce Technologies stood out as one of the most elegant and powerful DVD premastering tools on the floor at NAB. It is priced and configured for broadcasters, movie studios and multimedia producers with very large budgets. The higher price buys the user a high level of integration, sophistication and ease of use. Astarte, the maker of DVDirector, announced a plug-in, or "Xtra," for Macromedia Director that will allow Director users to create DVD titles. Director is found in most every multimedia production facility in the world, and offering those users a $900 Xtra means producers won't necessarily have to learn new tools to serve the DVD market. Pixeltools announced DVDpress, a simple DVD premastering application for under $3000, while Minerva was showing Impression as a standalone application at nearly $10,000 - making producers consider the Pinnacle DVD1000 bundle even if they didn't need the hardware. Pioneer's Next-Gen DVD-R Pioneer was showing its long awaited next-generation DVD burner, an improved, streamlined drive that will burn 4.6 GB DVD-R, at an SRP of $5400. That's a significant improvement over the previous model's $17,000 SRP, but blank media is still expensive - about $50 per disc - due to a high rejection rate during manufacturing. Data is packed very tightly on the recordable discs, requiring absolute precision from the media manufacturer. Canopus announced Amber, an MPEG-2 archiving system consisting of an MPEG-2 encoder card and a Panasonic DVD-RAM drive. Vitec Multimedia had a $250 product called MPEG Toolbox 2 that has a software MPEG-2 encoder with a 10x real-time encoding speed and editing software that edits IBP MPEG-2 video streams and puts text over the video as well. A frame-accurate version is available for $1259. PixelTools and LSX showed software MPEG encoders. LSX has speed and Pixeltools has an abundance of user-definable controls for every aspect of the encoding process. Heuris had a new real-time software MPEG encoder called Cyclone that has been written for one or more yet- to-be-named hardware platforms. Real-time software encoders are in the works from several more developers who simply need processors to get a little faster for their products to become a reality. Wired announced DigitalMedia Press, a $369 real-time MPEG-2 hardware encoder PCI for FireWire-equipped Macs that converts DV input to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 as it streams into the system. Digital MediaPress FX is a $499 dual-stream version aimed at users of real-time non- linear editing applications. -- Matt Payne Matt Payne is the founder of Payne Media, a Bellevue, WA company that creates graphics, animation, and effects for broadcast and multimedia applications. He is a contributing editor for DVD Report sister publication AV Video Multimedia Producer magazine.