Desktop video publishing product has Apple as competitor

At this week’s Digital World Conference, Radius will launch its first products based on the Touchstone technology it licensed from Apple Computer earlier this year (see Vol. 1, No. 5). Apple, however, made its own announcement last month, with a technology that competes directly with certain aspects of the Radius product.

The Radius VideoVision product line is geared toward the “desktop video publishing market.” VideoVision includes a 24-bit video interface card, an external audio and video input strip, and software.

Users are able to take an external video source, create QuickTime movies, integrate those movies into presentations using third-party software, and display those presentations on a regular TV monitor or record them on any VDR.

Other vendors have also targeted this area in the past year, including E-Machines, Macromedia, DiVA, Sony and others, with products that facilitate the creation of multimedia presentations for “printing” to video tape.

CONVOLUTION FILTERING

The technology includes a filtering process, called convolution, that allows computer information to be displayed on video monitors without flickering. (When a single pixel line is displayed on a television monitor, it will flicker, or vibrate, rapidly. This is due to the video technology that replaces only half of the frame, every other horizontal line at the resolution of a single pixel, every sixtieth of a second.)

VideoVision also provides invisible translation of the different international video standards. NTSC, PAL and SECAM are all accepted as input, and NTSC and PAL are both output options. The software will automatically recognize the incoming video signal and display it appropriately.

The VideoVision card supports the new H-Bus (“H” stands for high performance) that was part of the original Touchstone technology. H-Bus provides an alternate high-speed data pathway between multiple processing cards, avoiding the slower NuBus architecture of the Mac. While the NuBus normally provides data transfer at anywhere between 2 mb and 30 mb per second (depending on the application, system overhead, buffering, other bus traffic, etc.), the H-Bus allows transfer at 60 mb/sec. This kind of bandwidth is crucial for future video applications, which cannot be supported by the NuBus.

Radius says VideoVision will be shipped in the second week of July, at a list price less than $2,000. It will also be bundled with DiVA’s VideoShop and Macromedia’s Action for $2,399.

APPLE’S GOT ITS OWN

Apple announced its own high-speed data transfer architecture last month, called QuickRing. QuickRing and Touchstone were developed by Apple in parallel, until the company decided to focus on one single technology. It then licensed Touchstone to Radius for development and marketing.

QuickRing is a series of specifications that dictate board-to-board communications, including a data transfer system and data management controllers. The technology will provide data transfer rates of up to 200 mb/sec., along with data controller chips, designed and manufactured by National Semiconductor, and an “interconnect” system designed by Beta Phase, a Menlo Park, CA, company that specializes in high-speed data connection systems for supercomputers. The connector system will be manufactured by Beta Phase and Molex, of Lisle, IL.

The QuickRing technology differs from that of VideoVision in that the data travels in a “ring,” with individual input and output data nodes. This allows simultaneous input and output to different boards (thus effectively doubling data transfer rates). The Radius technology is a “bus,” which means that all of the data is traveling in one single direction only. In addition, VideoVision is a specialized technology for pixel data; it only works for video. QuickRing is data-type independent — it will be able to process any type of high-bandwidth data.

The Apple QuickRing technology will not be available to developers until early 1993, which means the first products, i.e., cards that utilize the technology, will probably not appear for a year after that. Ed Colligan, Radius general manager for Mac products, downplayed the competitive aspect of the two technologies, and stated that Radius is “working very closely with Apple, and QuickRing will be very compatible with H-Bus products and vice versa.”

David Baron