SIGMA DESIGNS REALMAGIC PRODUCER

The Easiest, Most Affordable Way to Assemble Natural-Looking Video for Multimedia Presentations

MPEG is here, and multimedia presentations will never be the same. MPEG overcomes the quality and performance limitations plaguing earlier attempts at desktop video to set a new video and audio standard for multimedia presentations. And with pioneering products like Sigma Designs' RealMagic card, the first affordable MPEG playback system for PCs, users everywhere now are able to enjoy the added dimension of viewing full-motion, full-screen video with CD-quality audio right on their desktops.

Now Sigma Designs continues its tradition of innovation as the leading supplier of PC-based MPEG technology with the RealMagic Producer, the easiest, most affordable way for authors to assemble natural-looking video for their multimedia presentations. RealMagic Producer also allows developers to maintain full control of their creation over the entire production process, from source creation to finished CD-ROM. RealMagic Producer captures and compresses video and audio in real time and stores this information as Editable-MPEGTM, the first fully MPEG-compliant format that allows frame-accurate video editing with any AVI-compatible editing software. Edited video is processed by RealMagic Producer to create a fully compressed MPEG-1 data stream for inclusion in a subsequent multimedia presentation or for distribution on CD-ROM or over a network.

Multimedia and its Applications

Multimedia is becoming big business, from standalone applications like kiosks, entertainment and enhanced Help screens in Lotus 1-2-3 and Intuit Quickbooks to networked training systems, audio-video databases and health-care systems moving images, audio and video to remote locations. In fact, some analysts are forecasting much of the growth in multimedia to come from new networked applications.

Insight Research Corporation, for example, is predicting that revenues for equipment and services used for both commercial and consumer multimedia applications involving networks, especially wide-area networks, will grow at a 22 percent compound annual rate to more than $61 billion by 1999. These applications run the gamut from improving the productivity of physicians and enhancing training and sales presentations, to providing scarier or sexier interactive home entertainment.

Multimedia's use in business is being driven to a great extent by two trends that have been making an indelible imprint on American enterprises over the past five years. First, persistent corporate downsizing and layoffs have forced many managers to find ways to do more work with fewer people. Second, the declining math and language skills of the U.S. workforce are requiring companies to increase training programs, including on-site training. Multimedia can provide cost-effective solutions to both problems.

Multimedia training, for example, offers a level of interactivity not possible with videotape-based systems. It offers a less intimidating way to present complex concepts and it can demonstrate a chronological depiction of events accurately in real time. What used to require 20 pages of written documentation can be explained in 30 seconds of video, and multimedia can include accurate renditions of warning tones and other sounds. And it can be distributed on a CD-ROM or over a network.

But businesses are not the only consumers of multimedia applications. The proliferation of CD-ROMs is putting a wealth of images and data within an individual PC user's reach. Yet, consumers still view this technology more as a way to get better entertainment than as a way to get better information. For example, Sega's Mortal Combat continues to generate far more revenue than educational products like Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia.

According to Insight, business and education together will spend $12 billion in 1994 to utilize and deliver multimedia services. A major portion of these expenditures will be made for electronic document management and workflow, improvements in sales productivity, groupware, training, videoconferencing, presentations and desktop publishing and customer service and support. In addition, multimedia today is playing key enabling roles in the health care, manufacturing, financial services, publishing, public safety, education and travel and leisure industries.

Why MPEG?

In order for video to be used in a multimedia presentation, it must first be put into a digital form. A single frame of broadcast-quality video can be put into digital form using a grid of 640 by 480 pixels, each with 24 bits of color information, for a total of exactly 900 kilobytes. Full-motion video operates at 30 frames per second. Therefore, fully digitizing a video signal produces a data rate of 27 megabytes per second. Or put another way, an hour of video would require 97.2 gigabytes of disk space to store it. And this does not include the audio portion. At this data rate, it's not practical to transmit video over a local network, most of which are limited to 8 or 9 megabits per second, or even store it on a CD-ROM, which can hold up to 600 megabytes of data.

To make video practical in a digital world, then, the data rate has to be reduced significantly. As it turns out, there are several ways to do this. The size of the frame can be reduced, reducing the total number of pixels per frame of video. The frame rate can be reduced to something less than 30 frames per second. The amount of color information for each pixel can be reduced. And some form of compression can be utilized to reduce the data volume.

