Portabel hårddiskrecorder för digital film och HD

Nu har han gjort det igen, överraskat marknaden med en unik produkt, visad på Cine Gear Expo. Paul Bamborough är mannen bakom Lightworks, en av de första ickelinjära datorredigeringarna, som nu gjort en hårddiskrecorder som har det mesta man kan önska sig vid digital filminspelning.

Codex Portable

This year’s CineGear2007 exhibition in Los Angeles sees the launch of Codex Digital’s new portable digital cinematography recorder. No larger than a toaster, the Codex Portable’s elegant design is packed with ground-breaking features and the industry’s most advanced technology – creating brand new opportunities for single and multi-camera production.

Light, easily-transportable and battery-powered, the Codex Portable contains all the key features of its larger siblings, including dual-channel 4:4:4 and 4K recording, ruggedised removable RAID DiskPacks, an integrated touchscreen controller, 8 channels of digital audio and a Virtual File System.

This new system has been designed to meet industry demand for a compact and rugged field recorder. It complements the original, award-winning Codex HD, 2K, 4K media recorder/server, which has already redefined tapeless digital cinematography and is now being used on major studio productions in the US and Europe.

Using visually-lossless compression, the Codex Portable brings cinema-quality disk-recording to every production where uncompressed recording is not an absolute demand, but total portability is.

Features

• Portable – compact, lightweight and battery-powered for ease of use on location.

• Flexible – captures moving images from one or two channels of 4:4:4 HD, all the way up to 4K, with 8 channels of sound and all production metadata, onto hot-swappable removable DiskPacks.

• Powerful workflow-oriented design – Codex’s unique Virtual File System allows all recorded material to be accessed via a network in a number of industry-standard file formats, with all copying, translation and format-conversion done invisibly and on-demand.

• Industry standards-compliant – designed to interface with just about any digital camera system, including the Sony HD range, Dalsa Origin®, Thomson Viper FilmStream™, Panavision Genesis™, Arri D-20, RED Digital Cinema System and Vision Research Phantom series.

• Future-proofed – comprehensive I/O connections and interfacing makes for complete compatibility with anything the future of digital cinematography might hold.

• Custom design – a complete film location recording system, not just a simple ‘boxed computer’ solution.

• Reliable – rugged, carbon fibre casing with advanced RAID DiskPacks for maximum performance and data integrity.

• Simple and self-contained – built-in touchscreen interface and dedicated transport controls for ease of use and speed.

• Expandable – can use a variety of media DiskPacks to optimise the size/weight/recording time ratio for your particular shoot.

Technical Specifications Dimensions

Power: 2 x 10 – 18V DC XLR battery inputs

Weight: 9lbs / 4kg

Operating temperature: 5 – 40° centigrade

Display: 6.5” VGA daylight readable with touchscreen
Top panel connectors: 2 x USB-2.0, 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, 3.5mm microphone jack

Top panel controls: record, play, stop, forward, back, input monitor, volume control, screen brightness

Video & Audio I/O

4 x BNC HD-SDI input (2 x dual-link 4:4:4 or 4 x single link 4:2:2 inputs)

2 x BNC HD-SDI output (1 x dual-link 4:4:4 or 2 x single link 4:2:2 outputs)

1 x BNC SDI downconverted output

25-way D-sub AES/EBU digital audio I/O (8 channels in/out, TDIF-1 standard)

1 x 3.5mm stereo headphone monitor output

1 x 3.5mm microphone input

1 x LTC timecode input/output

GPI record trigger input/output

RS422 machine control input/output

Optical I/O (Optional)

1 x 10Gbps Ethernet optical port, for fibre-optical connection to 4K cameras

Network

1 x 10Gbps Infiniband port, 1 x 1Gbps Ethernet port

x 10Gbps Ethernet optical port (option)

Supported video formats

Format: 1920x1080i/sF/p

Colourspace: 10-/8-bit YCbYCr 4:2:2 or 10-/8-bit RGB 4:4:4

Frame Rate: 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, 30 fps

Format: 1280x720p

Colourspace: 10-/8-bit YCbYCr 4:2:2 or 10-/8-bit RGB 4:4:4

Frame Rate: 59.94, 60 fps

Format: 4096x2048p

Colourspace: 14-bit Bayer 2:1:1

Frame Rate: 23.98 – 30 fps (4K option only)

Dual-stream simultaneous capture from A & B HD cameras

Real-time internal demosaicing of Bayer pattern material and downsampling of 4K material to HD/SD for monitoring purposes

Supported audio formats

16/24-bit at 48/96kHz, AES or HD-SDI embedded audio as standard

Unique ‘Mutter Track’ feature allows audio notes to be made during recording via the microphone input for hands-free shot- logging

Supported timecode formats

LTC in/out

VITC (ANC) in/out

Storage

Removable 400 / 800GB DiskPack with RAID-3 protection against drive failure

Solid state 128 – 512GB FlashDrive option

JPEG2000 image compression at variable ratios from 4:1 – 16:1

Example capacity: 1 x 800GB DiskPack holds approx 200 mins of 1920x1080sF 10-bit RGB 4:4:4 24fps material at 4:1 compression

Wireless Monitoring

Remote monitoring of recording / playback (with sync audio) via secure wireless MP4 link

Interface

Touchscreen-based graphical user interface

Image thumbnail or database-style view of all data on system

Full-screen sync playback of all shots on system, with Critical Zoom focus-check feature

Shot-logging and management facilities – add camera/lens/shot/continuity metadata to all takes

Interface can be run locally, or can be run remotely on a laptop computer or PDA via secure wireless connection

Virtual File System

Network access via NFS or Samba

Supported file-types include DPX sequences, H.264, JPG and WAV

Optional image resizing, colourspace conversion and LUTs

Many further file-types, including native MXF, in conjunction with the Codex Transfer Station, for direct-inject into post.

Note: Technical specifications correct as of June 2007. All specifications subject to change without notice.

Läs mer på Codex Digitals websida
Spec. på Codex Portable
Läs här Neal Romaneks artikel om Paul Bamborough skriven för TVBEurope
Bilder från Cine Gear Expo 2007