Digital Video for Offshore Survey & Inspection

Rev1.3 Digital Video for Offshore Survey & Inspection (00181) 16 Jan 2003

A review of the commercial and technical implications of the selection of a digital video strategy within the Offshore Survey and Inspection Market

16 January 2003

Prepared for: Restricted Release

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Analog Pseudo-Synchronous Survey Review

Single or Multi-Channel Video Acquisition - Burnt-In Telemetry

Figure 1 : Overview OffShore Survey and Inspection “Video” Requirements

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OnLine Digital Archive Instant Review without Tape Process

Digital Tape Archive

Searchable Synchronous Survey Review

Single or Multi-Channel Video Acquisition - Burnt-In Telemetry

Figure 2 : Overview of Digital Video Solution Elements for Offshore survey and inspection

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Digital Video for Offshore Survey and Inspection

1. Aims of this Report This report is aimed at the offshore survey and inspection community and shall present the results of both previous commercial and technical analysis within this market sector, their conclusions and recommendations, and also the current offerings available with which to consider the purchase or investment in new technology.

2. Introduction and Background NETmc has since 1996 provided both consultancy, architecture and design services to companies embarking upon the digital media revolution. The term “Digital Asset Management” has become popular and reflects the acquisition or trans- ference of multi media content into a form suitable for storage within a digital system. The acquisition and storage stages of Digital Asset Management translate to the digitisation processes and classification, categorisation and cataloguing of the information. Once within a digital system the information can be quickly distributed to a wide audience and manipulated in ways not possible with the paper and analog forms. Our solutions have been focused upon the bringing of content into the digital world but also within the media and multi-media market combining this information into end-to-end digital media solutions and processes. Whilst the media, multi-media and internet businesses have considered the media library and rapid production and delivery offered by Digital Asset Management of primary importance as the basis of the product or service, the corporate customer is now seeing a growing need to manage its media assets to improve productivity and protect its longer term brand investments. In the past 7 years we have seen the continued growth in the digital media management and acquisition market and with the advent of direct digital television broadcasting, DVD, and CD before it a commercial precedence is being placed upon convergence to the digital form. Whilst internet video delivery has been slow on the uptake due to the poor delivery of ADSL and a the lack of compression techniques today both these issues are close to resolution. Broad- band is being made more accessible, and MPEG4 and other high compression video multimedia formats are starting to deliver the means by which to transmit valuable content to customers within a reasonable bandwidth. Commercial backing for MPEG2 in the form of DVB with 10’s of millions of set top boxes already sold and DVD which has already outstripped VHS in retail sales, the future of these standards are now strongly established.

For the survey and inspection market the question still however remains as to which format and what strategy should be adopted. Since we would argue this is now no longer purely a technical exercise we hope to present here some clearer ideas and arguments as to the selections that would be best made and why.

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3. NETmc Experiences Over the past 8 years NETmc has focused upon the delivery of digital media management solution to its clients and has experienced first hand the growth and development of this embry- onic market both at a technical and commercial level.

Media acquisition, the digitisation of media assets, has advanced the most within this time and today many systems can be found to perform this role. Media interchange, transcoding and manipulation has always formed a key commercial decision which must be understood for each customer and application. Without an understanding as to the use of the media any decision upon its acquisition may be fundamentally flawed. Often the penalty for making such decisions is not felt until subsequent years when information interchange problems grow out of proportion. Media archive, like media acquisition, has advanced by orders of magnitude. Today digital storage costs are a fraction of that just a few years ago and relational and object database systems take advantage of low cost super-high performance server technology. Media management, search, selection and delivery remains the final element which is as yet un- solved and presents the greatest longer term challenge to the digital media world today. 3.1 Media Capture, Conversion and Acquisition Media capture or video digitisation is a mature technology and so called “frame grabber” solutions have been available for many years to capture un-compressed digital video images. The quest for the ability to store and transmit moving pictures is nothing new and techniques have been developed in order to reduce and make practical such transmission and storage. Analog compression methods and an understanding as to the human eye’s processing of image information lead to the interlaced video formats PAL, SECAM and NTSC which can be seen as analog compression methods applied to the un-compressed analog source material. Early digitisation solutions used frame by frame compression to removing redundancy within the image. Some examples as Motion JPEG are still in used today as they are ideal for video editing. Practical use of these for delivery was limited since compression was insufficient to meet available transmission bandwidths and storage costs at the time were still high. Low frame rate image sampling became practical and was used by some companies. New compression techniques were however being developed that extended the image compression methods by removing motion redundancy between sequential images. MPEG was born although the ability to encode in this new format became the biggest hurdle. General purpose computer systems were still slow and far from capable of performing this task. Even today real-

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time MPEG2 compression at full bitrate and CCIR601 resolution is a challenge to our desktop computer. However dedicated hardware solutions from IBM and CCube quickly lead to the first MPEG1 and later MPEG2 hardware compression solutions. Optibase and upstarts FutureTel in the encoder and Sigma in the decoder market were the main players and offered the ability to supple- ment the PC performance with hardware compression or decompression. At best the general purpose computer was simply a host and supplier of file media. Technology has over the past 8 years moved at a rapid pace and now many companies like CCube, IBM, VWEB, Visiontech, Vitech, ICompression, TI, Cirrus Logic and more have pro- duced low cost silicon compression solutions that allow cost effective whilst high quality MPEG encode solutions to be built. Cost is now determined not by the compression element so much as the video pre-processing and frame capture elements of the solution. The cost of hardware MPEG compression has dropped, but so too has the performance of the general purpose computer improved - so much so that it is almost possible to use software compression over hardware compression when considering MPEG2 as a format. However caution should be exercised when using the general purpose computer over its dedicated and designed hardware partner. Reliability is in direct opposition to flexibility and general purpose computer platforms and general purpose operating systems such as Microsoft Windows carry much baggage that can cause unexpected results. Constant application of operating system patches and the general purpose nature of the system serve to de-stablize and weaken this as a sensible decision for a critical system component. MPEG 4 which was designed as means to transmit multimedia objects at low bandwidth, is des- tined to become a significant milestone as a delivery mechanism and whilst arguably unsuitable as a primary capture format should be considered for delivery and media interchange. Prudence must suggest that selection of this technology should be reserved as a migration path when the technology becomes stable and commercially backed within the next generation of digital solutions. The ability to support 24/7/365 recording by customers means reliable recording technology is a must. Customers wish to purchase a solution and not a set of components which they themselves must manage, it is important therefore that a “black box” approach is taken. The rapid and constant change within the PC and software market means that any value invested is quickly lost or outdated, this capital investment loss needs to be arrested to provide stability and confidence to invest in any technology. Investing in standards and realities is critical. If a customer must specify rather than recommend a particular vendor’s product not because of preference but because the vendor has made it difficult for others to compete then the customer loses out as the market can not compete. Microsoft in particular sees the provision of digital video as a key means by which to continue its dominance within the operating system market place. Short cutting the MPEG4 standard, Microsoft’s own proprietary variation is being backed my zero-cost-of-ownership incentives aimed at the development community. This is in contrast to other vendors such as RealNetworks and AppleQuicktime that have all moved behind the MPEG4 standard. Software solutions often are effected by “external forces” such as changing operating systems, changing hardware, and changing configurations. Unless these parameters are fully understood and under control a software solution is a time bomb waiting to explode. A VHS recorder in stark contrast, for example, performs a specific task day in, day out, and can be relied upon to do so until it finally fails due to old age. Software solutions are often sold upon the pretext that they are flexible and can change, but change as we all know is not always a good thing.

