Apple grants rights to license and manufacture video products

Technology swapping in the world of desktop video continued this month (last month we reported SuperMac’s sale of ReelTime to Adobe) with the announcement that Apple Computer granted exclusive rights to its patented Touchstone video technologies to Radius, Inc. of San Jose, CA. Terms of the deal were not announced.

THE TOUCHSTONE TECHNOLOGY

Touchstone is a combination of hardware and software which, when combined with Apple’s QuickTime system extensions, makes digital video more versatile and inexpensive to produce. It places significant emphasis on maintaining or increasing the quality of the video image as it is run through the image enhancement, compression, digitizing and resizing processes we take for granted with still graphics.

The eight Touchstone patents, which include some Apple-designed custom chips, cover three technologies: a new “HBus” architecture, scalable video windows and flicker-free 24-bit output to composite video. Touchstone technologies are not necessarily dedicated to one product, i.e., a single “super video” card, but will be used in a wide variety of products in different combinations over the coming months and years.

Today, users can pass video across the NuBus, or the Macintosh motherboard, and display it on the monitor using a video card. A video window of 640×480 lines at 30 frames per second is the limit of what the NuBus can handle. Therefore, to manipulate the video in any way — such as compressing it and storing it on a hard drive in real time — a user would be required to reduce the resolution, make the window smaller or cut the number of frames being displayed.

A video bus. Apple devised a new architecture called HBus, which in essence moves video traffic off NuBus. Additional processors or dedicated daughter boards can be connected through an HBus slot which will sit on the NuBus cards. Thus, high bandwidth video information can be processed much more quickly, without slowing concurrent operations of the computer.

According to Ben Jamison, product marketing manager for professional color systems at Radius, creating an open HBus slot instead of a dedicated, single application card will allow users to configure their machines for the particular needs of the application.

For example, one may want to add special effects, while another may need a video compression chip. In addition, different video applications may require different compression algorithms: a video teleconferencing application would require the Px64 algorithm (a telecommunications standard), while video postproduction applications may require MPEG compression. HBus’s functionality should allow vendors to address these needs separately and more efficiently.

Dynamic resizing without loss of quality. Touchstone’s second advancement is its display technology. With today’s displays, changing the size of a video window on a computer screen reduces image quality significantly because information is squeezed out, an effect called “decimation.” Thus, an image reduced to a thumbnail usually looks pretty bad. Touchstone uses a filtering process whereby the quality of the image is maintained, no matter how small the window (within reason, of course).

This is largely a developer tool that, when built into applications, will enable producers to choose window sizes with impunity. In addition, picture icons or moving icons (picons and micons) can easily be created. Users will likely also appreciate the ability to incorporate a video signal into their applications as they see fit (no pun intended).

24-Bit convolution. The third technology is called “24-bit convolution.” Convolution is a filtering and interpolation process in which digital video information is converted back to an analog signal for use in conventional video appliances, such as TVs and VCRs. In order to do this, one has to convert the noninterlaced, digital RGB signal to the interlaced signal of analog television.

Television systems in the United States alternately display two fields of information every 1/60 of a second. Each field displays every other scan line of data, odd or even (hence the term “interlaced”). Thus two fields of video, displayed at the correct speed, produce the image of a full frame of video every 1/30 of a second, or 30 frames per second.

The problem with computer data, however, is that computers “paint” the image from top to bottom, without interlacing scan lines. So any TV image displayed on a computer screen that is one scan line in width will appear to “flicker” as the fields alternate.

The Touchstone process “interpolates” these interlaced lines, causing them to appear solid on the monitor. In addition, it allows 24-bit output, so photorealistic images and smooth color shading and blending can be captured on video or displayed. This technology would enable users to pull a composite video signal (like the one that goes in and out of a standard VCR) straight from the computer. Computer-generated presentations could then be easily displayed or captured on tape for distribution.

Touchstone’s capabilities include real-time international video standards conversion. The hardware allows input and output to and from the NTSC video format (the U.S. and Japan) and pal (most of Europe), and input from SECAM (France and the U.S.S.R.).

A PRIMARY TOOL SET

Radius envisions Touchstone as the primary tool set for anyone using desktop video. And “anyone” includes other companies, which will be able to sell Radius products that incorporate Touchstone technologies under their own labels.

Barry James Folsom, Radius president and CEO, ultimately sees Touchstone as the “universal common denominator for multimedia developers” — the technology is being ported to other platforms, including Intel-based computers. This is a particular strong point for Radius, which has taken its expertise and innovation in the Macintosh video monitor market and developed revolutionary products for the normally staid PC monitor market, including Pivot and 19-inch VGA monitors.

Radius expects the first Touchstone product to be announced in the first quarter of 1992. Incorporating many of the Touchstone technologies, it is likely to sell for under $2,000. The company is building an entire Touchstone product line, as well as upgrades to existing products.

Braving the video world. The technologies themselves are significant for users of both digital and analog video. According to product manager Jamison, one reason the multimedia market has not taken off as some predicted is that video has proven itself an extremely difficult and expensive data type to deal with.
Braving the video world requires the purchase of expensive additional hardware, cabling and difficult software, as well as navigating a whole new problem set around international display standards, compression techniques and a myriad of product offerings.

In addition, Jamison believes the multimedia market splits between analog and digital video users. People producing program-length material ultimately go “out to tape.” That is, they produce videotapes or laserdiscs (analog media) with computer tools. Digital video users generally include shorter snippets of video as a way of enhancing computer presentations, such as supplementing a PowerPoint slide show with video, or a MacroMind Director animation with a video window. Jamison’s goal is “a solution that is just as comfortable in both situations.”

Why did Apple let it go? Certainly on-board video is in future plans of all computer manufacturers. Why wouldn’t Apple want to hoard this technology for its own use?

Apple spokesperson Patty Tulloch says the reason is that Apple is concentrating on system software and platform development, and has chosen to offload resource-intensive NuBus development projects to those third parties that have more incentive to bring them to market.

David Baron