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Canopus has received, and will continue to receive kudos for having been first out of the gate in this 1394 DV NLE saga, and for apparently staffing themselves with some programmers who are worth their salt.
However, you're right about this all being about the software, dgcom! It's a big reality adjustment for the NLE market to break away from the hardware based 'system', since the hardware codec has moved out of the computer and into the camcorder. A lot of people still haven't quite realized what this means. It's here. It's here NOW: DV camcorders have their own 'capture card' built in. IEEE-1394 ('firewire' or 'iLink') is simply a new style of serial port... very inexpensive.
However, you're right about this all being about the software, dgcom! It's a big reality adjustment for the NLE market to break away from the hardware based 'system', since the hardware codec has moved out of the computer and into the camcorder. A lot of people still haven't quite realized what this means. It's here. It's here NOW: DV camcorders have their own 'capture card' built in. IEEE-1394 ('firewire' or 'iLink') is simply a new style of serial port... very inexpensive.
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, you may not know but the frame rates in both USA and Europe were based at 1/2 power frequency so that, in the days when power smoothing was less perfected than it is today at both the Tx and Rx ends, there were no annoying hum bars moving up and down the screen. In fact, the power frequency could vary and the Tx end line frequency was always kept at a multiple of the momentary power frequency to give the required number of lines. As the power within a given country was generally on a nation-wide grid, this meant that the image was stable from start to finish. Hence the nominal frame rate was 25 Hz in Europe and 30 Hz in the USA. As technology advanced, so these frequencies actually became fixed and were divorced from the real power frequency. So monochrome TV in the States WAS, as was stated, at 30,000 Hz. The CCIR standard still quotes 30 Hz but the FCC standard actually normalises the horizontal scan frequency only for colour TV at 15 734,264 Hz +/- 0,044 Hz, this being 2/455 of the chrominance subcarrier frequency, which is fixed at 3,579545 MHz on the upper sideband (don't ask me why!). If you divide 15 734,264 by your 525 lines, this gives a frequency of 29,97 frames/s. The same standard specifically quotes 15 750 Hz for the line frequency and 60 Hz for the field frequency for monchrome transmissions, because there is no chrominance subcarrier to which it can refer.
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