Thanks to Tommy Haupfear for the link. I don't think this has been discussed here in the News area but I could be wrong.

"Improvements to CCD imaging devices and the use of high-efficiency coding technology will achieve 1.3 million pixels at 30 frames per second by 2006."

See http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/nea/200312/conele_278989.html for the complete article.

Yeah..film is in its twilight.

For those reading over the press material (http://www.usa.canon.com/templatedata/pressrelease/20040107_camcorders.html) and tech specs (http://www.canondv.com/zr04/index.html) on the new Canon ZR 80, 85 and 90 models, here are a few points to consider.

The product positioning for the ZR line has changed, which alters the feature set on these camcorders. Previously, last year's ZR 60 / 65 / 70 as well as the earlier ZR 40 / 45MC / 50MC were designed to be full-featured camcorders at entry-level prices. This year the entry-level prices across the market have dropped even further. In an effort to reduce the pricing on the new ZR line and to meet the consumer demand for smaller form factors, Canon has altered the ZR 80 / 85 / 90 compared to last year's models.

The overall size of the new ZR is reduced 20% from last year. Also, power consumption is reduced by about 20%, resulting in an increase in battery performance (now 125 min. with the included BP-508). The long zoom lenses are retained, FireWire jacks are still there of course, but most importantly, the built-in mics are now much better insulated from noise produced by the tape transport and zoom motor. There's a one-button toggle for the various color night-shot modes, a new option for skin detail, and simultaneous photo & video recording on the models equipped with an SD card. The motion JPEG capture limit has been removed (now allowing up to 24 minutes of 320x240 video on a 512mb SD card).

Thanks to the advent of comb filters on consumer television sets which show no visible difference between sources coming in from S-video and composite inputs, the S-video jack is now gone from the ZR 80 & 85 (but for those who must have it, the ZR 90 is S-video equipped). The mic jack is gone as is the advanced accessory shoe or "hot" shoe (standard shoes are still there). Very few consumers were mounting a $180 mic to a $450 camcorder, so that's understandable, I guess. The tripod mounting socket is now plastic on all three of the new ZR's. The ZR 80 does not include a wireless remote nor does it have an IR receiver for such a remote. Finally, the "light-up buttons" of the old ZR 70 and ZR 50 are gone as well.

When considering these changes, keep in mind that Canon's goal is to reduce the retail price (and size) as much as possible on these entry-level camcorders. With no need to bundle a remote with one model or an S-video cable with two models, they're able to set the MAP (maximum advertised price) to $399, $499 and $599 on these three new ZR's. If the past is any indicator, these prices can be expected to drop even further as the year wears on. For those value-shoppers looking to buy a DV camcorder for the least amount of money, the ZR 80 / 85 / 90 models are targeted directly at the entry-level market.

For those who are looking for an enhanced feature set and a stronger tripod mounting socket at well under $800, I recommend the Canon Optura 20. For those expecting new HDV-format camcorders at CES 2004, remember that the format was only recently announced and agreed upon, and that it takes generally 12 to 18 months to bring a design concept to the consumer market. Hope this helps,

<<<-- Originally posted by Chris Hurd : For those expecting new HDV-format camcorders at CES 2004, remember that the format was only recently announced and agreed upon, and that it takes generally 12 to 18 months to bring a design concept to the consumer market. Hope this helps, -->>>

That might explain Sony and Canon not having any new offerings, but since JVC already has an HDV offering it certainly seems like they might be ready to upgrade it. I mean, we'll all know tomorrow, right? Still, it just seems like JVC should be ripe for an upgrade either at CES or NAB.

Check this out:
www.shining.com

$599.00 at the Apple Store

Still a bit pricey, but looks sweet!

Brian,
We've had some discussion on the CitiDisk. It has some issues and limitations. See this thread (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10041&highlight=CitiDisk) for example. Do a search on "Citidisk" to see the other threads.

