Starwinder, BBC Technology Group’s project to move to tapeless HD production by 2010, is to trial the Grass Valley Infinity digital media camcorder and related products from Thomson. The initial phase of the Starwinder project sees tapeless acquisition systems from Grass Valley and one other manufacturer undergoing intensive trials over the next year to determine the corporation’s future policies.
For such a large organization, a smooth transition to new technology is important. The Grass Valley Infinity Series program is designed to make such a transition seamless. It is capable of capturing in all common SD and HD standards even on the same recording medium. It also supports both today’s widely recognized recording formats (including the DV and MPEG-2 families), as well as JPEG2000.
Rather than being tied to any proprietary video recording medium, the Infinity camcorder offers a range of recording systems based on commodity IT technology. The REV PRO disk is based on the Iomega REV 35GB removable hard disk system and is built into every Infinity camcorder, as are slots for professional-grade CompactFlash cards. The use of standard CompactFlash cards gives all the benefits of solid-state recording at off-the-shelf media prices. Infinity also carries USB and Firewire (IEEE 1394) interfaces for connection to other external recording devices, and gigabit ethernet network ports for direct connection of the camera to a networked storage system.