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The ability to adapt to change here as is often used as a marketing advantage to software based products does not correctly reflect the investment that has been hitherto made in the capture of previous media content. We suggest that flexibility becomes less critical than stability when considering the investment to be made in digital media content. 3.2 Media Content Investment The digitisation of content in itself transforms the content into a form that can be distributed, used, searched, and manipulated in a digital world. The means by which content is digitised dictates the best that we can expect from the digital representation of the content. Resolution, not only in terms of screen pixels but also colour depth, frame rate and compression losses at this stage are the metrics by which we can determine the cost of digitisation. Lower resolution and poor compression techniques may yield better storage overheads at the cost of usability of the data itself. Some methods lend themselves better than others to search, editing, and distribution. But one aspect of digital content is the investment that is made within it. That is whether or not the data is transient or is to be archived for later use. When considering this less technical and more commercial driver a format for storage becomes critically important. Streaming video solutions demand that the content has a short life. This helps to ensure that the ownership of the content is retained by the original content supplier. The content owner however wishes to digitise content once and thereafter be able to distribute it at a later date perhaps using the latest technology without the cost of re-digitisation. Using “building block” formats offer the foundations of the video content from which streaming video can be created.

In the search for a primary capture format, we seek a format that can be manipulated and down- graded as appropriate, that in itself has a long life, and that can be distributed either in its original form or most other forms to a consumer. 3.3 Media Archive We all accept that digital media has the potential to provide rewards beyond its analog rival, its flexibility and availability are unparalleled. The level of this reward is however directly coupled to the way in which such digital media is managed since today it still occupies a storage footprint that is beyond the standard users work- station. In a large media archive a solution to this has been to produce and adopt “Digital Asset Man- agement” solutions or “Library Managers” to manage metadata or “index and catalogue” information whilst using HSFS storage solutions to provide on-line or near on-line data access. 3.3.1 The Media MetaData Survey metadata in the form of positional information, event and other data sources have already been brought into a digital form by many customers and so Digital Video can be seen as simply the last piece of the data convergence process. Bringing video into the digital domain makes reporting simple and easily transportable as an atomic self contained product that does not need any other external physical media in order to be complete. Survey solutions therefore may already implement a metadata management solution in the form of a proprietary survey solution or may use a GIS based survey system to provide the means to attach geo-referenced content to physically managed entities.

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In these cases the digital media solution is simply the provision and extension of these systems to include external references to separately managed digital video data. The media metadata therefore can be considered as simply an external reference to media content. Where no system exists the media metadata itself must contain sufficient information such that it can be reconstructed later or associated with external information. In current analog systems this is essential since no implicit referential information is possible. Thus the use of burnt in timecode and telemetry information in analog recording is essential to perform this function. In the digital equivalent this information is placed within the digital video stream as telemetry data providing for a fully referential source media stream. Metadata extraction from source however is a slow process so the role of a D.A.M. system here falls to ensuring that metadata is placed within a suitable searchable database in addition to that held within the native video streams. Obviously any loss is protected with the dual redundancy. Indeed the delivery of metadata enriched content means that at any time media can be clearly identified by the recipient. Examples of thin metadata management solutions are the NETmc DVR/DRS system which provides both metadata storage within the media content stream as well as within a standard SQL database for use by both the management applications and third party products. 3.3.2 The Media Content The value of digital content is only as good as its ability to be recalled quickly and the original encoding quality and format. The selection therefore of a primary encoding format should be selected based upon the highest quality required down stream since this quality dictates that which must be captured at source. Unlike analog recording, digital recording does not suffer generation loss during the copy process and so once an encoding decision is made the quality will remain fixed. Further digital deg- radation can then be applied based upon the relative importance of the media content on an instance by instance basis. NETmc adopts this variable archive strategy to ensure that media retention is always tracking the value of the media as defined by the customer. By default all media has equal value, but where media has little value it can be further compressed or simply removed all together. The use of linear digital tape for media storage draws a parallel with analog tape and whilst access speeds can be greatly enhanced the off-line digital content retains the accessibility issues inherent within its analog equivalent. It does however retain one aspect which is of great potential value - that is that once media is written to the tape it is relatively safe and so its use as a backup strategy is an important consideration. No matter which video encoding technology is selected, nor whether an on-line tape backup strategy is adopted, the overall storage requirements differ only slightly ( less than an order of magnitude ) and any difference is dwarfed by the continual growth within the storage market and the decreasing cost of content ownership. Today NETmc sells enterprise video level network attached storage (NAS) solutions ranging from 720GBytes (a 2U device costing £4,000) to 4TBytes (a 4U device costing £15,000) along side its higher end storage area networking products. Just a year ago storage costs were between 2 and 5 times that of today. If we consider the cost in time to write and recover 720GBytes from tape archive (approximately 80 man hours and £800 in tape media) it is obvious that on-line storage does not have far to go before it can compete directly on price and perhaps even eventually act as a customer deliverable. A 4TByte system could store 3 channel video data for 30 consecutive days un-interrupted and un-filtered, the equivalent of 120 DLT tapes or 720 VHS tapes. To gain the advantages of digital media it is important that the media is kept on-line or pseudo-

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on-line. The rapid growth in data stored then makes it essential to be able to view the bigger picture of digital asset management as applied to this market place. 3.4 Media Distribution and Production The capture, catalogue and storage of digital media is only one part of the digital picture. Rarely is a digital media asset of value in its entirety and so the search, selection and editing of source material is of importance in addition to the means by which materials of particular inter- est are then distributed to interested parties. The inclusion of video media clips directly within reports is one means of media distribution. These typically being compiled during the early stages of the digital content life where a direct relationship exists between newly created content and its associated importance. Digital media has a wider and broader use beyond these summary reports for use in later months or years as reference. Long term comparisons, trend analysis and tracking for example is at present difficult due to cumbersome nature of analog video data. Digital data can provide quick and immediate access to many years of data for a specific feature or location giving the power of comparison to the customer where before it was not possible.

To prevent off-line digital data becoming as difficult to manage as analog data it is essential that the survey customer consider today the adoption of digital media asset management solutions.

