OCR to the Rescue: Device Reads Any Text for Blind

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

Chalk up another innovation to Ray Kurzweil America’s leading inventor (and Lifeboat Foundation Advisor along with me). This one is a simple and elegant solution to help the visually impaired.

Developed in conjunction with the National Federation of the Blind, the device (The Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader) is a digital camera that can photograph any text or sign and then digitally OCR it and read it outload to the user! Quite a simple concept.

Kurzweil recalls the invention of the First OCR Reader in 1974

“In 1974, computer programs that could recognize printed letters, called optical character recognition (OCR), were capable of handling only one or two specialized type styles. I founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. that year to develop the first OCR program that could recognize any style of print, which we succeeded in doing later that year. So the question then became, ‘What is it good for?’ Like a lot of clever computer software, it was a solution in search of a problem…I had found the problem we were searching for—we could apply our ‘omni-font’ (any font) OCR technology to overcome this principal handicap of blindness.

New System is Portable “The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. (KTI) have created the world’s first portable OCR device, that allows an ordinary page of text to be photographed and subsequently translated into voice. Over the last three decades there have been several computer-based solutions for translating OCR to voice, but none of them are portable.”

Click here for video of the device in action[wmv width="375" height="211"]http://mfile3.akamai.com/12032/asf/kurzweil.download.akamai.com/12032/knfbr/CNN_Device_opens_the_world_for_blind.asf[/wmv]

New Flexible Biodegradable Battery Invented

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

ars technica reports on the invention of a paper thin flexible biodegradable battery.

Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT have developed a new material that eliminates the need for a multilayer battery. They grew carbon nanotubes on a silicon substrate and impregnated the gaps between the tubes with cellulose—that’s right, plain old paper. The cellulose also covered the ends of the nanotubes, but once it had dried, the paper material could be peeled off of the silicon substrate, leaving one end of the carbon nanotubes exposed to form an electrode.

By putting two sheets of paper together with the cellulose side facing inwards (and a drop of electrolyte on the paper), a supercapacitor is formed. These supercapacitors retain the flexibility of normal paper, but they have a rating that is comparable to that of standard commercial hardware.
By putting a drop of electrolyte on a single sheet and then putting a metal foil consisting of lithium and aluminum on each side, a lithium ion battery is formed. Researchers indicate that small prototypes could already power small mechanical devices like fans. These batteries operate over a wide range of temperatures, with the research showing that they can operate between -78–150°.

Potential Medical Applications: Its been reported that bodily fluids can act as the electrolyte. The capacitor would be put into a patient fully charged but dry, and when more power was needed, bodily fluids would be allowed into the device to allow it to discharge.

HD in the OR: The AVCHD Video Recording Format

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

Can we go from this to this?

This post continues my series HD in the OR examining the current and future use of High Definition video in the Operating Room- as well as current and future HD technology. You can read background on my OR HD testing here. This was a big week – after working with the Stryker HD system in the OR a few days ago I operated in a new hospital today and walked right into a Linvatec HD system trial. Review info coming soon.

In this post I want to review the new HD video recording format AVCHD for you and explore if it has a potential space in the OR (sneak peak- the answer is a qualified “yes”).

First a bit of video in the OR history: One area that is relatively ignored is archiving video. As I have written before, for years the standard video archive format was simple consumer VHS, and for those of us who wanted the highest possible resolution of our archives- S-VHS. The use of consumer DV was never really widely adopted in the OR. I do remember a single Sony DVCAM based recorder that never really made it to widespread installations. If I recall correctly, it was Karl Storz who offered it briefly. I really wanted to use this format since it provided higher resolution (500 lines) and native firewire output for direct digital input into my computer for editing. Our only option for getting the video into these decks was S-video input since none of the major companies offered firewire output on their OR cameras (despite my requests).

What is AVCHD? Briefly, AVCHD is a relatively new digital compression and recording format for high definition video being promoted primarily by Panasonic and Sony.

How is AVCHD Better than Other HD Recoding Options?: The main difference is that the MPEG-4 technology that fuels AVCHD is roughly twice as efficient as the MPEG-2 technology used in HDV (the other consumer tape based HD recording options). What this means is that files are 1/2 the size but retain the same high quality. This compression is so effective that new camcorders have been developed that can directly record HD video in real time to a hard drive or even flash- based memory card (Panosonic has introduced a consumer AVCHD HD recorder that saves to SD cards and Sony one that saves to Memory Sticks). – And as I keep advocating- if video can be highly compressed and retain quality then wireless systems can be enabled or internet-based recording and archiving options. This is the Holy Grail for the surgeon in terms of documentation- online access to HD footage from the OR from the office.

Technical Details of The AVCHD Compression Format: Digitalcontentproducer has reviewed the format. AVCHD stands for Advanced Video Codec High Definition, and it’s based upon the AVC codec, a joint standard of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) and ISO (International Standardization Organization) groups. It’s also called H.264. AVC/H.264 is an advanced subset of MPEG-4 compression. H.264 is a very hot topic lately in the broadcast and internet video worlds.

AVCHD is Based on the Same Codec Used in Your IPOD: They comment also that while AVCHD is relatively new, AVC is an established standard—particularly in streaming video and it is the primary codec for iPod video. AVC is also starting to displace MPEG-2 in the cable TV and satellite TV markets, and it’s one of the three technologies available for HD DVDs (along with MPEG-2 and Microsoft’s VC1). Even the Sony PS3 will play it natively.