I don't see why new DV cameras can't just come with an HD anyway. Maybe they're too fragile for rugged shooting, I don't know. Panasonic is coming out with DV cameras that use Flash Memory Cards, that will be neat.

There's a new DV Pro model that looks new since the last discussion about this that you pointed me to, Ken. Check the shining.com site for the announcement.

Adds some new features (like in-field scene editing and camera control).

Maybe this technology has finally come of age?

Look at these cute new Sony cams, some with a 1/5" CCD, and some with a 1/6" CCD.

http://www.grandeye.com.hk/etx/900/index.html

PS: nice colors, huh? :-))

<<<-- Originally posted by Frank Granovski : nice colors, huh? :-)) -->>>

Somebody should tell Sony that the "fruity" iMacs are no longer in production...

But didn't you notice that the new iPod Mini comes in 5 cool colors?

Canon started this with designer colors for the illuminated buttons on the ZR70. And you don't have to choose when you buy -- you can set one of six colors any time you like!

It's like a moodcam.

Will

I suppose that color choice is such a compelling draw for consumer products that it's hard for manufacturers to resist. But it sure can end up breaking a company's heart.

Hey DVX users- this was passed on to me in an e-mail report from Videography Magazine

== Women's Entertainment Network Shoots 2 New Shows on
Panasonic DVX100 Cameras
WE: Women's Entertainment network has recently shot two
original shows, "New Year, New You" and "A Cut Above" with
Panasonic AG-DVX100 Mini-DV 3-CCD camcorders.

http://www.uemedia.net/CPC/videography/article_6112.shtml

Just a reminder Sundance is starting today.
Plus there are several films being digitally projected using Windows Media 9. (in addition to the online version of the festival).
http://www.digitalproducer.com for the article about
Windows Media and how it's being used.

http://www.sundance.org to go to the festival.

If you're interested another WE show "mix it up" was shot on the sony DSR-570 which is DVcam.

http://www.videoforum.co.uk/indexVisitor.php

free entry too!

Never been before, but sounds fantastic!

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/7849191.htm

I've recently learned about a new company with a new product that may interest some here. The company is NetCell (www.netcell.com/main.htm) and the product is the SyncRAID Storage Controller.

The problem with RAID for video is that the solutions offering the best data protection have performance problems (RAID 5) and the fast performers offer no data protection (RAID 0). Solving this problem usually comes at some expense. Reasonable solutions designed for video are available from companies like Medea (www.medea.com) with list prices in the neighborhood of $5,000 for a 1TB array.

NetCell does not sell complete solutions, only the controller. I'm sure it would prefer to sell just its chip technology to other RAID system manufacturers, but because it is a new company it is seeding the market by offering two controller cards based on its chip. One allows the connection of 3 drives and the other 5. The SyncRAID 5000, the 5-drive version, sells for $219 and is available directly from NetCell. The SyncRAID 3000 is $159; the company told me it should be available for sale in a matter of weeks.

Here's the key: the SyncRAID chip runs the most economical drives available, ordinary everyday IDE ATA hard drives. Yesterday I priced Western Digital 250GB drives at $207. That means a 1TB array could be built for less than $1,400 including cables, shipping, and tax. That's an incredible price -- fast, protected RAID for $1.40/GB.

Check out the press release (http://www.netcell.com/111003.htm#GEN_11-10-03) or the technology papers (http://www.netcell.com/technology.htm) at the company's Web site. There are some reviews of the product, all mentioned at the site. Only the Tom's Hardware Guide review (http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20031128/index.html) goes into much depth; I commend it to you. It does conclude that the product is good for applications like video.

I have no vested interest in the company and am not endorsing or reviewing the product here. I do intend to try it on a modest scale, converting my 120GB D: drive into a 240GB array for $360. Contrast that with spending $210 for a 250GB drive -- I'd get the space, but less performance and no data protection.