But digital distribution does not mean that digital data is always transmitted or distributed in its original form. Low-quality preview streams can be used to allow real-time transmission from source directly to shore whilst still retaining high quality reference media. An event therefore can trigger the download of a high quality review copy of the same video without the need to retrace a survey or even halt a current survey. Much is mentioned about digital video and digital process however it is important to consider the distribution of the video data in a form that is readily usable by others, not just users of general purpose computer equipment. VHS has provided a simple and cheap means to distribute analog video all be it at a lower than ideal quality. DVD-Video, based on the MPEG2 standard, provides us with a similar distribution technology for our digital video media.

MPEG2 and indeed NETmc’s open PKT encapsulation format ensure that digital video media can be quickly edited and written to DVD-Video media for playback on domestic DVD players and general purpose computers alike.

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4. Digital Video for Offshore Survey and Inspection In 1999 NETmc advised the marine industry upon the application of digital video and digital asset management technology based upon its own experience and expertise grown from the media, multimedia, video on demand and streaming markets.

Research into industry requirements suggested that a technical solution alone was insufficient for the longer term view required by the industry and so NETmc made a leap of faith in recom- mending a set of technologies that were technically challenging but never the less commercially correct.

Early system sales invested in customers as hardware costs amounted for 90% of the overall unit cost and software was provided free to stimulate the market and offer a means by which to champion this route in a market renowned for belief only in that which it could see. Now some 4 years later those commercial decisions have proven to be solid. Some 25 million DVB decoders worldwide and the support of the DVB and DVD media distribution community ensure that MPEG2 is the format of choice. Encoder choice has grown and allowed real commercially viable MPEG2 solutions to be created. Today non-MPEG2 solutions where high profit margins and artificially high prices have been possible must face the hard commercial reality of such a choice and either offer cheap short term solutions to customers or bow to the overriding commercial argument to adopt a solid standard.

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For the survey community the issue is identifying what the key decisions are that must be made and why a move to a digital approach should be selected with care. 5. Confidence to Invest in Digital Video Digital video for survey and inspection faces two compelling problems, firstly the lack of a clear winning digital video recording “package” and secondly the emergence of vendor lead digital video solutions.

The term “Digital video” as an expression holds no clear description or definition, neither however does the term “Analog video”. By contrast however the analog video market is mature and we no-longer refer to the term “Analog Video” instead we discuss formats such as VHS and SVHS. The digital video marketplace now has a growing number of commercial products. DVD-Video and DVD-Rom carry on from the digital audio CD-Audio and CD-Rom for digital video and data distribution. The CD recording formats CD-R and CD-RW for write-once and re-writeable media have given way to DVD recording standards DVD-R, DVD+R for write once and DVD- RW and DVD+RW for re-writeable media. DVHS is a digital enhancement to the respected VHS standard and like DVD it too is based upon the MPEG2 standard. DV with its domestic Mini-DV1 standard has been widely adopted as a standard in digital camcorders due to its small media form factor. Why should a standard be adopted at all ? Survey customers often select different survey suppliers for each and every survey job. Each survey customer may have elected based upon its own internal decisions to store its own digital media content in a different digital format upon its own possibly bespoke digital media management system. Each survey supplier may have selected a digital video solution based upon its own internal decisions, it may have even created its own in-house solution or have championed an external solution to meet its requirements. Since the survey supplier may wish to win many survey customers it becomes clear that the issue here is that with a many-to-many relationship between supplier and customer selection some level of standard is needed in order that this constant change does not generate constant addition work in its own right. Selecting a “building block” standard like MPEG2 does go some way to helping the situation

1. Unlike the larger DV products DVCam, DVCPro, DVCPro 422, where recording formats differ the MiniDV has a standard physical package. DV is 25Mbps video with 60dB S/N and 500 line resolution.

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since it allows for any other format to be delivered to the customer. The reverse is not true, it does not resolve the issue that costs are being driven lower within the industry. If digital is to deliver both upon its own merits and also as a means to enhance productivity and increased profits some standardisation is critical.

A standard is therefore needed in order that supplier and consumer alike can gain the confidence to invest in a digital solution.

NETmc has lead the way and it is fair to say that all the current products in commercial use now can be traced back to the pioneering work undertaken by NETmc in this field. It is however time to once again to inject some direction into the market place. 5.1 Video - Current Systems It is always useful to consider the current systems in use before adopting any new standards.

Survey video acquisition consists of the recording of multiple analog video sources synchro- nised with telemetry data. This video media is used for QA purposes and currently is recorded upon analog VHS and SVHS tape with reliability and confidence. The media is stored for many years and since multiple hardware vendors support the VHS/SVHS standard no single source problems have existed so far. Today SVHS has been dropped as a production standard and manufacturers have already ceased production of industrial recording devices, this poses a critical and fundamental problem for the capture of video within survey. 5.1.1 Analog Solution The analog solution today consists of separate S/VHS industrial recording units loaded with 3 hour video tape, one recording unit for each of 3 video camera sources. Every 3 hours a new set of tapes are labelled and inserted, often dual recording is performed for safety. Manual log sheets are written to capture event data and visual attention to video tape counters are recorded to indicate approximate location of events upon the tapes themselves. These sheets and labels are later “typed up” and attached to the tape to form the video records. 5.1.2 Quality and Performance The analog recording system itself is not the only part of the current system that impacts the video system quality. The 3 subsea cameras that act as video sources are located some consid- erable distance electrically from the video recorder units. Cable losses as well as multiplexer

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noise further act to reduce the recorded video quality. However recording quality has been considered adequate for the purpose and this would therefore suggest that a PAL video resolution of 352x288 (similar to VHS resolution) would be sufficient at a quantisation of 8 bits (yielding 48dB signal to noise similar to VHS) and given an analysis of image content at a video post compression rate of 1.1Mbps (CD-Video quality similar to VHS). This fit-for-purpose approach however does not leave any room for future improvement and so, as we will see later, considerations will be placed on technology that not only matches that which is required but also protects the customer from any change should SVHS or higher quality be required. 5.2 Video - Requirements

5.2.1 Interchangeability Survey suppliers and customers change on a job by job basis and so interchangeability of data between suppliers and customers is essential. If each supplier selects a different deliverable, or if each customer defines a different deliverable, then it will be necessary to constantly transcode materials to meet contractual demands. Customers may become concerned over transcoded information, a digital video requirement to supply one digital video format could be satisfied by a transcode from another. This process is possible and acceptable where for example the deliverable is WV9 and the encode was say MPEG2 but the reverse is not necessarily true. Even if possible such a process is not without its cost in terms of time and effort.

