Building Your Encoding Hardware - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 473

Figure 29-12 BMD Multibridge. Source: courtesy of Blackmagic Design.

29.16.6 DV Cameras

The FireWire interface is particularly popular because some DV cameras and decks come
already equipped with a connector. Video-editing software like Final Cut Pro or iMovie
is aware of this and of how to drive it with the correct protocol. Just plug in and away
you go.
On Sony equipment, you will find that the interface is labeled iLink and may require
a special connector at the camera end of the cable. These connectors are small and fragile.
Oddly enough, you will often find that these cables are supplied separately from the cam-
eras. Cables with the 6-way FireWire connector at one end and the mini iLink connector
at the other are available in photography stores. Check when you purchase the camera,
because you may get home only to find that another trip is necessary to obtain the neces-
sary cables.

29.17 Removable Media

The original intent of the MPEG-1 codec was to deliver video at bit rates that would allow
a movie to be compressed sufficiently to fit on a CD-ROM. That's about 650 MB in size.
The codec was not good enough to do that job as convincingly as consumers wanted, but
it has turned out to be useful for other low-bit-rate applications.
MPEG-2 deployed on DVDs makes MPEG-1 on CD-ROMs totally obsolete. Systems
based on H.264 allow movie-length content to be compressed down sufficiently to fit onto
a CD-ROM. The DivX codec is also designed for reducing movie-length projects to CD-
ROM-sized files.
Sony is deploying video cameras that use Memory Stick technology, and Panasonic
was showing cameras at the IBC show in 2003 that supported multiple memory cards that
were used together rather like a RAID array of disks. Their camera is manufactured with