The Professional Video Industry Needs a Standard, Over-The-Top Digital Audio/Video Expansion Bus

The use of economical, general-purpose PCs in demanding professional video applications like nonlinear editing, graphics creation, animation recording, 3D rendering, video-on-demand and commercial insertion continues to grow. In these applications, specialized PC adapters are typically used to handle the massive processing requirements for transporting natural data types in real time. Commonly used sub-systems include: video I/O, video processing (DVE-mixing), video compression/decompression (codec), audio I/O, audio processing (EQ-mixing), mass storage interface, network interface and video-in-a-window console display. Although it is possible to accomplish some of these tasks with host CPU software and a single highly integrated adapter, most professional systems require more than one adapter. — How to connect these multiple video adapters together inside a PC is a question that system integrators have been wrestling with for many years. The problem is essentially one of data rate considering that: • a single ITU-601 4:2:2 digital video stream = 21 MB/sec. (32 MB/sec. with key bus 4:2:2:4) • eight 48 KHz − 16-bit audio tracks = 768 KB/sec. • motion-JPEG compressed digital video stream at Betacam quality = 6 MB/sec. — This paper examines the limitations of commercially available busses in these demanding broadcast video applications, proposes the Movie-2 bus as a high-performance open-architecture standard that overcomes these limitations, discusses the Movie-2 bus in detail, and finally, presents a model of a typical nonlinear editing platform as an example of system-level Movie-2 bus implementation.

Published

1996-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00121

ISBN

978-1-61482-925-6