News

Hitachi Implements Hard Disc Recording into Professional Cameras (5/4/2005)

At NAB 2005, Hitachi Denshi America, Ltd.'s Broadcast & Professional Division will introduce for immediate sale a truly affordable high-quality tapeless recorder for its Professional Camera models. The Z-DR1 recorder will dock to its popular Z series cameras and enable them to be liberated from their studio pedestals and tripods giving Hitachi customers the freedom to realize Field Productions with their best cameras.

The new Z-DR1 is a collaborative effort between Hitachi Denshi America, nNovia Inc, Audavi Corp and Blueline Technologies which brings to market the most economically sensible method for digitally recording, editing and playback of SDTV video and audio.

The digital recording compression will be 25Mbps. The file formats will be the popular AVI and MOV type now handled by a large majority of NLE suites on the market. The Hitachi Z-DR1 recorder has a removable "MediaPac" media (HDD) available in capacities ranging from 20 to 120Gb providing as much as 6 hours recording time at 25Mbps. Prices range from $150/ drive to $350 depending on capacity.

The Hitachi "MediaPac" will house rugged and reliable Hitachi Travelstar 2.5-inch Hard Disc Drives that are presently the industry standard in Laptop PCs and other mobile multi-media devices. It is expected that the cost to storage density of the Hitachi MediaPac will surpass that of all other media presently available and for the next 5 years thereby providing its users with sensible and future-proof storage technology for digital video acquisition.

An optional MediaPac bay will be offered with the recorder, which allows installation into a PC or MAC NLE. The HDD simply goes from the camera to the NLE making the video ingest process seamless. Since the NLE PC ÔseesÕ the MediaPac Hard Disc as another hardware drive, video editing can take place in the very same media it was used to acquire it. For those NLE users desiring other IO interfaces, Hitachi makes available stand-alone MediaPac playback accessories as well as USB, Firewire and SCSI computer interface adapters.

In development with Blueline Technologies Inc, Hitachi will furthermore demonstrate solutions for a larger networked News or Production teams. The removable MediaPac drives from the new Z-DR1 will be mounted in a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, managed by a file server and made available to collaborative editors on the same network as clips they can drag and drop into timelines directly from the file server.

Hitachi plans to promote the removable HDD "MediaPac" media as the key benefit over the delicate optical disc and the expensive solid-state memory. Future plans include the use of Advanced Video Codecs and working partnerships with established NLE companies to quickly bring economical but high quality HDTV camera-recorders to market that avoid the use of videotape.

The Hitachi Z-DR1 will tentatively list for $5,000.00 and delivery starts as early as June 2005.

www.hitachidenshi.com