IBC: Grass Valley Infinity—Recording Without Tape, but with Standard IT Technology

Grass Valley (stand 11.551) is proclaiming nothing less than a revolution at IBC. With its new Infinity series for ENG and EFP use, the company is promoting a move away from expensive proprietary standards for broadcast equipment, codecs and formats. “With Infinity there are no rules and no limits—we give customers the choice of formats, media, compression and workflow,” explains Grass Valley president Marc Valentin.

The Infinity products—a camcorder and a field recorder—support the DV codec for DVcam and DVCPRO (SD), MPEG-2 compression with I-frame and Long GOP support (SD and HD), and JPEG 2000 as an additional compression method. The corresponding codec (10-bit, 4:2:2) is intended to deliver good, artifact-free images, particularly at low bit rates.

Both devices use hard-disk and solid-state storage solutions familiar from the IT sector. Foremost among these is the Rev Pro removable hard disk developed jointly with Iomega, which is designed to store up to 35 GB of video data—either 45 minutes of HD or more than two hours of SD. In addition to the camera’s drive bay, Grass Valley also offers an external Rev Pro drive that can be connected to a notebook, for example. According to the company, a Rev Pro medium will cost less than €70. The Infinity series can also use standard CompactFlash memory cards, which currently offer capacities of up to 8 GB.

Grass Valley’s new camcorder enables multiformat acquisition in HD and SD (525i 60, 625i 50, 1080i 50, 1080i 60, 720p 50, 720p 60) and uses 14-bit imaging. For SD formats, the aspect ratio can be switched between 16:9, 4:3 and letterbox. The Digital Media Recorder also supports HD and SD, uses the same storage media as the camcorder and can be connected directly to an NLE system or server.

The Infinity camcorder is expected to come onto the market in spring 2006, priced from €20,000. The Digital Media Recorder will be available at the same time for under €10,000. The Rev Pro drive is scheduled to launch by the end of the year for less than €500. Its multistream functionality allows it to transfer SD video data while simultaneously recording another source.