Roland VC-300HD guide

Wanting to make full use of HDV―Interview with a VC-300HD developer

The idea was for the VC-300HD to be able to deal with most of the popular formats at present. So why did they want to have a go at perfecting the huge number of conversion patterns other manufacturers weren’t interested in? Let's take a look at initial product concept and the technical backbone. Let's interview Hironori Mikami of Roland, the person in charge of VC -300HD development.

To start, what was the initial impulse for

development? What was it that triggered the

process?

The plan got underway with the idea “We want to record to HDV simply and easily.“ The company already makes the V-440HD, a multi- format video mixer and can output from it be recorded or not? At Roland, we often have events that call for use of the V-440HD, but it is not that easy to record the events. We felt that many V- 440HD users must have the same desire and need for recording from the mixer.

Currently, the only option for line recording in HD is expensive broadcasting equipment that has HD-SDI. It is not easy, however, to prepare and

Hironori Mikami, in charge Roland VC- 300HD development

afford this kind of equipment for recording live events. Then, even if we did record on it, it’s better to convert it down to HDV, since we can’t justify keeping the expensive format unchanged just to have it always easily on hand for editing.

When DV first came out, everyone was putting converters on the market. With HDV we’ve hardly seen the same kind of thing. What’s more, virtually nothing has become available for two- way conversion of HDV-baseband. This situation has opened the market for the VC-300HD.

In designing the hardware, it must have been hard to choose a processor and come up with algorithms to do conversion in real time.

Real-time conversion was an extremely high priority for us. After all, one of the things that all Roland products share is a capability for use in live show production. That goes for both music and images.

Coming down to specific technology, the company already had some converter know-how that we could apply. Our way into the market was via experience with scaling control, which has been built up from dealing with video mixer products. When talking about video conversion, you may assume audio is a comparatively minor concern. But, as you know, audio processing technology involves a mass of expertise with real-time processing as well.

Products, of course, can't be created simply by combining existing devices, so we carried out various technical surveys. These were not confined within the company. We also needed