Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Flash XDR™ is the first ultra-portable HD field recorder which utilizes CompactFlash media coupled with the high-quality, reprogrammable Sony MPEG2 CODEC. These two key technologies allow Flash XDR™ to redefine HD field recorders in terms of size (similar to a USB drive), weight (2 Kg), power (8 watts), noise (no fans), and affordability (US $4995). The all solid-state construction opens up unrealized applications where older tape or disk-drive based solutions were too large, too heavy, too noisy, too costly, or too fragile.

Flash XDR™ supports 160Mbps, 422P@HL I-Frame profile (4:2:2, full-raster 1920×1440 or 1280×720). This enhanced capability comes in addition to support for HDV, XDCAM® HD (35 Mbps) and 50 Mbps 4:2:2 long-GOP MPEG2 data-rates. Now videographers and cinematographers can enjoy ultra-portability with superb video quality coupled with the ease of I-Frame based editing. (Note: by populating both Compact Flash slots with 16GByte cards, Flash XDR™ can record approximately 26 minutes of video at the 160Mbps rate).

Flash XDR™ is an ideal upgrade path for HD-SDI based HDV camcorders (like our Canon XL H1). The live HD-SDI output (direct off the CMOS/CCD A/D converter) is far superior to the native HDV recording capability. Due to the constraints of tape-based recording, the HDV-2 format, for example, squeezes a 1920 x 1440 video stream to 1440 x 1080, decimates the color from 4:2:2 to 4:2:0, then applies long-GOP MPEG2 compression to squeeze the bit rate down to 25 Mbps (from the approx 1 Gbps uncompressed rate). Flash XDR™, on the other hand, utilizes high-performance (340 Mbps I/O) CompactFlash memory enabling a much higher data-rate (160 Mbps) with full raster (1920×1440) and full 4:2:2 color space