It is clear for interchangeability to occur some standards need to be drawn. Great caution should be exercised when considering the selection of emergent standards such as MPEG4 however attractive they may at first appear to be. 5.2.2 Long Life Video data whether analog or digital must be usable today, tomorrow and beyond. There is no use in capturing data if it will not be usable in the future. All data degrades to some extent, digital data is no exception and the same storage issue apply to digital data as with analog data. Furthermore since digital data is somewhat removed from the technology that is required to replay it, unlike its analog equivalent, long life here means stability of recording format as well as recording media.

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5.2.3 Reliability Paramount to any solution here is the reliability of recording. Analog recording technology is quite tolerant to recording glitches and recovers well from loss of data due to physical tape damage. Analog recording technology has matured and is now both highly reliable and well proven. Time is money and the reliability of any alternative to the current system must be able to produce digital media that does not require extensive re-processing after the event nor should it al- ter the performance and speed of the job to be undertaken. If anything it should enhance and accelerate any processes that are currently performed using analog technology. 5.3 Analog meets Digital To better understand our dilemma here let us draw upon the four aspects of video that we must define for any solution. That is the source, encoding method, storage format and physical media. The source, that is how the video will be presented to us to capture. The encoding method, that is how we shall turn the source into a form that is practical to store. The storage format, defining how the encoded source material is to be stored and lastly, the storage media selecting a physical interchange media.

5.3.1 The Analog Package :: Source, Encoding, Format and Media For “Analog Video” recording the source, encoding, format and media elements are strictly defined within the mature commercial product that is in use at present, that is VHS. VHS as an accepted defacto standard defines the supported source protocols (PAL, SECAM and NTSC), the encoding method (analog chroma separation and bandwidth compression), the storage format (helical scan video, FM helical audio, and linear audio and tracking/sync) and the physical media (a half inch magnetic tape proprietary to VHS). The word VHS that defines all four elements of video recording has become synonymous with domestic video recording. 5.3.2 Digital Source For “Digital Video” recording there is no mature commercial product at present equivalent to VHS and so we must exercise caution so as to not select a set of formats that may later prove to be an expensive mistake ( Betamax and V2000 are the analog video equivalent formats that lost to the commercially backed VHS product ) In digital video recording the source can be defined as PAL, SECAM and NTSC as with its analog partner although the digital video solution is capable of supporting other standards such as HDTV and also formats that do not exist within the analog world.

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5.3.3 Digital Encoding Encoding for digital video is a two stage process as we have mentioned previously, the digitisation and the compression process. Digitisation itself is the process of digital representation of the analog video data. Digitisation of analog video data presents an anomaly since the analog data itself is a means by which to scan an image field and represent the image data. Digital video camera technology can directly con- vert an image field into a matrix of digital values representing light intensity and colour information within the image. The digital compression method should function equally well with digital un-compressed video source as with compressed analog video data. The quality of the digitisation process is governed by the number of bits used to represent the video data, by the number of samples made per image. Digitisation is mature and the factors that influence its quality are well understood. Digital compression techniques fall into four categories:- • Motion Compensation not strictly a compression method, motion compensation attempts to reduce the level of noise in an image by the detection and removal of objects in motion prior to the application of simple gaussian noise reduction. Motion compensation is unlikely to be used within any survey or inspection solution. • Intra Frame Compression Simple image compression on a frame by frame basis can eliminate redundancy by removal of large areas of image fill or repetition. Image compression can be loss less or lossy. • Inter Frame Compression compression is applied between successive frames to attempt to eliminate redundancy where one image is almost the same as the previous image. Motion vectors that indicate the movement of picture elements replace information about the actual content of the image. This technique therefore is transmitting only the change information. • Object and Field Based Compression Composite object recognition and compression can be used to identify object elements of a composite image and separately compress each object based upon its own characteristics. This technique is useful where an image field is clearly defined as a collection of independent elements. Foreground and background object processing is a simple example of this. Background material can be encoded at a lower bitrate to foreground detail which is encoded at a higher bitrate. The overall picture appears therefore to be of significantly better quality.

MPEG2 uses intra and inter frame compression whilst MPEG4 uses object based compression.

The pre-filtering of video signals before digitisation dramatically influences the final quality of a compressed video data. Over filtering and the use of subjective filtering as in MPEG4 should be considered carefully when using compressed video data for any form of analysis. 5.3.4 Digital Physical Media Format Digital video exists as a collection of bytes of data and as such whilst it is “on-line” it can exist without a digital equivalent of the analog format. Analog data can not exist without this physical equivalent. The digital format therefore can be considered as two elements, an encoding wrapper and an archival wrapper. The encoding wrapper is not a necessary element if the digital encoding method clearly defines this, but often to ensure independence from the particular digital media format itself an encoding

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wrapper is preferred since it enables us to select alternative digital encoding formats whilst still using the same set of tools. NETmc uses an encoding wrapper for just that purpose, although a proponent of MPEG2 the encoding wrapper allows the same set of NETmc tools to operate without regards to the underlying video coding technology in use. RealVideo, MPEG4, Windows Media Video 7,8 and 9 can all be supported but with obvious consequences to the final deliverable to the customer. Without the encoding wrapper this would not be possible. The archival wrapper once again is not necessary until the digital media must be transported outside the on-line system. Tape remains an excellent method for this but we should not overlook the growing use of other storage technologies such as firewire hard-disk devices which both have very high capacity (250GBytes) and also very high transfer speeds. The archival wrapper in essence merely allows exported physical media to be interchanged between systems, both today, and in the future. 5.3.5 Digital Physical Media Itself Early digital computer systems had limited digital memory and often no non-volatile mass storage device upon which to store data. Paper tape, magnetic tape, floppy disks even audio cas- settes have been used as primary storage formats for computer digital data. Today although we have high capacity mass storage devices upon which to store our digital data and magnetic tape has grown in its capacity digital video has reset some of our expectations back to these early days due to its huge requirements. Today tape media is used for backup and archive and no-longer as a primary storage format, the exception to this remains the digital video manufactures of broadcast and semi-pro video where tape remains a primary recording format due to its high storage density. When we consider a digital video system it is easy to think of the digital video without consideration as to how it is passed between supplier and customer and how it is stored in the longer term. History has shown us that what is not possible today will be possible tomorrow and so the digital video media format should be considered not just as an archive format but also as an interchange format. Recordable DVD technology is set to challenge the magnetic tape media ground and already hard disk recording and archive solutions are closing in on tape media. Many digital tape archive solutions exist, few currently are in step with the rapid growth in hard disk storage and so much change is likely in the near future if tape is to keep pace with the needs of the hard disk storage market to archive and secure its data. DLT and SuperDLT, based upon the well proven Dec DK tape format, has a firm hold in the IT market place and offers good capacity at a reasonable cost. AIT is comparable and in some ways better and has a firm hold in the media market place and offers lower up front costs and similar capacity at reasonable cost.

Which ever format is selected it is important to choose a format that has a clear roadmap and that is likely to be readable atleast in years to come.