The advent of the CD-ROM, an outgrowth of the popular audio compact disc, as an inexpensive way to store and distribute large volumes of data also made it attractive for storing multimedia, including video. But to be useful on the single-speed CD-ROM drives popular when this was first being considered, the video data rate could not exceed the data transfer rate of the drive, which was 1.5 megabits per second. That meant, at 30 frames per second, each 900 kilobyte frame had to be reduced to at least 5 kilobits, when you include audio, a reduction of more than 200:1.

Early attempts a providing digital video for desktop PCs could not achieve the 1.5 megabit per second constraint and maintain natural-looking video. Most reduced the data rate through a drastic reduction in the size of the frame, often resulting in what came to be known as postage-stamp video. These methods also greatly reduced the number of frames per second, resulting in jerky, unnatural motion. They also did not provide interleaved, synchronized audio, and the sound they did provide was not of high quality.

MPEG-1 is an international standard developed to address these limitations. With a target data rate of 1.2 megabits per second for the video signal, MPEG-1 utilizes sophisticated video compression algorithms to dramatically reduce the amount of data needed to represent video information. Perhaps most importantly, it can compress the data so efficiently that it no longer becomes necessary to reduce the frame size or frame rate, resulting in full-screen, full-motion video from a 1.5 megabit per second data stream. Video compressed using MPEG even has enough room left over to also include several channels of CD-quality audio.

One of the principal ways MPEG-1 achieves these dramatic reductions in data is by digitizing only some of the video frames, and then "guessing" what the in-between frames are. By including data for only the difference between the fully digitized frames, the total amount of data can be greatly reduced. This tremendous advantage becomes a problem, however, when you want to edit the MPEG data stream.

MPEG was not designed with edibility in mind. Because of its reliance on P-frames and B-frames, which do not contain full frame information, MPEG is a "lossy" compression scheme, and multiple compression/decompression cycles would seriously degrade the quality of the image. When editing MPEG, cuts can be made only on the fully digitized intra-frames, or I-frames, which occur much less frequently than the P- or B-frames, limiting flexibility. Otherwise, the playback system could get confused, causing an unwanted disturbance in the playback image.

Editable-MPEG

Because of the limitations of editing an MPEG data stream, most video productions are edited in analog form and then digitized all at once into an MPEG data stream. Alternatively, other digital formats can be used to provide so-called non-linear editing capabilities. Non-linear editing is becoming popular because it provides the ability to access any point in a video source without winding and rewinding tape, making the editing process much more efficient. But until now, these digital alternatives have been prohibitively expensive for many applications.

Editable-MPEG is Sigma Designs' answer to maintaining MPEG compliance without sacrificing edibility. Editable-MPEG is a fully MPEG-compliant file structure developed by Sigma Designs that embodies all the benefits of MPEG technology -- natural-looking, full-screen, full-motion video with CD-quality audio -- and at the same time permits frame-accurate digital video editing. Editable-MPEG offers significant advantages over previous attempts to digitize and compress video and audio (including fully compressed MPEG-1), maintains compatibility with existing MPEG playback systems and can be manipulated with all popular AVI-compatible editing tool, such as Adobe Premier, or with any animation tool, such as Caligari trueSpace. In fact, the hardware compression/decompression offered by RealMagic products significantly enhances the performance of these software packages by eliminating the need for slow software codecs.

Editable-MPEG a rich and flexible file format made up exclusively of MPEG intra-frames (I-frames) and interleaved, synchronized MPEG audio. Unlike B-frames and P-frames found in fully compressed MPEG, I-frames employ only Huffman encoding, a lossless compression algorithm that does not depend on any other frames in the MPEG data stream. As a result, Editable-MPEG frames can be decompressed individually, allowing frame-accurate editing. The lossless compression used for I-frames also enables Editable-MPEG to achieve significant compression of the video data while preserving an image quality close to the original and allowing multiple compression/decompression cycles without degradation of image quality.

Editable-MPEG typically requires a data rate of 5 megabits per second (versus 1.2 Mbps for fully compressed MPEG-1), and can be increased as required up to 8 Mbps to maintain the highest quality possible. The RealMagic Producer Previewer allows the Editable-MPEG data stream to be viewed in real time, enabling dynamic adjustment of the video bit rate during capture.

