Spea Software AG has launched a Motion JPEG video capture and digitising board for ú325. Crunch It is aimed at home video and business desktop multimedia. It transfers full motion video from a video cassette recorder, laser disk or camcorder to personal computers for video and sound editing. Edited video can then be moved back onto the video casette recorder or used in personal computer multimedia applications. Crunch It views TrueColour 16.7m colours at 25 frames per second in UK Phase Alternate Line format in full frame video, 768 by 576 pixels, down to quarter size, 320 by 240. Sequential Couleur a’Memoire, or SECAM and National Television System Committee formats are also supported. Real-time compression and decompression is carried out by a Zoran ZR 360/055 Motion JPEG controller. The board has two Composite Video inputs and one Y/C input; and one of each output. It comes with editing software, Video Maestro, and PixelShrink, which converts MJPEG files to MPEG – at a rate of around 75 minutes for each minute of film. Motion JPEG began six months ago as the poor man’s movie editing technology but is rapidly gaining status. Sony Corp uses a stripped down Motion JPEG player for playing full-screen movies from its PlayStation console. Individual JPEG images are strung together, meaning that any frame in the sequence can be edited. MPEG, as used by broadcasters and professional production houses, offers better quality but costs upwards of ú8,000. Converting film to MPEG at a third-party encoding house can cost up to ú150 per minute. Richard Rosen, an analyst at market brokers Durlacher & Co, believes that Motion JPEG will grow well as it fits the requirement for low-cost quality personal computer video. It (Motion JPEG) is actually overlooked. It’s really a very good solution, Rosen asserted.