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6. Digital Video - Making A Selection 6.1 Digital Encoding - Some Considerations To make a selection of a digital encoding strategy we must consider the merits of each option both at a technical and commercial level.

6.1.1 Right Quality The right image quality is essential and the usability of the data for its purpose within the review and QA process is critical. The ability to scan media and search quickly is as important as the ability to extract useful video clips from the source. 6.1.2 Minimum Cost Equipment investment costs are important as are the running costs both in terms of media and consumables. The cost of change however is critically important. Any system that is based upon the tracking of technology, hardware, operating systems and changing formats has a very high longer term cost that can far outweigh any immediate short term gains. 6.1.3 Proven and Stable It is essential that the formats selected are stable. Stability should mean stability in the format and its implementation. If a digital encoding format is to change then the current media archive encoded in an earlier format clearly becomes an immediate legacy and in the future may no-longer be usable. Some say that proven and stable is old technology. This is true; MPEG2 encoders purchased in 1997 are at work today and only differ from the current technology in so far as their price! To ensure the long life of any format it is not enough for the survey community to adopt it as a standard - that standard must also be adopted by a wider commercial market. A good example of this is the DVD and DVB market place where MPEG2 has become a commercially backed standard for distribution and live broadcast. As a stark contrast Microsoft Video has undergone 3 major changes in the past 2 years so much so that now it is necessary to upgrade your operating system to support the latest video encoder formats ! This is surely a high price to pay and one which will eventually lead to the loss of support for the previous Video 7 and Video 8 formats. Microsoft in particular are focused upon diametrically opposing targets to those that the survey industry would be best served by. Whilst such a war is of benefit to the consumer of on-line streamed digital video it is of little comfort to the survey community wishing to retain digital video media for many years to come.

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6.1.4 MultiVendor Single vendor solutions, whether they be from Microsoft, NETmc or others, are not good news for customers. They restrict choice and serve to hinder competition. When selecting a digital solution whilst preference may elect one supplier over another at its foundation must be a set of standards that allow and encourage other vendors to compete. Today it is good to know that there are many vendors of MPEG2 acquisition solutions to choose from, not just from within the media market but also now focused upon the marine survey market. Focus within the media market is split between broadcast applications requiring high quality video content and streaming / video-on-demand applications requiring low transmission overheads. The MPEG2 and MPEG4 standards have been selected in these markets as solid foundations for DELIVERY. Source materials are retained at higher quality since the cost of production is often orders of magnitude in excess of than of the cost of a single transmission. A $10million movie is sold on a $20 DVD !! With standards in place multi vendor acquisition systems will lead to multi vendor tools, including in-house developments. Here at NETmc we are committed to supplying customers not just complete product solutions, which are necessary in the early days of adoption, but also a full suite of toolkits to ensure that application integration can be performed simply, quickly and at low cost. Whilst we may argue our solutions offer the combination of not just acquisition but also on ship live video distribution as well as asset management we must accept that alternative technology helps make the decision easier for the customer. 6.1.5 Deliverable The delivery of digital media is quite separate from its acquisition. Acquisition reflects the longer term view of the content life cycle whilst delivery reflects the immediate value of the content itself. Within survey the ability to transmit content quickly may be of importance and so a capture format should allow for this lower rate transmission. Transcoding, sub-sampling, and dual stream encoding are all methods of ensuring that quick transmission is possible. Where delivery is required to be performed quickly over low-bandwidth links, for example direct from ship to shore, high compression techniques may be necessary. The source format should be able to cope with this but not at the cost of the primary material which may be transmitted more slowly to shore. In addition to simple transmission, distribution may also require some level of tracking. Video content in itself does not define this and so wrapping technologies such as ASF, native MPEG telemetry streams, or packet wrappers may be used to watermark source material to ensure that it can be tracked at a later stage and always associated with the original event. Some solutions, NETmc’s included, perform this operation at source but this can equally well be applied at any stage of the content life and in many instances the addition of metadata to content clips forms a critical means by which to ensure that video assets can be located in the future. 6.2 Digital Encoding - Making the Choice Today it is valid to say that all the current compression techniques are able to deliver the level of quality required within the survey market place as defined by our own research and discus- sions with the community.

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Quality is our first consideration since this must be fit for purpose. Where “no better than we already have” is a driving force then this can be summarised as SIF or 352x2881 resolution 48dB S/N. This is the standard resolution for MPEG1. Wavelet compression, MPEG4, RealVideo (now backing MPEG4 http://www.realnetworks.com/company/ press/releases/2002/mpeg.html), Windows Video 7,8,and 9, and Quicktime (now endorsing MPEG4 http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/) can all support this resolution. Where “better than we already have, but not at any significant cost” is a driving force then we can suggest either half-D1 or full-D1 being either 352x576 or 704x576 resolution at 10bit quantisation ( 60dB S/N ). These are the standard resolutions for MPEG2. All other formats as listed above can support this resolution. We can clearly see that the community is split between five different compression standards:-

Theoretical H/W H/W S/W S/W Technology Implementations Standard BitRate Encode Playback Encode Playback

MPEG1 MPEG1 (352x288) ISO 11172 1Mbps Yesa Yes Yes Yes

MPEG2 MPEG2 (704x576) ISO 13818 4Mbps Yesa Yes Yes Yes

MPEG4, RealVideo, QuickTime MPEG4 2Mbps b Yes Yes Yes (704x576) Yes

WV9 Microsoft (704x576) - 2Mbps No Noc Yes Yes JPEG2000 / M-JPEG2000 Wavelet ISO 15444 2Mbps Yes Yes Yes Yes (704x576) a. Supported by all NETmc mediaNET encoders b. Supported by NETmc’s E4 range of mediaNET encoders c. Microsoft is pressing more than 30 hardware vendors to include hardware playback of its WV9 format by offloading some of the decode process to the graphics card itself. This is likely to be a yes very soon.

Theoretical bitrates are suggested here based on achieving a similar output quality. Using two pass encoding MPEG4 and WV9 can achieve higher compression however limitations in host system performance often results in MPEG4 and WV9 using higher bitrates and therefore less taxing compression.

1. we consider PAL rather than NTSC values here.

