DV: the de facto video standard - Comment - Brief Article

Electronic News, Sept 2, 2002 by Steve Musallam

DVIS QUICKLY BECOMING the de facto standard in the consumer video market--a phenomenally fast transition brought about by high-quality MiniDV camcorders, lowcost home DV editing on PCs, and the ability to burn DVD discs at home. To further accelerate the transition, reasonably priced DVD authoring and archiving tools add to a wealth of new devices that record and display content digitally in the high-quality DV format. DV devices use IEEE 1394 connectivity to transfer native digital images directly to editors or displays with no quality lost to analog signal conversions.

But DV is more than just digital video. It is a specific, high-quality digital stream in a format that can be piped directly to a PC or TV along a wholly digital-to-digital path. By contrast, analog formats -- and digital signals converted to analog--lose quality at each step during capture, editing, archiving and display.

With enabling technologies such as the Divio NW700 DV Decoder and the NW701 DV codec, today's DV-based products for consumers, businesses and professionals will continue to expedite the transition. At the consumer level, units such as the second-generation Philips DVDR985 DVD recorder let users capture, edit, archive, distribute and display DV in a pure digital-to-digital format. Systems such as the Marantz VP12S1 projector allow direct projection of high-quality DV from miniDV camcorders over IEEE1394. At the professional and prosumer level, the very high caliber of "Blue Book" DV offers powerful advantages hard to resist for such real-world applications as product design.

New applications continue to spring from DV-based systems, and the market for DV-related products will continue to explode over the next decade. For example, DV technology is helping to drive the growing video editing market, where devices such as Applied Magic's ScreenPlay non-linear video editor allow corporate, event, education and prosumer users to process composite, S-video and optional DV 1394 data in a single device with a single interface.

Similarly, highly specific DV technical applications such as the Datavideo DAC-2DV/analog converter deliver high-quality video and audio content conversions in real-time, while professional-quality DV bridge devices from companies such as Miranda Technologies are helping to create new markets. DV is also hitting the consumer markets with products such as the Hollywood DV Bridge from Dazzle Multimedia.

Companies such as Sony, Panasonic, Canon and JVC have lent their marketing weight and engineering credibility to the DV transition, fielding DV-capable solutions for a wide variety of markets such as MiniDV. As a result, DV sales already exceed analog camcorder sales in Asia and Europe and soon will in the United States, too, as the market continues to move toward and support the DV standard.

Ron Glaz, an analyst with market research firm IDC, concurs that the shift away from traditional analog video is well established. "Digital camcorders are rapidly taking over as the new standard for consumer video capture," Glaz said. "Worldwide shipments of analog versus digital camcorders show the two are already equal in shipments, and DV will outpace analog within the year."

As DV camcorder sales grow, new portable, stand-alone and application-specific IEEE 1394-enabled devices will continue to appear, enabling new DV applications and capabilities.

As a result, DV is emerging as the new standard for prosumer and professional segments, which use DV for a growing number of applications including TV news segments, live broadcasts, in-the-field footage, video documentaries, training films and wedding videos.

DV expert Roger Jennings, in a seminal 1996 paper on DV, argued that DV quality is comparable to the former de facto video recording standard, Sony's Betacam SP analog format. Jennings maintains that today's digital technology renders Betacam SP obsolete as the majority of new purchases shift to DV-compliant systems.

As Jennings foretold, DV has now become the de facto video standard, and DV equipment comprises the bulk of new video purchases. Its combination of high performance, small form factor, high image quality and low cost ensures DV's place as the most widely applied standard for new digital video applications.

Steve Musallam is the director of marketing at Divio Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif.