The Future of The DVD
by Earl R. Dingman

The DVD might already be a dying medium, as least as far as professional productions are concerned. It might remain as a home format, replacing VHS, but the writing on the wall indicates that a new replacement for DVD is destined to be found.

Why so? Resolution. DVD uses an MPEG compression format with a 480 x 480 pixel image that is able to deliver a resolution of 480 horizontal lines of resolution. While this is far above VHS (240-270 lines), Hi-8, S-VHS, Betacam SP and 1” C professional video (all rated at 400 lines) it is below the quality of home Mini DV camcorders, which generally offer 520-530 lines of resolution.

When DVD was first introduced most home TV sets delivered between 330 and 450 lines of resolution with broadcast television sitting at 330 lines maximum. Today, however, only the entry level TV sets offer this low a performance level, while the average high quality analog or low priced digital television set, priced between $300 and $700, offers upwards to 650 lines of horizontal resolution, which is far above the DVD in picture quality.

Finally HDTV is catching on and dropping in price. Today you can buy into an entry level HDTV set for about $1,000 and this delivers between 720 and 1,000 lines of horizontal resolution, almost twice the picture power of a DVD disk.

Last year we did a piece on DVHS, which is the new digital tape format used to record HDTV transmissions as well as offering the capabilities of playing back all forms of VHS tapes you make at home. This is an effort to keep the VHS standard alive and there are also HDTV movies commercially sold on this format.

The downside, is of course, that with a DVD disk you can quickly go to individual scenes, select outtakes and interviews with only a few moments wait as the head finds the proper file on the disk. With tape this “search” process still can take long minutes, so an alternative to both DVHS and DVD has to eventually be found.

Right now if you put an HDTV quality picture on a DVD disk it would probably take several disks to hold one movie and you’d have to use a player capable of holding many disks or switch disks every 40 minutes.

They are developing double sided DVD processes that hold twice the data, which might be enough to hold a short movie in near HDTV quality.

Right now home video and music producers are starting to turn to removable hard drives, because an hour of digital video recording uses up most of the space on even a large 100 GB ATA drive. It is possible that removable drives might be the wave of the future. Sort like the old 8 track auto stereo music cartridge.

The price of hard drives is really dropping. You can get a 40 MB drive for under $100 today. If the commercial demand for small drives, enclosed in a plastic carry case that attach to a FireWire connection on your computer this might end up being the way movies are viewed in the future. They can be viewed on both computer (Mac or PC) and in a special home HDTV movie player.

It was barely 10 years ago that everyone was jazzed about the Zip drives and disks, which quickly killed tape back up in computer. Now Zip and even Jazz drives don’t hold enough data for anyone to take seriously.

When I started doing in computer digital editing I found it would take a whole core of 100 CD-R disks just to store one hour of video production and I’d have to cut some of my longer files in half, as a CD-R can store only a maximum of about 3 minutes of compressed 720i video. That means you can’t even fit a finished music video on to a single CD-R disk in digital video quality format!

DVD won’t even work for me as a storage medium. It would take 20 disks to store these files! It’s far better at close to 4 GB of data but we need a way to store 20 GB economically on a small disk that can be accessed quickly.

The half-life for technology is dropping logarithmically. Tube electronics rules for 60 years before the transistor took their place for 20 years and then came the IC.

In the 1980 everyone marveled at the high storage of the new 3.5” 1.4 MB floppy disk, today some computer aren’t even putting in a floppy drive and I haven’t bought a floppy disk since I got my CD-R burner in 1995!

Now, 8 years later, the CD-R drive doesn’t hold enough to do my work! I have still picture folders that require several disks just to hold the full size 2MB digital images I take.

You still don’t find a DVD player in every home today and you might never for by the year 2006 when HDTV will go full force this concept might be a dinosaur.