IBC 2003 Streaming Products Wrap-Up

Tapeless Capture
Two companies with impressive tapeless camera acquisition products provide a glimpse into the future of camera-based content acquisition.

First, addressing the legacy camcorder market by providing a way to "have your tape and edit fast, too", Focus Enhancements showed the shipping version of Firestore 3, their DV25 hard disk capture system. The unit attaches between the battery and the camera on most Mini-DV, DVCam, and DVCPro25 professional cameras, simultaneously capturing on Firestore’s 2.5" removable hard drive the same content that is being recorded on the video tape. The expertise Focus Enhancements gained in the creation of the original FireStore desktop unit is evident in the Firestore 3, as the camera mounted unit can capture DV files in one of the seven DV file formats in use today, such as DV-AVI, MOV, Raw DV, AVI2, etc. In practical terms, unlike the Laird or Sony DV Disk recorders, Firestore 3 files can immediately be used in specific NLEs that normally require reformatting of a raw .dv file prior to editing. The unit also mounts to semi-professional Mini-DV cameras via a special mount.

Second, Panasonic showed prototypes of P2, a SecureDigital (SD) card system capable of holding four SD cards in a single PC-MCIA card slot; with current sizes of 1GB for an SD card, the P2 prototype can capture 18 minutes of DVCPro video and then immediately be moved to a laptop for editing. Panasonic combines the speeds of each of the four chips, enabling rapid transfer speeds to hard disk, if desired. Solid-state flash memory like the SD card can also be operated at lower or higher temperatures than traditional tape-based camcorders and have lower power consumption. While HD is not yet available on P2, Panasonic expects 16GB SD chips within the next two years and expects to release P2-based HD recording shortly thereafter.

Video Indexing, Search, and Retrieval
As disk-based media libraries proliferate, so does the need for advanced indexing tools. Two companies showed technologies of interest:

Pictron demonstrated the integration of its webcasting module into MediaGateway, complementing its ability to index video, audio, and Powerpoint slide content into a web-searchable database. As part of the Rorke Data booth, Pictron was also able to showcase its Video Gateway and facial recognition systems as part of a large storage area network (SAN), indexing and archival broadcast solution.

A newcomer to the indexing space, NOA Audio, demonstrated a four-pass audio indexing system with impressive results. Most speech to text systems peak at around 75% accuracy in untrained mode and 85% in trained mode (in other words, after a speaker has "trained" the system by reading pre-defined lines for 15-20 minutes). NOA’s expertise in audio processing led to the creation of a product, named DACTYLO, that uses a four-pass solution to improve accuracy, identify, and flag different voices and even index speech that is recorded with a music bed. NOA’s current plans are to sell the product as a stand-alone archival system and to possibly consider licensing its audio pre-processing technology to video indexing product manufacturers to complement their current indexing solutions.