RE: First Film To Be Sent Via Satellite
Been lurking for some time, now something we know about:
The press release mentions that this used the QuVIS products, which use a
proprietary wavelet encoding. So speculations about the MPEG-2 used on DVDs
or miniDV underestimate the compression ratio (a modern proprietary scheme
should do much better than venerable old MPEG-2). On the other hand, they
start with 24 frames per second at over a thosand lines and more than twice
that many horizontal samples, at twelve bits per component sample.
Now sending this uncompressed stream would use 10 Gbps links as noted. But
after the compression, my guess is that the rate is a few hundred megabits
per second. A similar encoding our products handle is HDCAM, which is
intra-frame compressed high definition down to about the rate of an
uncompressed Standard Definition. Encryption would not expand but of course
error correcting codes for the sattelite links would. And no reason for the
transfer to be real time (the press release says it is about four times
slower than real time). The QuVIS people have estimated a movie in their
format would take about 8 DVD-ROMS (using their encoding of course, NOT DVD
MPEG-2!) or a few tens of gigabytes.
Bill Nowicki, Omneon Video Networks