Panasonic Delivers HD FireWire VTR
May 26, 2004
Mississauga, ON - Announced by Panasonic and Apple at NAB 2004, HD FireWire will arrive in June, the companies have announced, describing the collaboration as the world’s first implementation of IEEE 1394 FireWire with 100 Mbps DVCPRO HD (the native video compression of Panasonic DVCPRO HD recording systems) capability, and will introduce HD FireWire production systems on a cross-country video show.
As previously reported in WEVA Industry News, (Click here for more) Panasonic will be participating in the Apple Canada Video Tour which begins June 8th in Montreal and moves across Canada till July 16th when it finishes in Victoria. The show is entitled “Moving post-production forward” will demonstrate the latest in post-production technology including the HD FireWire.
Panasonic’s new AJ-HD1200A VTR is the first DVCPRO HD production VTR to offer an IEEE 1394 FireWire interface. The VTR interfaces with Apple’s recently announced Final Cut Pro HD professional video editing software, enabling users to edit HD resolution images on desktops and PowerBooks. Once material is transferred, users can edit camera-original quality HD content on their desktop, utilizing a Final Cut Pro-equipped Power Mac G5. Where field operations are required, a Final Cut Pro-enabled PowerBook G4 can be utilized without purchasing any additional hardware.
Panasonic’s new, compact AJ-HD1200A DVCPRO HD VTR, allows 24fps or 60fps progressive scan material shot by Panasonic’s AJ-HDC27 VariCam HD Cinema camera or 720 60p/1080i footage recorded by DVCPRO HD VTRs to be transferred via the VTR’s IEEE 1394 interface directly into Final Cut Pro HD without any loss in quality. Once transferred, the material is instantly available for real-time editing operations. All footage maintains its camera-original quality, because the IEEE 1394 FireWire interface transfers the native DVCPRO HD high definition files, as originally recorded on tape in the VTR or Varicam, directly to the Power Mac G4 or Power Mac G5 host computer's internal hard drive. Final Cut Pro HD can also automatically extract 3:2 pulldown from any 24fps HD VariCam footage, saving an additional 60% in disk storage space, thus providing a highly-streamlined 24fps native HD ingest and editing process. The AJ-HD1200A, also provides format conversions, some of which are option dependent.
Expanding access to high definition editing means that HD images can be saved as photos and can be instantly available to other content creators for supporting print and interactive materials (such as advertising, posters, direct mail, web banners, CD-ROMs). At a transfer rate of 60fps, DVCPRO HD’s video data rate is a 100 Megabits per second, making it an efficient transfer versus baseband rate. Unlike other higher-priced systems, Final Cut Pro HD will be accepted by other standard hard disk drives. For example, a portable 60GB drive holds 60 minutes of 720 60p material. For 24p producers, that number jumps to two hours and 30 minutes of camera-original material, because at 24fps VariCam’s DVCPRO HD video compression rate drops to 40Mbps. It also becomes very easy to share material using small portable FireWire drives and for non-real time distribution, a CD-R or a DVD-R can be used as the data transfer device. For higher storage capacities, Apple offers the Xserves RAID which provides 3.5 Terabytes giving the user over 50 hours of 720 60p material and 120 hours of 720 24p material.
In less than three years, Panasonic and Apple have teamed to revolutionize high-performance desktop video editing by enabling the direct digital transfer of native 25Mbps DV 4:1:1 (DV and DVCPRO), 50Mbps DV 4:2:2 (DVCPRO 50) and now at 100Mbps DVCPRO HD via IEEE 1394 FireWire into Final Cut Pro based nonlinear editing systems. At NAB ’02, the companies announced that Final Cut Pro would support Panasonic’s AG-DVX100 24P mini-DV camcorder. At NAB ’03, support of DVCPRO 50 full studio quality video based on 50Mbps DV 4:2:2 compression over IEEE 1394 was announced.
The Panasonic AJ-HD1200A will be available for a manufacturers suggested retail price of $28,000 (CDN), the AJ-YAD120AG IEEE-1394 interface card will be available for a MSRP of $5,400 (CDN) and the AJ-YA120AG HDI I/O and SDI output board will available for MSRP of $8,000 (CDN). A complete HD editing suite, including a G5 computer, HD plasmas, HD VTR and RAID storage costs less than $50,000 (CDN).
For more information, visit
www.panasonic.ca
or
www.apple.ca
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