I did ask one technical question of the company yesterday. I wondered if the SyncRAID 5000 controller required 5 drives or whether it would run with fewer. The answer is that it will run with 3 or 5 drives. However, there is no automatic way to reconfigure the array if one starts with 3 drives and adds 2 later. The data must be removed, the drives added, the array reconfigured, and the data restored.

This seems like a very interesting technological development for those of us in video.

Thats cool, I'm a huge fan of my xbox, and the game halo in my opinion is by far one of the best games i have ever played. I read about the playstation 3 and it said it has dvd recording and Tivo. Thats going to be pretty crazy also.

I know this is about a game system, but I posted the link because it shows that mass HDTV adoption is right around the corner. Couple this with HDV camcorders coming out, cheaper HDTV sets coming out, and one can clearly see that HDTV is right around the corner.

Yeah and more HD channels need to be added. I'm guessing 2 years from now 90% of all TV will be in HD.

Thanks for the update and extra info Will. This was spoken about not long ago and i thought it'd be ages/if at all that we'd see it happen. I may prepare for this one's arrival :)

The SyncRAID 3000 controller card, for 3 ATA drives, is now available at NetCell's site.

In the original post I said that the chip ran IDE ATA drives. That is correct, but the chip also runs the newer serial ATA (SATA) drives. NetCell's two SyncRAID controllers, however, only support IDE (parallel ATA) drives.

I looked into this couple of weeks ago when I was building a new DV Editing system. It is a very economical RAID solution. However, it lacks greatly in performance. Tom's Hardware did some tests and it's average access time is around 17-18ms. That's almost 2x of most drive access times.

A NetCell sales rep told me that the SATA controllers would be available sometime in March.

Vince

I'm wondering why no-one mentioned the Promise RAID
controllers. They have been out for like 5 years and also have
cards (cheaper then SyncRAID's) that work with ATA and SATA
drives. Adaptec also has a relative cheap RAID card for ATA
drives on the market.

The issue for video is not access time but maximum sustainable transfer rate.

Vince, I did not see the access time result in the THG article. Can you point me to it? Perhaps I read too fast.

Rob, I looked at the Adaptec cards. They implement the XOR function in software. I believe the Promise cards are also soft-RAID solutions.

The NetCell card requires no special driver and implements the XOR onboard.

Why do you say SOFT raid? And how do you mean? The promise
controllers have a chip on the cards that does RAID. So it should
be "hardware" RAID. Or I'm very much mistaken. Can you post
a link to where you raid about it being a soft-RAID solution?

This link is to a PDF file at the NetCell site. Look on page 5 for Figure 2. The diagram in the middle shows "Software RAID" while the two flanking diagrams are variations of hardware RAID. (The link is to a technology paper that explains the NetCell approach and is worth reading if you're interested.)

http://www.netcell.com/technology%20info/SyncRAID%20Removing%20RAID%20Adapter%20Bottlenecks.pdf

There are three main issues with RAID. One is making a group (array) of hard drives look like a single drive. The second is the method of storing the data (usually referred to by RAID level, as RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 3, etc.). These two items are relatively simple and are the ones most often implemented in hardware.

The third is the implementation of redundancy through the creation of parity bits (that's what the mention of XOR is all about). This is computationally intensive. Today's PCs are pretty fast, so one solution is to have the software driver incorporate parity generation. This eats some CPU cycles and, because it must be done before the data can be passed to the hardware RAID controller, introduces a delay. Worse, the parity data must also be written to the disks, so the total amount of data passed by the O/S driver to the hardware RAID controller goes up. For a 4-disk array with a 5th disk for parity, 25% more data must be passed.

The diagram on the far right of Figure 2 is the NetCell approach. The design makes the SyncRAID system look like an ordinary IDE disk. That means only the actual data has to be passed through to the controller (no extra overhead for the parity data) and no special software driver is needed. The XOR calculation for parity is done in the controller on the fly.