Editable-MPEG Benefits:

RealMagic Producer

Sigma Designs' RealMagic Producer takes advantage of Editable-MPEG and combines this technology with best-of-breed editing, animation and VTR control software and dedicated hardware to turn a desktop PC into a full-fledged multimedia authoring workstation. The high-quality video capture and editing capabilities of RealMagic Producer and its low cost now makes the creation of professional-looking multimedia products accessible to a much larger number of organizations. Now for less than the cost of producing a single multimedia title by renting costly editing suites and hiring outside service bureaus, a company can purchase all the equipment necessary to produce an endless number of titles in-house, and maintain control over the entire process. As a result, RealMagic Producer has the potential to significantly alter the multimedia landscape in much the same way as the introduction of desktop publishing changed the creation of print media.

The RealMagic Producer includes:

RealMagic Producer requires an IBM-PC-compatible computer system with a 50-MHz (or faster) Pentium processor or equivalent, a 32-bit PCI bus slot, a VGA or Super VGA graphics card capable of displaying 256 or more colors, a RealMagic-compatible MPEG playback board (driver release 2.20 or later), MS-DOS 5.0 or later, Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later, and one serial port for controlling a VTR.

A fully configured system for video capture and editing should also include at least 16 megabytes of RAM, a SCSI hard disk drive and controller with at least 500 megabytes of free disk space for video files (RealMagic Producer software requires an additional 92 megabytes of disk storage), SoundBlaster-compatible sound card and speakers, TV monitor and, of course, a video source.

Using RealMagic Producer

RealMagic Producer offers the easiest, most affordable way to create in-house multimedia titles, and gives title developers full control over the entire process. The RealMagic Producer Previewer captures the video source, encodes it into Editable-MPEG and plays it back on the RealMagic playback board in real time. By interactively adjusting the video bit rate while monitoring the quality of the playback image, the best setting can be achieved for each video segment.

Once the optimal encoding bit rate is determined, RealMagic Producer captures the video segment, encodes it in real time to Editable-MPEG with interleaved, synchronized CD-quality audio and saves it in an AVI file that can easily be used with any off-the-shelf video editing software. The bundled software VTR controller ensures frame accurate control of the source videotape.

RealMagic Producer accelerates the video editing and animation and titling processes by providing hardware assisted video compression and decompression. A typical digital video A-B edit, for example, requires these steps: 1) decompress clip A and 2) decompress clip B for import into Premier, 3) create the transition and output image, and finally 4) recompress the output and save to a file. With software codecs, steps 1, 2 and 4 can take a considerable length of time to process the video data, bogging down the entire creation process. RealMagic Producer accomplishes these steps quickly and transparently.

Similarly, animation created with a product like trueSpace used to require a time-consuming two-step process to prepare the data for inclusion in a multimedia title. First, the animation sequence was saved as a Targa file, for example, and then software encoded to MPEG. RealMagic Producer accomplishes the same result in a quick, hardware assisted one-step encoding process directly to an Editable-MPEG file.

When the editing and animation sequences are assembled in the final cut, RealMagic Producer transcodes the Editable-MPEG file to a fully-compressed MPEG-1 data stream at three times real time speed. That is, a one-minute Editable-MPEG file takes three minutes to convert to a fully compressed MPEG-1 data stream. The output can be stored on a network server, a DAT recorder or a writeable CD-ROM.

Sigma Designs -- The MPEG Company

Sigma Designs has pioneered PC-based MPEG technology, and today is the leading producer of PC-based MPEG technology. Its RealMagic MPEG playback card set the standard as the first affordable hardware MPEG decoder, enabling the delivery of high-quality, full-screen digital video to the desktop for more than a year. Now Sigma Designs is broadening it MPEG offerings in a big way.

While the original RealMagic card addressed the need of the consumer market for full-screen MPEG playback, Sigma Designs' RealMagic Producer targets the commercial market for quality MPEG encoding, providing the first cost-effective way for title developers, multimedia producers, corporate training departments and others to work with video at the level of quality they need.

Sigma Designs develops and publishes its own multimedia titles through RealMagic Productions, a distribution and marketing organization specifically geared to enhancing the availability of MPEG materials. RealMagic Productions works with third-party content authors to create new titles, and then leverages its resources to market and distribute them through established channels.

In addition, Sigma Designs also offers an in-house commercial service bureau offering professional-grade MPEG encoding services. Previously edited analog or digital video can be quickly turned into a CD-ROM, ideal for training programs, quick reference to videotaped depositions and other applications.

Sigma Designs is dedicated to creating affordable MPEG solutions for the desktop PC market, and its RealMagic Producer is the latest example of this commitment. Affordable and easy to use, RealMagic Producer is the best way to get control of multimedia.