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In practice vendors use higher bitrates than these specified typically 4 or 6Mbps for MPEG2 and 2 or 4Mbps for MPEG4/WV9. As encoding technology advances and host system performance increases so the latter coding strategies will become more attractive. Storage itself is however becoming cheaper and cheaper and this “consumable cost” is therefore offsetting any immediate gain in reduced storage budgets. There is no clear winner at this stage. MPEG4 offers hope for the future but as yet it is early days within the technology and it is wise to consider waiting until it matures. The war between MPEG4 and rival WV9 de-stabilises any decision to select this standard. The lack of an order or close to an order of magnitude difference in storage requirements for these formats means that selection should be therefore based upon the usability of the resulting content and any commercial overriding drivers. As we have stated, all encoders here are capable of producing good quality content. This does not mean however that there are no differences between products. It is very possible to create content using the same bitrates, the same coding technology, but to result in very different video quality. As mentioned previously filtering and noise reduction as well as motion compensation and estimation techniques help to improve encoding performance at any given bitrate. Failure to do so reduces the encoding efficiency and therefore results in a lower apparent encoding quality. Quality is however not everything and we must consider the life span of content itself.

commercial Life Technology Commercial Backing Maturity (years)

MPEG1 VideoCD 1992 no commercial driver

DVD MPEG2 1994 10+ years DVB working alongside MPEG2 in next generation DVD and DVB MPEG4 1998 a video streaming and PVR mar- yet to be established kets

WV9 Microsoft “force” 2003b yet to be established

High compression in still image Wavelet 2000 10+ years archives a. A war between MPEG4 and WV9 makes commercial life estimates difficult. It is fair to say their life has really yet to start. b. Microsoft have promised that the WV9 bitstream format will not be fixed after changes between WV7 and WV8 over the past 2 years. Although not a ratified standard WV9 will become a defacto standard for Microsoft unless pressure from MPEG4 proves to be too much.

Although MPEG4 would seem to be a possible option both in terms of its future and its current budget the war between rival WV9 and MPEG4 as well as the early stages of its adoption make its commercial life somewhat uncertain. MPEG2, much like VHS before it, has the commercial backing of the media distribution network, that is to say that the retail sale of DVD media, already outstripping that of VHS, sets the means by which MPEG2 itself will remain a standard for most likely 20+ years and certainly 10+ years. The open standards serve to also enforce this since with the exception of WV9 all other codec specifications and reference implementations can be purchased from the ISO body. This would

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mean the ultimate protection for ones content investment.

Therefore in making a selection there is one overall clear winner, that is MPEG2. It is the best compromise and offers the best insulation from change whilst offering the best quality of image at a reasonable budget. 6.3 Digital Recording - An Archive Interchange Format Digital video as we have mentioned can exist as “files” upon a computer systems disk system.

As such it is not necessary to “package” the video data into a physical form unless we wish to protect our investment (backup) or pass our content onto a remote, unconnected, third party. An archive interchange format should therefore be considered since part of the survey process is to exchange video content between the collector, the survey company, and the client, the customer.

Digital tape itself does not define this alone. A DLT, DAT, SDLT or AIT tape for example can contain the same information written using different archive packages and be simply unreadable by the target audience. Once again we need to arrive at some standard that can be used by the silent majority such that the particular source and destination of content media does not define yet another combination to be managed. We are discussing here how we “bag” up digital video files into a format that can be used by

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many different types of client. A Windows client may suggest media written using “Microsoft Backup” in order that he may be able to recover it upon his systems. A Unix Client may suggest media written using “dump” for similar reasons. Other less operating specific options such as Legato, or Veritas may be suggested as they are platform independent. Non tape based solutions such as CDROM and DVD are simpler to consider as these define file- systems and digital media can simply be copied to these random access disk formats. Their capacity however is strictly limited ( a cdrom is less than 10 minutes whilst a dvd is less than an hour of 3 channel video data with telemetry ). Selecting a standard here should be a zero cost option to ensure widespread adoption. Enforcing a standard that requires a client to invest simply to read a suppliers data is not valid and since each client may have a different target system for the data any solution must be available on all platforms. Microsoft backup although technically free with the Microsoft platform is only available on that platform and therefore can not satisfy the need to standardise for all clients. More importantly there is little control over this defacto standard and it represents a single vendor proprietary solution. Veritas, ArcServe and other enterprise strength backup solutions are cross platform but require the customer and supplier to invest significant money to purchase. TAR, or Tape ARchive is a well established POSIX standard that is available across all platforms at zero cost via the GNU open source project, as a native utility on all UNIX platforms and available from manufacturers such as MKS. TAR is a sequential archive technology, each “archive record” consisting of a header and the archive data is appended to the archive one at a time. TAR therefore does not have a catalogue or index in one location this is distributed across the whole archive. A tar archive can exist outside of a tape and can be created as a single file and compressed. Many software packages use this as a distribution method on the internet. The well known ZIP and WinZIP software applications understand both tar and compressed tar archives as standard. The sequential nature of tar means that each video record that is written to the tape is “safe” and so tar can be seen as an On-line recording method similar to that of the VHS tape.

Are there other options ? Yes but non so universal, free and compelling as that of TAR.

NETmc fully back the use of single and multi-volume TAR archives and supply TAR tools free for non-unix based software as well as supporting toolkits for customers interested in incorpo- rating TAR into non-unix and unix based solutions. 6.4 Digital Recording - A Physical Interchange Format Archive packaging itself does not define a target physical media. When considering the physical interchange format, or media, we must ask ourselves whether or not this remains an issue for the digital video system ? Certainly were we to define a specific tape or disk media then this should be done with some reflection towards their merits. 6.4.1 So what are the considerations ? A purely physical consideration should be that the digital tape has a packing density no worse and in fact considerably better than that of the equivalent VHS tapes.

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A digital recording system is likely to produce some 5GBytes per hour of data based on 3 channel video recording. In our analog system a “tape” carries 3 hours of data and so our digital tape should similarly carry no less than 3 hours of data. So our digital tape must have a native capacity greater than 20Gbytes and be able to sustain a writing speed of no less than 10GBytes per hour for safety and allowing for tape defect management. DLT, SDLT, LTO and AIT support capacities in excess of 40Gbytes with write performances of between 2 and 10 times realtime. Secondly compactness is important. The physical size of recorded media must be less than that currently used with analog recording. Digital storage density is very high and roughly equates to 1/10th of the volume required for an equivalent VHS tape archive. This directly translates to a real gain in the physical storage requirements of the digital archive.

Thirdly the recording format must have a performance able to cope with the data recording requirements of approx 6GBytes per hour. Ideally since the recording process may require verifi- cation a format capable of supporting write speeds in excess of 12GBytes/hour would be ideal. Vunerable formats such as DVD and slow formats such as DAT are not capable of supporting these data rates as primary archive formats and so should be considered only for distribution and not archive itself. DVD in particular is an excellent distribution format but its vunerability to failure during authoring is higher than that of the alternatives.