I know providing a NetCell diagram may seem self-serving. However, I'm an IT guy of 30 years experience. Based upon that experience, I'm saying that Figure 2 is an appropriate rendition of how RAID works and is certainly accurate with respect to software RAID. I would say that the leftmost diagram in Figure 2 is a bit self-serving because there are legacy solutions that look more like the NetCell approach. They are just much more expensive, like the Medea RAID products I mentioned.

This is very analogous to "WinModems." Older "hardware" modems contained the circuitry required to operate the modem plus a microprocessor that could process commands. As computers got faster, the microprocessor was eliminated and the equivalent functionality was moved inside the PC to the modem driver. This sharply reduced the price of a modem, a fact more visible than the performance overhead incurred by the host PC. In other words, the RAID chips on most motherboards are WinModem-like in that processing is split between the RAID controller and the host PC. In the NetCell approach, everything happens on the NetCell chip.

Again, I have no connection to NetCell in any way except that I expect to become a customer.

Will

Okay, now we are getting somewhere. They are using the RAID 3
standard which they are calling RAID-XL3. A bit confusing [all
those different things in the document, but okay]

First things first. Why use RAID at all? DV doesn't need RAID.
If you are using a fast ATA133 or SATA drive you will definitely
don't need RAID for DV if speed is your concern. A normal system
can keep up with the 3.6 MB/s datarate just fine [if you don't
have tons of applications running and defragment etc.].

So if it isn't for speed it must be for safety. Basically there WERE
(in the past) 2 options: RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 5 (parity).
Now we/they seem to have RAID 3 which is optimized for Video,
right?

I'm wondering why not simply use a mirrored drive then. That
will yield a higher protection rate (should be 100%) without the
loss of speed for writing (drives can write in parallel) and should
give increased speed reading.

I'm not saying that NetCell doesn't have a good product or
anything, I'm just wondering the why's and how's.

Also keep in mind that for most people RAID is a thing you don't
need (unless perhaps for realtime backups).

And I checked the Promise site and their line of RAID controllers (http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.asp?familyId=2)
and they ARE hardware RAID controllers but they do not offer
this RAID3. They do offer striping (RAID 0), mirroring (RAID 1)
and parity (RAID 5) with some other modes (like RAID 10).

Just for everone's information....

Will, here's the average access time from THG's test results: http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031128/netcell-12.html

On February 9th, just after 5PM when we closed for the day, Videoguys.com had our 4 millionth visitor!!

We hit the 3 million mark in August '02 - that works out to 1 million visitors in about a year and a half!

We're proud to be the #1 destination on the Web for digital videographers all over the world!

Thanx to all 4 million of you. Without you, we could never have become the worlds leading reseller of affordable digital video editing gear!!

Gary
Videoguys.com 800 323-2325
We are the Desk Top Video Editing and DVD Production Experts!
Subscribe to the Videoguys' Insider Newsletter http://www.videoguys.com/insider.html

Maker Release 2.0 is available now from our website, for
Windows. The Mac version is about 2 weeks away.

Demo version: http://dvfilm.com/maker/preview.htm
Update to 2.0 from older versions: http://dvfilm.com/update

Here is a summary of the new features, which are of primary interest to NTSC users:

24P as well as 30P film-motion for NTSC 60i to 24P conversion for editing normal NTSC at 24 frames/sec 3:2 pulldown removal for editing 24P Normal or film telecine non-recompressed 2:3:3:2 pulldown insertion for archiving 24P to tape.

read/write Avid DV Quicktimes directly support for uncompressed AVI format YUV or RGB processing.

variable vertical blur on motion optional manual control of compression settings selectable output folder.

improved quickstart guide
pause/resume/minimize control during processing

Best Regards,
Marcus van Bavel

I got this off 2-pop.com!

JVC Expands HDV Product Line With VTR (http://www.uemedia.net/CPC/2-pop/article_6617.shtml)

>>Designed to playback material recorded with JVC's JY-HD10U camcorder, including HD and DV footage, built-in conversion allows HD footage to be viewed on virtually any monitor.<<

I wonder if it would work with PAL monitors...the only thing that keeps me from buying an HD10 is that I wont be able to sell my material to the PAL market.

