"SpursEngine helped achieve high-quality in Blu-ray video" - Interview: Mr. Wataru Hisaki, Assistant Manager, Product Planning & Marketing Dept., Thomson Canopus Co., Ltd.

"SpursEngine helped achieve high-quality in Blu-ray video"

Interview: Mr. Wataru Hisaki, Assistant Manager, Product Planning & Marketing Dept., Thomson Canopus Co., Ltd.

Figure 1: FIRECODER Blu, an MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and MPEG-2 codec accelerator

Figure 2: FIRECODER Blu and EDIUS Pro, video editing software, demonstrated

Figure 3: Mr. Wataru Hisaki, Assistant Manager, Product Planning & Marketing Dept., Thomson Canopus Co., Ltd. (at the company's booth during Inter BEE 2008)

Figure 4: FIRECODER Intra, an AVC-Intra codec accelerator for broadcasting stations

　Thomson Canopus, a manufacturer of video editing equipment and software, joined Inter BEE 2008, a tradeshow for broadcasting and audiovisual production equipment, and demonstrated FIRECODER Blu, an H.264/MPEG-2 codec accelerator, which the company began shipping from the 21th of November (Figure 1 and 2).

　FIRECODER Blu is equipped with SpursEngine, Toshiba's stream processor based on Cell/B.E. It is attracting public attention as an HD video processing solution, realizing casual but high quality Blu-ray authoring.

　Thomson Canopus says that they got good responses from a lot of visitors towards the demonstration of FIRECODER Blu and EDIUS Pro in their booth at Inter BEE. We interviewed Mr. Wataru Hisaki, Assistant Manager of Product Planning & Marketing Dept., Thomson Canopus (Figure 3) to ask the features of FIRECODER Blu and their business development in the future.

Q: Thomson Canopus has a similar product, FIRECODER Intra. For what kind of users is FIRECODER Blu offered?

A: FIRECODER Intra (Figure 4) is for broadcasting stations, and FIRECODER Blu is for general video producers and prosumers. The H.264 codec of FIRECODER Intra uses intra-frame compression, different from that of AVCHD mainly for consumers.

　We think users of FIRECODER Blu would include wedding videographers, for example. Since Blu-ray Disc (BD) players and AVCHD camcorders have become quite popular in Japan at present, consumers increasingly tend to ask for their wedding videos created in HD or Blu-ray. Therefore, wedding video producers are urged to offer HD or BD video services, and we believe our solutions such as high-speed H.264 encoding or Blu-ray disc authoring with FIRECODER Blu would be most suitable for such purposes.

Q: What kind of software is FIRECODER WRITER, bundled with FIRECODER Blu?

A: FIRECODER WRITER is software that does DVD/BD writing (writing in to the disc media) and file conversion (transcoding). As for the writing feature, you can create chapters as well as burn files in to the disc. Another key feature is that it supports 24p video format, which can deliver film-like motion aesthetics. You can even mix both 60i and 24p formats or both 50i and 24p.

　As for file conversion, both up-conversion and down-conversion are possible. The up-conversion makes use of Super Resolution technology and allows to convert standard definition videos to crisp, HD-equivalent ones and save them in BD media.

　The keyword here is "double speed." You can transcode and compress MPEG-2 files to H.264 for archiving at double speed. Because it is in the m2ts format, you can play them back on a Blu-ray player/recorder or PlayStation3 (PS3).

　Also, BD media can store all videos that have been thrown away because of insufficient capacity with DVD media so far. As the standard war for the next generation DVD technology is now over with Blu-ray being the winner, the BD market is rapidity growing, which is significant. In addition, the price of BD media is quickly becoming cheap.

　As Core i7, Intel's latest CPU family, also has sufficient performance to play back HD video on the PC, the environment to watch HD is now ready. However, since H.264 encoding as for HD editing is hard even with Core i7, there we can use SpursEngine.

　By the way, we believe we are the first company to have acquired Blu-ray certification with a product equipped with SpursEngine.

Q: What is your plan to support FIRECODER Blu with your existing applications such as EDIUS and AVCHD Converter?

A: EDIUS Pro is scheduled to support FIRECODER Blu during the first half in 2009. Also, we are considering to do the same with AVCHD Converter as well, but the time frame has not been decided yet. Nonetheless, we would like to do so as soon as possible.

Q: You have EDIUS Neo for entry-level users as well as EDIUS Pro for professionals. Do you have any plan to support FIRECODER Blu with the software?

A: At this moment, we do not have such a plan, but we have no problem technologically at all. If there are needs of the customers, we will consider responding accordingly.

Q: EDIUS Pro features video processing with so-called GPGPU technology. Then what does SpursEngine do with EDIUS Pro?

A: Since effect processing on the PC is very heavy for the CPU, EDIUS Pro takes advantage of GPU, which we call GPUFx, for effect processing. We have used the pixel shader library of Direct3D by Microsoft for GPUFx.

　We do not use GPU for H.264 encoding with EDIUS Pro, though. That is because the library is not standardized among the hardware venders and the video quality differs from one another. We believe dependence on a specific platform is undesirable and would like our customers to use our software on a variety of platforms.

　As for H.264 encoding, SpursEngine implemented on FIRECODER Blu helped us achieve high quality in Blu-ray video. We have completed development of the basic portion for EDIUS Pro to support SpursEngine. We therefore plan to release the product in the first half of 2008 as I mentioned already.

　We have developed FIRECODER Blu in close cooperation with Toshiba Semiconductor and made it familiar to use H.264 or MPEG-2 codec, which is of high quality but burdensome, used in Blu-ray. As FIRECODER Blu seems already available on store shelves, we would really like many customers to use it and realize the high-quality Blu-ray video.