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Lastly the recording media must be reliable both in the ability to author the media initially and latterly to recover data from the media in years to come. DLT and AIT both perform tape media fault management at the writing stage and also incorpo- rate error detection and correction to provide a level of protection against data loss. The defect management under DLT in particular ensures that archive lives in excess of 30 years are gau- renteed. Data retention is not the only issue when considering a media’s life. The technology road map must ensure that the physical media and its recording device is still available and readable in years to come. There is no point in recording data on a tape that has a life of 30 years only to find in 30 years time that there has been no tape drive that can read the media for 25 years ! DLT, SDLT, LTO and AIT technologies have each a long term roadmap which will mean that data stored in these will be readable for many years to come. DLT and AIT in particular with an archive life of 30 years places pressure upon drive manufacturers to ensure that media is at worst readable in future drive hardware. 6.4.2 Do we need to choose ? The digital video content creator, the survey supplier, is not the end consumer of the digital video content. Instead the survey customer that has contracted the supplier to produce digital video content may define the physical media upon which to deliver the digital video content. Unlike VHS previously the physical media nolonger is defined by the recording process itself and therefore can be safely considered as of less importance when making a decision upon the digital video solution. The survey customer, and where appropriate the survey supplier, must consider the longer storage of its video assets and so it is this party that should define the physical media upon which data is to be supplied. It is obvious that some merit still remains in the selection of a standard since the delivery in one format or another still requires a hardware purchase depending upon that format.

From a system perspective the use of DLT or AIT technology offers the least issues today and the greatest likely hood of delivery in a format the customer defines. AIT has the lowest cost of ownership whilst DLT has the highest acceptance within the survey market today. 6.4.3 What about the future ? Digital tape capacity is growing at an alarming rate and whilst this may be seen by some as an enabling technology to the manager of a digital tape based archive this can only be seen as a potential threat to the usability of his tape archive. Disk technology has overtaken tape technology in capacity to such an extent now that consideration of online storage solutions as possible means to exchange information is becoming possible. In future the delivery of digital content may be achieved using on-line storage solutions such as the high capacity NAS products offered by NETmc. These couple both the low cost storage of mass digital video data but also offer protection against hardware failure. This is an essential component of any disk over tape based solution. Although today these storage solutions have a higher purchase cost than the equivalent tape based solutions the immediate on-line nature of the data once connected is a compelling reason for adopting this as a strategy. Simple reduction in engineering time alone can justify this cost ! Tape archives however will remain for some time the safest and most easily understood means to transfer digital video information.

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7. Conclusions Digital video can be seen as the logical step forward in the convergence of information sources within the survey and inspection market place. It not only acts to place the final element of survey data in the digital domain but it also addresses directly the need to find a replacement for the current SVHS based recording systems.

A digital video standard is essential to ensure that suppliers and consumers can operate efficiently and gain from competition in the digital video vendors.

MPEG2 is a clear commercial and technical winner. TAR is an ideal packaging method for distribution.

NETmc believe they are the only digital video vendor today that have developed future proof video acquisition and management technology that delivers both on the commercial needs of today and the possibilities of tomorrow and at all times insulating the customer from change. NETmc’s acquisition systems support both MPEG1 and MPEG2 realtime content capture as well as live stream technology for on ship video distribution. MPEG4 hardware compression is

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also available. NETmc’s review suite and data management solutions already cater for not just MPEG1 and MPEG2 but also MPEG4. NETmc firmly believes in open standards and as such already OEM’s its products both hardware, software and protocols to other vendors and actively encourages third party integration such as with the Esri ArcView Mapix GIS product family. NETmc’s product range is proven within the media industry as the backbone of media monitor- ing organisations, video archive agencies and also video distribution companies.

NETmc offer consultancy and research and development resources as well as product through its sister companies NETmc Marine and NETmc AVI.

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8. Glossary The following glossary is provided to clarify the meaning of terms used within this document.

Term Meaning as Intended or generally accepted

3 Channel Synchronous Playback of Digital Video and Telemetry Data 3HP Available free of charge to customers and as a toolkit for integration directly into third party applications.

Refers to the digital sampling of luminance (black and white outline) and colour difference signals Cr and Cb (often referred to YCrCb or YUV) within the frame digitisation 4:2:0 process. In 4:2:0 colour subsampling each group of 4 pixels is represented by 6 values, Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Cr Cb.

Refers to the digital sampling of luminance (black and white outline) and colour difference signals Cb and Cr (often referred to YCbCr or YUV) within the frame digitisation 4:2:2 process. In 4:2:2 colour sampling each group of 2 horizontal pixels is represented by 4 values Cb Y1 Cr Y2.

Refers to the digital sampling of luminance (black and white outline) and colour difference signals Cb and Cr (often referred to YCbCr or YUV) within the frame digitisation 4:4:4 process. In 4:4:4 colour sampling each pixel is represented by 3 values Cb Y Cr

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line - refers to the use of an unbalanced digital data service using a two-wire telephony grade carrier connected between a telephone exchange and a telephone subscriber. ADSL The subscriber to exchange (back) channel has a nominal 250Kb/s bandwidth whilst the exchange to subscriber has a bandwidth between 64Kbps and 2Mbps. ADSL signalling is out of normal speech band signalling and so the ADSL service can operate along side the use of the two-wire signalling for normal telephony.

Archive Tape format from Sony with full roadmap. Current AIT-3 technology provides AIT high performance 100Gbyte tape capacity in a very compacy tape format. Tape loading and mechanisms are faster than DLT.

Microsoft proprietary packet format for encapsulating any object that has a valid “class identifier”. ASF is commonly used to store multimedia meta-data within a video stream such as ASF sub-titles, telemetry, watermarks etc. The ASF command format enables complex signalling to trigger events from within a tagged video stream. ASF can not be easily and efficiently manipulated without use of programming tools.

Sony’s early 1/2inch video tape format aimed at the domestic video recorder market in direct competition with the Video2000 and VHS standards. BETAMAX Sony later dropped BetaMax for domestic recording in favour of the accepted VHS product due to poor marketing and lack of pre-recorded video materials being available on its format.

The survival of BetaMax for the professional and broadcast market. Testament to the quality of the BetaMax format in its broadcast variation is that it still BETACAM remains today the main recording and distribution format. Slowly DigiBeta is taking over this role.

DIGIBETA Digital version of Betacam for the broadcast market.

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Term Meaning as Intended or generally accepted

CCIR Rec. 601 specifies the image format, acquisition semantic, and parts of the cod- CCIR-Rec 601 ing for digital "standard" television signals. ("Standard" television is in the resolution of PAL, NTSC, and SECAM) CCIR-601 gives the specification for encoding of 4:2:2 signals and a tentative specification of 4:4:4 encoding. 4:2:2 means, that the colour-difference signals Cr and Cb CCIR-601 are sampled with half of the sampling frequency of the luminance signal Y, that is 13.5MHz to 6.75MHz.

Compact DIsk format CD-ROM Several formats exist including CD-Data, CD-Audio, VideoCD, and SuperVideoCD. Recordable media CD-R (write once) and CD-RW (re-writable).

Abbreviation for Digital Asset Management

Digital Asset Management refers to the convergence of multimedia assets into the DAM digital domain and the management of those assets. DAM encompasses acquisition, capture, catalog, storage, search, retrieval, and production of digital multi-media assets.