Note: I substituted a link to the news item (at 2-pop) for the text of the announcement.

I remind everyone that copying news and articles from other sites is a violation of copyright laws and strictly prohibited here.

I wonder if you could hook up two of these and do cuts only linear editing..........???

http://www.io2technology.com, check out the videos under the "video/images" section, I don't think this has been posted here before. Very promising stuff.

" The Heliodisplay (TM) projects TV, streaming video and computer images into free space (i.e. mid-air) "

Looks interesting!

Wow. That's pretty crazy stuff. Anybody have any theories on how the heck it works?

The future is now, it seems. This is all they care to say (http://www.io2technology.com/technology.htm) about it, except to assert that it is definitely not holography.

I can't really say I believe what they say. Looks too unserious to my eyes. Why does he have this high tech gadget in his garage with shovels and other garden instruments?

Nah, I think it's a hoax...

It never occurred to me that someone would pull a stunt this weird. What's the point? I would say that their contact info is sure odd.

http://www.io2technology.com/contact.htm

Why? A hoax is still a hoax, perhaps they get a kick out of getting loads of questions about their "invention". To the public they would seem smart and important. To produce the video they do (on their site) would take a day to do... (3D Graphics) and is not very hard at all to do..

The movie where he demonstrates the touch function there is a dot that is suppoed to track his finger, but it does not fully match, the dot goes a lot longer then he moves it fingers and sometimes it does not, how does the dot know when it needs to move further then other times to change the larger dots?

And if it where true, woud it not get more media attention?
what they do seem to me is next to impossible. The air would need to stream out of the box at an extreme rate (one could tanselate that to frame rate) because as I kind of understood the invention it lets air travle trough 2 ionized plates and out on the top. the plates would have to arrange the air atoms really fast and blow them out on top. And I kind of figured that if they can alter atoms like that they could easaly build a real car with the same technology only alter the atoms into real materials instead of images. Nanotechnology. If you do a quick search you get no good pages to read about it.

This is only my opinion, don't take my word for it, figure it out for yourself :)

Hrmm another interesting thing is, They can control the lenght of light. Imagin the lightsabers in Starwars.. Didn't some science people figure out that lightsabers woud never work? One can not stop light or control light to just become a certain length.. Well, the this apparatus just proved them wrong? Or did it?

It would also be totally useless in windy conditions.. Outside is not even to talk about. But even the circulation in ones home would make this thing very unaccurate to produce good pictures..


I still don't believe in it..

Something that looks suspect to me is that they are taking orders for such a revolutionary device so early. It would be like me inventing a civilian space ship that can go to Mars in 2 days, and then taking orders for it. It may not be a total hoax though, it may just not work as good as they claim.

Ciao

http://www.jvc-victor.co.jp/press/2003/cu-vh1.html

here a image of cu-vh1

Francesco

Found this at ATI's website:

"ATI PCI Express Demonstration
ATI is being joined by Intel® and Pinnacle® Systems to demonstrate High Definition (HD) video editing on a PC at Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco the week of February 17th, 2004.
Made possible by PCI Express’s high speed data transfers, the demonstration has to use the industry’s only true PCI Express visual processing unit (VPU). ATI’s PCI Express VPU, in conjunction with the advanced real time HD engine being developed by Pinnacle, takes advantage of the new read and write capabilities offered by PCI Express.

The future is here, stay tuned to see it first with ATI."

-http://www.ati.com/products/PCIexpress/index.html

The future is here!!! :)
Emilio

An interesting, albeit a bit patronizing, perspective (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3506803.stm).

Quote regarding "November""You can't tell that we shot it on a consumer camera, it just looks like a regular movie.",
Greg Harrison, Director
Gee, 25 DVX100's? Perhaps if you buy that many you can get them for $2,500 ea. as the article states?