Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!pacbell!att-ih!att-cb!clyde!watmath!watdragon!daford From: daford@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Daniel Ford) Newsgroups: comp.ivideodisc Subject: Re: Are we alive here? Message-ID: <5697@watdragon.waterloo.edu> Date: 14 Mar 88 17:15:39 GMT References: <8464@eddie.MIT.EDU> Reply-To: daford@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Daniel Ford) Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 47 Keywords: quiet Both DVI and CDI were demo'd at the CD ROM conference, both were impressive. Microsoft, Lotus, Intel and RCA/GE announced that they would would be supporting DVI (from RCA/GE) as the standard. The DVI demo looked good but you could see some problems when the image changed very fast. Their subjects seemed to be choosen so that only a small part of the image would change (people spinning/walking/running/jumping). The demo was basically straight "movie" type video, little interaction was shown in the main demo. They also demo'd their live video editing. If I remember correctly they called it ELV (Edit Level Video). Pretty good, it allowed you to capture video from a hand held camcorder (or equiv.) and store it on hard disk for play back. The CDI demo was a bit different. It stressed the interactive nature of the Philips/SONY standard. Fewer moving images and the ones they did have were small (no surprise). There was a music video of Olivia Neutron Bomb, it sounded great and the picture was acceptable. They also had cartoons, still screen pictures and some special effects (fades, wipes, multilingual). To make the DVI stuff work takes an IBM PC, video monitor and 5 full size cards crammed with RAM and VLSI, that is just for playback. To do development requires an additional 2 piggy back digitizing boards. Someone I met on the shuttle bus told me that they wanted $20000 for the boards. My impression was that all though DVI could produce more and better quality images, that CDI was more advanced from an interactive point of view. CDI also seems futher along in terms of becoming a consumer product. DVI looks like it is in dire need of some input from the marketing boys. I saw little in the way of creative applications or thought about the use of DVI technology. The two demos reflected this, one could easily imagine more advanced applications of the type seen in the CDI demo but this was a little more difficult for DVI. This may not be a consequence of the technology itself but it may drastically affect its success. It looks like the Americans (DVI) against the world (CDI) again. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel A. Ford daford@watdragon.uucp CS Department daford%watdragon@waterloo.csnet U. of Waterloo daford%watdragon%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa