When someone at a cocktail party asks Steve Jacobs what he does for a living, his reply is something like this: “What I say is ostensibly I run the business of Sony’s broadcast and professional group which ranges from switchers to cameras to storage devices to nonlinear editors. In reality, I try to make a marriage between our customers’ requirements and the superb technological skills of our engineers in Japan. I make sure that the communication in that marriage is as good as it can be.

“I’m a storyteller for our customers, detailing the technology that our engineers have created; I’m a

storyteller for our customers with our engineers, making certain that our engineers understand the workflow and the competitive issues. Along the way, I try to make a few bucks for Sony.”

Prior to becoming senior vice president of Sony’s Broadcast and Professional Systems Division, Jacobs was executive producer of new media and, before that, special events, at CBS News. Jacobs held several producing jobs at CBS News, serving as a senior producer of CBS News’ special events news unit and CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. As a producer, Jacobs has received numerous distinguished honors, including several Emmy Awards, an Overseas Press Club Award, and a Women in Communications Award.

What will Sony’s new professional optical disc video system do for your broadcasting, news and studio customers?

Everyone in our business, whether they are broadcast, production, or producing 30- second commercials or featurelength films, whether it is hard news or soft news, everyone is focused on three objectives: faster, better and cheaper.

It used to be that if you got two out of three of the golden triangle, you were doing pretty well. Now, with tighter budgets, increasingly competitive environments, and so many channels of distribution, users cannot afford to pay what they used to pay. You need to hit all three. You need to be faster, better and cheaper.

Traditionally, that’s been impossible to achieve. However,our new technologies, particularly the professional optical disc video system, will give our customers the tools necessary to achieve that goal.

What is the professional optical disc video system?

camera capable of recording both MPEG up to 50 megabits as well as DVCAM® compression at up to 25 megabits. The MPEG compression on the optical camera is identical and interoperable with our tape-based MPEG IMX™ technology. A second camera, with a lower price, will record in the DVCAM format only. Both cameras offer superb 3 CCD imaging and standard 2/3-inch lenses.

In Sony’s view, MPEG IMX is not a tape format, it is not a disc format; it is an interchange system. MPEG IMX is a common technology that we have realized with both tape and optical disc systems, and with evaluation help from a series of third-party relationships.

As far as the high-resolution material, we can easily achieve up to almost five times transfer of the video. But we have some amazing tricks up our sleeve, being able to achieve transfer rates of up to 50 times over real time for the thumbnails that represent the high-resolution material on this disc.

Imagine an old-fashioned light box on which you took all of the slides in your collection. We see that now on our desktop computers when you see all of the jpeg images you have stored on your hard drive. You see a snapshot at low resolution and you can look at four, six, 32, or 64 of these images at the same time. Every time the professional optical disc video camera starts a new scene, we’ll create a little snapshot of that first scene. Our technology will transfer all of the snapshots of the first scene at least 20 times and in some cases up to 50 times real time from our optical technology to computer-based editors or browsers. It is as though you can look at an entire hour’s worth of material in two minutes. So, all of a sudden the tyranny of not knowing what the shooter captured until you fastforward to it, that tyranny is ended.

In addition, the advantage of optical, because the material is stored as files on the media with random access capability, means that your first shot is at the beginning of the disk and your second shot is at the end of the disk, there’s no cueing time. I can’t tell you how many times I sweated during my younger years at CBS News, while editing and fastforwarding from one position to another position, and wondered if this cue time would be the thing that might prevent me from making my spot.

We think optical will make them instantly more competitive. If time to air is one of the major competitive drivers, shooting in optical gets their material on air faster. In addition, we think the lightweight video that we record in addition to DVCAM or the MPEG IMX video will be very easy to reprocess and put on the Internet.

At some stage, not terribly far from now, if you are in the field and have a high-speed wireless connection between your mobile van and your television station, you will be able to transfer all of the proxy data, its associated metadata with time code, a variety of information about the camera settings, and GPS information. By the time you get the physical optical media back to the television station, the promo and the preview have already aired, your editor has done a rough cut, and all you do is put the optical media in the player and it’s automatically conformed.

That’s pretty good. We’re eliminating part of the time consideration. Also, anyone who uses a browser on a laptop editor is certainly faster than working in the old-fashioned linear mode. The professional optical disc and its system—the cameras, storage devices, and support from a leading non-linear editing company— will revolutionize the way production is done, particularly on reality TV shows.

Reality TV is shot with multiple cameras, then it needs to be laid back and conformed across a time line. Even with the best tape systems, there’s still a lot of logging and arduous work that production associates and assistant editors have to do. The ability of the storyboard to be painted and the multiple audio tracks that are available on the optical systems will really help what is arguably one of the fastest growing genres in television today.

We have three devices. There is a studio level deck that could be interchanged with any one of our MPEG IMX decks. There is a field player designed for use in a mobile van. Lastly, there is an in-between deck that offers greater support for metadata as well as the ability to make a playlist that we believe will be sequential and glitch free.

The optical disc is, in addition to being far easier to handle, a superb archive material medium. We believe, in specific operations, people will shoot their stories, edit their stories, and put the edit master and the associated masters back on the optical disc and stick it in a jukebox, which we plan to have in year two of the product. We expect that the price of the media will be lower than comparable duration tape. We think optical will become the production standard for news and, ultimately, for anything other than high- end production. The optical disk will record up to 90 minutes using DVCAM compression and 75 minutes using MPEG compression at 30Mbps.

Spectacular. The DVCAM camera will encompass all of the lessons we’ve learned form being a market leader in the format, and the MPEG IMX version, going all the way up to 50 megabit i frame, just produces stunning picture frame quality. They both have the advantage of being a package with a superb camera whose resolution pushes the level of detail and the level of authenticity.

You get better-looking pictures out of the optical camera system. When you marry it with the advanced professional optical disc, well, we think the reaction is going to be very, very enthusiastic.