Potential revolutions ahead for HD video editing environment - Technology Trend at CEATEC JAPAN 2008 (1)
Potential revolutions ahead for HD video editing environment
Technology Trend at CEATEC JAPAN 2008 (1)
CEATEC JAPAN 2008, Japan's largest tradeshow on consumer electronics, was hosted at Makuhari, Chiba, from September 30th to October 4th. Affected by the stagnant economy, the scale of exhibition compared with that of last year shrank. Nonetheless, cutting-edge electronics including large-screen TV sets gathered with crowds of visitors.
In this CEATEC, there were two big movements in the HD field.
First, the arena of competition moved from the size or thinness of TV screens to the image quality. For example, Toshiba's signage declared "HDTV by Super Resolution Technology with high-density image quality", and Sony's "World First: CREAS plays back HDTV video in 14-bit high-gradation,” extensively promoting technologies to achieve high-quality images on HDTV (Figure 1).
The second move lied in the HD video editing environment. In the past, encoding time for HD video had taken as 7 to 10 times long as decoding. Showing up at this CEATEC were multiple solutions that can perform encoding virtually in real-time. Toshiba and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced their solutions using SpursEngine and GPGPU (General Purpose GPU), respectively (Figure 2). Such moves show that the environment for watching, editing, and saving high-quality HD video is being prepared.
Two different solutions for HD video encoding: by hardware and by software
"HD processing" in this article or on this website implies a series of tasks such as shooting, watching, editing, and saving HD video images. In the process of shooting, a video camcorder is the key device. Since products compliant with the AVCHD standard, the specification for HD camcorders, appeared in 2006, "the HD ratio of domestic camcorder sales reached 70 to 80 percent within just 2 years," said Panasonic and Sony. This means that the switchover from SD to HD camcorders moved ahead at a breath, boosted by the spread of full-HD, large-screen TV sets.
Editing is to do some editorial work, such as insertion of telops, cut edit, special effects, and so on. Panasonic said, "20 to 30 percent of camcorder users do such editorial work." They usually edit video on a PC with a video editing software. However, it just takes a lot of time to edit HD video. When a PC equipped with Core 2 Duo (at 2.5GHz) is used, the encoding time takes 7x to 10x of decoding. For example, it takes 35 to 50 minutes to encode a 5-minute video. It is hardly practical. The moves that appeared at this CEATEC are solutions to such a problem of HD video editing.
Pegasys performed a benchmark with their encoding software, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. Source: HD video (1440 x 1080) for 15 seconds; output DVD SD video (720 x 480); video codec is MPEG-2. They compared the encoding durations using NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 (power consumption: 236W) and Intel Core 2 Duo Q6700 (2.66GHz). While the encoding time with CPU is 3'58”, that with CUDA is 41”, about 6x faster with GPU.
At CEATEC this time, as technology to reduce encoding time of HD video, two directions are on the horizon, that is, hardware solution and software solution. The former is to implement video codec (decoder/encoder) of MPEG-2 and H.264 as LSI hardware logic to execute it fast (Figure 3). The latter employs a high-performance GPU built in the PC to run video codec software of MPEG-2 and H.264 at high speed by the software.
A representative example of the former is SpursEngine by Toshiba. Since it is a hardware solution, built-in video codec is limited but can execute at high-speed and efficiently. Therefore, the power consumption is low compared with GPGPU. In case of SpursEngine, the power consumption is 10 and several watts (Figure 4).
On the other hand, a typical example of the latter is GPGPU methodology. It uses the floating-point operation performance of a graphic processor for a general purpose and executes video codec at high speed. A high-level shader language for graphic processing or C language is used for the coding. Since it is a software process, it is easy to support various codec algorithms. However, the power consumption is very high with 100W or even more because a high-performance, high-power GPU is used.
SpursEngine versus GPGPU
At this CEATEC, several SpursEngine Partner companies demonstrated their solutions besides Toshiba Semiconductor Company. Those were: Thomson Canopus, Leadtek Research Inc., Corel Corp., CyberLink Inc., CRI Middleware, and Toshiba Information Systems (Figure 5), six companies in total.
Thomson Canopus demonstrated FIRECODER Blu, announced in this September. FIRECODER Blu is a PCI-Express board equipped with SpursEngine. They say it can convert video files from H.264 (AVCHD) to MPEG2 (and vice versa) in 1/4 to 1/5 of real-time. As Thomson Canopus, with a user base in professional video editing systems, has adopted SpursEngine, the processor will build a certain position in the segment.
Meanwhile, as for consumers, Leadtek's image processing board, WinFast PxVC1100, attracted attention. Leadtek plans to ship the board in October, bundling with Ulead DVD MovieWriter, Corel's DVD authoring tool supporting SpursEngine. In addition to WinFast PxVC1100, Leadtek demonstrated an encoder system and a bare bone system equipped with the boards, latter of which is for software developers. The demo encoder system was equipped with Intel's Core 2 Duo. It has USB2.0, DVI, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, and so forth, as interface, allowing to easily build an HD video editing system. This encoder system presumes the image/video editing companies who have troubles with HD video encoding.
In this CEATEC, AMD introduced AMD HD! Experience, which aims at spreading PCs capable of full-HD, as a software solution. AMD showed that they could speed transcoding of HD video 4x faster, accelerating Premiere Elements 4, Adobe's video editing software, with GPGPU. Besides that, AMD demonstrated a technology called UVD, or Universal Video Decoder. UVD is a decoding technology, implemented in GPUs or graphics processor cores integrated into chipsets, and processes decoding of H.264 and MPEG-2 at high speed. AMD combines chipsets and GPUs to aim speeding a series of tasks including conversion, playback, and editing of video images.
Though not present at CEATEC, NVIDIA, the graphic processor giant, also showed a similar direction. It announced that Pegasys, a video editing software developer, and NVIDIA would work together to port TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress, video encoding software, to their GPU using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), the C-based IDE for NVIDIA's GPUs. TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress can encode H.264 and MPEG2.
So far, the main battlefield for such solutions is Japan where HD camcorders have been popular. Outside Japan, even in the U.S. where the large-screen TV sets have spread, "the sales ratio of HD camcorders is as low as about 20 percent," said Sony. However, because of the end of the standard war by Blu-ray and HD DVD, Sony considers "HD content will be popular out of Japan as well, and the camcorders' trend towards HD will accelerate over the next 2 years or so." The competition in HD video editing solutions in the Japanese market will be the preliminary skirmish.