Digital Audio Tape - initially a tape format used for recording digital audio later pro- moted as a high density (similar dimensions to that of Mini-DV cassette) digital archive storage device. DAT DAT uses helical scan head technology similar to that of VHS, Betamax, Betacam etc. DAT is a relatively slow archive format and with low capacity - Maximum capacity is DDS tapes range from 2G (DDS1), 4G (DDS2), 12G(DDS3) and 20GBytes(DDS4) per tape

Digital Linear Tape - based on the Digital DK tape cartridge, DLT uses 1/2inch magnetic tape media and writes data using linear tracks (DLTIV uses some 208 tracks to DLT attain its 40GByte capacity). Performance is good but loading speeds are slow and track-to-track speeds limit the performance.

Super DLT - enhanced performance and capacity version of the DLT format. Offers 110Gbytes and 160Gbytes per tape currently at performances of 10x real-time SDLT storage as referenced to the current suggested 3 channel + telemetry digital video solution.

DV Professional Digital Video format in competition for the M2 and DigiBeta marketplace DVCAM Unlike the domestic version Mini-DV a number of competing “recording standards” DVCPRO exist that use the DV format. DV422

Mini-DV Domestic camcorder version of the DV

Digital VHS - the VHS digital recording successor to analog VHS. DVHS Uses MPEG2 encoding

Digital Video Broadcast via satellite, cable and now terrestrial DVB Uses MPEG2 encoding

Digital Versatile Disk

Aimed initially at the Video (DVD-Video) and Games market (DVD-Rom) the DVD DVD capacity is 4.7Gbytes per disk rising to 9Gbyes using dual layer or dual-sided disks. Next generation technology will deliver enhanced capacity of 23Gbytes and beyond.

Uses MPEG2 encoding for digital video.

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Term Meaning as Intended or generally accepted

DVD Recordable media similar to that of CD-ROM

Unlike CD-R, DVD-R comes in two versions - one for authoring and one for domestic DVD-R use. The former is for mastering DVD-Video or DVD-Rom and must be written using a DVD+R special DVD Recorder. The latter has copyright information pre-written to the disk media and must be written using a general purpose DVD Recorder. The aim, to attempt to prevent mass copying as has become the case with CD-R.

DVD-RW Re-Writable formats for DVD DVD+RW

NETmc’s Digital Video Recorder

Replaces 3 VHS tape recording devices and the current telemetry burnt in.

Independently captures 3 video channels and telemetry and offers real-time tape archive as well as live-stream video-over-lan of the source media. DVR Storage server provides online immediate access to recorded video materials. This is expandible directly or via external network or server attached storage products. SQL RDBMS access direct via ODBC as well as fall-back text based database pres- entation. Remote control from Unix and Windows platforms as well as integration with all medi- aNET family Digital Asset Management products.

NETmc’s Digital Review Suite

Replaces the VHS edit suite and manual digitisation products used currently

Synchronous playback, search, and clip selection of digital video media. SQL RDBMS accessible to third party products for reporting and integration with DRS existing technology. Event tagging directly to the database. Searchable telemetry and event markers. Clip management and report collections as well as clip trimming and export as composite packet files or native individual video files. Built in options for preview quality streaming and production distribution. Integration with the mediaNET family of Digital Asset Management products.

3 Channel Synchronous Playback of Digital Video and Telemetry Data 3HP Available free of charge to customers and as a toolkit for integration directly into third party applications.

Refers to video digitisation resolution.

Half-D1 is 352 x 576 pixels (PAL) HALF-D1 Full-D1 is 702 x 576 pixels (PAL) FULL-D1 Full-D1 symbolises the capture of the full resolution of the video signal as technically specified. This does not necessarily mean that the resolution of the video itself will be this since the video source may have a lower resolution ( typically 400 to 500 lines ).

Geographic Information System

A system manages geographically referenced information sources and presents geo- GIS referenced data in a graphical manner. The GIS system is a focal point acting as an information convergence site within the survey industry. Many in house and commercial products exist however few are fully integrated with Digital Asset Management solutions or digital video solutions.

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Term Meaning as Intended or generally accepted

The Open Software group responsible for providing open source unix and windows software. GNU GNU TAR is freely available on all operating system platforms.

HDTV High Definition TV standard

Linear Tape LTO High capacity and performance archive devices with

Domestic version of the DV digital video standard. MINI-DV Records digital video at resolutions of 720x576 at 25Mbps

A frame by frame compression technique that lends itself to video editing. MOTION JPEG JPEG is an image compression technique.

Motion Picture Experts Group - MPEG1 standard MPEG1 Aim was to produce a digital standard that could offer VHS quality performance. MPEG 1 was adopted commercially within the VideoCD market.

Motion Picture Experts Group - MPEG2 standard MPEG2 Aimed at producing a high quality video distribution format with better efficiency and quality than its MPEG1 partner with full scalability.

Motion Picture Experts Group - MPEG4 standard

A multi-media object framework aimed at the video conferencing and streaming mar- MPEG4 ket to take advantage of the different information rates within an image field. Objects are separated from a composite image into separate streams, encoded and transmitted at rates in accordance to their properties. Works alongside MPEG2

Network Attached Storage

Represents a growth market in plug-and-play storage devices that can simply be NAS “attached” to the local network and provide large quantities of storage.

NETmc’s video level NAS products are cost effective NAS devices typically costing less than £3 per Gbyte of RAID5 NAS storage.

NTSC American Video Standard

PAL UK and European Video Standard

POSIX Unix standards Body

Personal Video Recorder PVR Based on MPEG2 technology the in-pc and set-top-box personal video recorders allow pause and record-store functionality using digital recording techniques.

SECAM European Video standard

SIF MPEG1 standard image format 352x288 (PAL) or 352x240 (NTSC)

Domestic Video Recorder standard for analog video recording. VHS Domestic DVD Recorders are set to challenge the VHS market although it will be some time before the price targets are met to make this a reality.

WV7 Windows Video 7 - Microsoft’s advanced video encoding format coupled to its ASF

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Term Meaning as Intended or generally accepted

Windows Video 8 - Microsoft successor to WV7 with enhancements. Change to the WV8 underlying video bitstream formats made.

Windows Video 9 - Microsoft’s successor to WV8 with audio coding enhancements. Further changes to video bitstream formats made. Microsoft commit to making this the last change to the bitstream itself - future changes to the encoding formats alone are suggested. In an attempt to regain ground over MPEG4 which is now backed by all other streaming formats (RealNetworks RealVideo and AppleQuickTime) Microsoft offload WV9 processing to VGA graphics cards and are applying pressure to vendors to adopt WV9 in motherboards. WV9 however requiresend users to jump to Windows Media Player 9 which is only supported under Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Installing mediaplayer 9 has been noted to break a number of previous video codecs and so real-world deployment problems are likely.

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