Grass Valley Group Unveils Path To Digital Cinema Distribution, Playout—Broadcast/Professional Video Leader to Discuss Digital Advances for Cinema at International Electronic Cinema Festival in Portland, Oregon—The drive toward fully capable digital cinema systems is accelerating quickly, fueled by the continued expansion of disk drive capability, the increased sophistication of compression algorithms, and improvements to other, key digital technologies. One of those technologies is the video server — which has been the cornerstone of worldwide broadcast industry's transition to providing high-quality, digital video content instead of traditional, analog-based video content. A leader in the broadcast industry and in defining digital compression standards such as MPEG2, the Grass Valley Group defined the video server product category for the broadcast market more than five years ago—and worked diligently to help create the MPEG2@HL standard to ensure that the video server output was of a high enough quality to meet the demands of broadcasters and their viewers. As the market share and technology leader for video servers worldwide, the Grass Valley Group is using its Profile® XP Media Platform to define new opportunities for content providers, from Internet streaming to Interactive TV. And it is using this same core digital video technology to hasten the development of digital cinema. Next week, Dr. James Clark, a lead architect and product designer for the Grass Valley Group, will discuss how today's digital technology such as that found in video servers provided by the Grass Valley Group, among others, can easily support the compression and image quality requirements of digital cinema. Another facet of Clark's discussion will be advances in disk technologies — which now have the capacities and throughput capabilities to store several multi-hour movies on one unit. "With the maturation of these and other technologies, the emergence of digital cinema systems that offer the picture quality, lower overall cost of distribution, and provide income-generating opportunities necessary to make them attractive to film studios and theatre chains is all but certain," said Clark. "Clearly, picture quality must come first. Basic quality issues, such as adequate resolution, bit rates, adequate frame rate, acceptable minimum contrast ratio, and acceptable color palette range, must be defined. Achieving these standards, however, will be more a matter of evolution than revolution." In addition to scrutinizing the finer points of compression technologies needed to support a viable digital cinema system as well as the basic quality issues which are associated with emerging digital cinema systems, Clark will examine other features which should be embedded in a high-quality digital cinema system. These range from WAN-based networking technology robust and intelligent enough to perform monitoring, self-diagnosis, and that can enable error/failure repair; hot-swappable repair procedures that do not impact presentation flow; easy-to-use interfaces for inserting trailers and advertising; data file technologies which enable seamless clip merging for the greatest frame accuracy possible; and, encoding technology for highly reliable, secured distribution that will assure the high-quality integrity of the original material. Clark's presentation will be posted on the Grass Valley Group website starting May 15 at www.grassvalleygroup.com/DigitalCinema. The Grass Valley Group knows more about high-quality video than anybody else—especially as video goes digital. Interactive television. Digital cinema. Data-enhanced broadcasting. Internet. It's a world of Digicasting™—of Media Without Bounds™. Whether online or on the air, the Emmy® award-winning Grass Valley Group, a privately held digital media leader, has the hardware, software, and new media technologies necessary to get content wherever it needs to go. # |
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