NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, May 2004
No More Video Tape
Implications of Video Cameras Becoming Tapeless

by Timothy Everingham
teveringham@acm.org
(click to email author)


In video, we first changed over from editing with tape to digital editing with computers. Then we went to exporting the video -- first to laser Disc and VCDs, followed by DVDs. As of this year we are in the transition of eliminating tape in video cameras. Sony introduced, at the Consumer Electronic Show in January, consumer video cameras that record to Mini DVDs.

At the National Association of Broadcasters, they announced shoulder-mounted cameras for news crews that record to blue laser DVDs (four times the capacity of a standard DVD). And Panasonic shocked everyone with the announcement of a TV news camera that replaced tape with solid state memory modules. This camera will be available late this year, with a consumer handheld version ready in 2004 or 2005.

What does all this mean for those at the consumer and prosumer levels? For one thing it means no more tape mechanisms eating your video. It also means longer shelf life. With videotape, significant deterioration can happen within a year and by 10 years it is probably gone. With DVD-R or DVD+R media the life is expected to be 40-250 years. With DVD rewritable formats the life is expected to be 25-100 years. The more moving parts you have, the more you will probably have an equipment breakdown.

Sony has replaced a complex drive and tape feed mechanism with a more reliable optical disc recorder. Panasonic goes one step further by replacing all the moving parts of the recording mechanism with memory modules. As with DV cameras, these cameras will not have the transference problems of converting an analog signal to digital format, and their transfer rate will not be governed by the slowness of a tape deck or camera tape drive.

With Sony, the internal speed will be like that of a DVD drive, and Panasonic like that of computer RAM. So the real limiting factor will be the speed connection method between the camera or player to the device being transferred to. The random access to any part of the video within a second allows you to quickly do a rough edit to get only the portions of what you have shot that are of interest. We are starting to see instant playback of weddings at the reception, and this new technology will probably increase this type of video use.

This will make it easy to transfer video over data networks. It used to be that you had to transfer video over satellite in real time if satellite facilities were available in your area. Later you physically had to travel to a place where you could digitize the video by hooking up a camera or tape deck to a computer and then send it over a land- or satellite-based digital network at speeds faster than real time. Now you can directly transfer the video from the camera using a portable satellite dish or even the Internet very much faster than real time. (This technique was used by embedded reporters in the recent Iraq war, but the new technology should make such transfers even faster).

The average consumer with a broadband Internet connection should be able to take advantage of this too. Your video is transferred at Firewire rates or faster, so transfers of a ½ hour video from your camera to your computer can be accomplished in three minutes or less. The big issue will be to convert the video from standard DV to MPEG-4 or Windows Media. If you are using a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 or better it should take about the same amount of time as the length of your video, but for DVD quality it should take three times as long.

The implications for professional and consumer associations and user groups, computer related or not, could be phenomenal. Take a typical 45-minute presentation. The presentation starts at 10 a.m. on the east coast of the United States. The videographer can pack up his equipment, get home, load the video into his computer, and encode it at VHS quality for transfer over the Internet by noon. By 12:30 p.m. the video is on a server ready to download by whoever knows where it is and has the password to allow them to download it. By 1:00 p.m. those in the know could have downloaded it and are on their way with their laptop, with the video on it, to an awaiting LCD projector in the meeting room of their group where the presentation will be shown. Of course 1:00 p.m. on the East Coast is only noon in Chicago, 11:00 a.m. in Denver, or 10:00 a.m. on the West Coast. It is still even early enough for an evening meeting in London, England. Associations of such groups may even set up their own video news services for the benefit of the members of their groups using this technology and possibly have a newsreel available of what has happened in the groups belonging to their association over the last week or month.

With video being stored in solid state memory modules or DVD in the camera, we will no longer have the problems of video tape. We can almost instantaneously access the portions of the video we want from the point where it is in the camera and enable quick long distance transfer of video via data networks like the Internet.

It is already starting to get to the consumer level, which may affect how we even hold common meetings and events. The effects of such technology may affect our lives in many ways in the not too distant future.

Timothy Everingham CEO of Timothy Everingham Consulting in Azusa, California. Vice Chair of the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH, the largest chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques; member of the Management Information Systems Program Advisory Board of California State University, Fullerton; Vice President of the Windows Media Users Group of Los Angeles. As part-time press, he has had articles published throughout the United States, Canada and Australia. He is a member of several user groups in southern California. Further information can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~teveringham.

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