More Technical Details on The Video Files Produced: The AVCHD specification itself supports scalable frame sizes from 720×480 up to 1920×1080 in either 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios. Like HDV, AVCHD video uses the 4:2:0 sampling format, which is superior to the 4:1:1 used in DV camcorders (less artifact and better color fidelity). AVCHD uses an MPEG-2 transport stream “wrapper,” and it is scalable up to 18Mbps

What is HDV – Why Not Use It?: HDV is the first consumer High Definition Video format released. It allowed the recording of HD footage on standard miniDV tapes. Unfortunately, its MPEG-2 based format still creates huge files and is not compatible with a disk (non-tape) based recording format. More on this format to follow in upcoming posts…

The Editing Quagmire: Editing is the current AVCHD shortcoming. Many software based NLE programs cannot edit AVCHD video leaving the recorded files of limited use in presentations inthe medical world. I predict this will change in the next 2 years. Today Vegas 7+ supports AVCHD editing (of course it does as a Sony product since they are backing this format in the consumer realm). Adobe Premiere still does not support the format and the message board logs are full of people being told by Adobe don’t hold your breath. Apple Final Cut Pro has announced support on the Mac side. Third party tools exist to transcode the video to allow any program to edit it but that is a royal pain. Both Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus and Pinnacle Studio 11 support AVCHD and even Blu-ray disc burning. Nero Ultra Edition Enhanced can process it as well.

Will We See AVCHD In The OR?- My Inside Insight: I have spoken to several Medical Video device companies and as of today there is no development in this area. Even a discussion I had with sources in the Medical Imaging Division of Sony would suggest this is not a format being aggressively pursured. If anyone is could push this technology into the Medical arena it could be Sony. They have the medical video hardware and the consumer AVCHD technology- and they are globally committed to AVCHD technology and HD medical video. For now the mainstay of documentation in the OR remains MPEG-2 based DVD recorders for at least the next two years is what you will see. (hint: and next blu-ray - more to come on this soon)

Then What are the OR advantages of AVCHD?

High HD video quality
smallest HD captured video file size
ability to archive in HD not SD
ability to record on removable flash media or a disk drive
ability to edit by surgeon with consumer software
potential for wireless streming and archiving HD systems

Quality Concerns: All early reviews of the AVCHD HD camcorders have however noted quality flaws when compared with their comparable HDV based tape systems. The errors seen have been primarily lower light sensitivity and moting artifacts and flaws (as expected with higher compressions codecs). This concerns me enough to delay upgrading my camcorder and I don’t want them in the OR until it is settled. The software will need to be tweaked at minimum.

I’ll post a line-up of the consumer AVCHD camcorders next

Then exciting insight from suprise trials this week of the latest HD systems from Stryker and Linvatec. Details coming from Docinthemachine HD OR system testing.

New video Connector Solution for the OR? Displayport!

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

Continuing in my HD in the OR Series I wanted to share a video connection option for the future. Most current systems offer simple S-video or component video. As usual, the OR equipment lags a generation behind consumer video. This has has been my experience with the major consumer video and surgical video companies over the past 10 years. I can understand their viewpoint (a little). In the OR most want broad interconnectivity backwards compatibility and standards. The latest and greatest electronics is not what most OR committees demand. On the flip side, the video companies focus rightfully so on consumer video because that is where the market is. I had this discussion with JVC and SONY in 2000 when I first began my HDTV surgery project at Yale. The entire medical video market is but a tiny blip compared to home TV’s and camcorders.

Where are we today? SVIDEO and Component. What is used in the bleeding edge for your computer, home theater, or professional HD video studio? NONE OF THESE! The standard connections there include DVI, HDMI and High Definition Serial Digital Interface (HD-SDI) for the pros. The consumer formats have copy protection as one of their major design requirements (movie studios don’t want you copying their HD moves). However the pro HD-SDI is the industry state of the art.

What’s next in the comsumer arena?

Engadget writes

industry’s move to DisplayPort is hotting up with AMD announcing ATI Radeon graphics processors supporting DisplayPort 1.1 in the “early 2008 timeframe.” Just in time to support Samsung’s new 30-inch panel scheduled to see production in Q2 2008. In fact, AMD just completed successful interoperability testing of their presumably “next-generation graphics processor” toting a native DisplayPort 1.1 transmitter.

Its advantages are another all-in-one audio video connector with high signal quality. Unfortuantely it also has copy protection as a major requirement. DisplayPort supports full bandwidth transmission over 3 meter (10ft) cable, and a maximum of 1080p resolution at 24bpp, 50/60Hz over a 15 meter cable.

Extensive technical details are here.

HD Endoscopy Series Coming

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

I have been inundated with requests for information and critiques of Medical HD endoscopy/laparoscopy systems. To meet the rising tide of demand for information I will begin an ongoing series of posts of HDTV in surgery, laparoscopy and endoscopy. You can read about my testing of the World’s Highest Resolution HDTV Surgical Camera – Ever! – First Exclusive Evaluation here.

Army’s Robotic Prosthetic Arm Demo’d

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

I have previously written about the Army’s robotic prosthetic arm projects – run of course through DARPA. You can see my posts and a video fest at Video Fest of Brain-Computer Links & Control.

An equally amazing story is how the project has come to be- DARPA contacted Deam Kamen (and team at DEKA of Segway fame) and challenged him to create this amazing feat of technology. The NYT reports

Eighteen months ago Segway entrepreneur and serial inventor Dean Kamen received a visit from Anthony Tether, the electrical engineer who runs the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s research and development agency.

Mr. Tether had come to Mr. Kamen’s rural western Massachusetts workshop to persuade him to tackle a challenging engineering problem: a robotic arm that would make it possible for any of the 1,600 or more Iraq veteran amputees to resume a semblance of a normal life.

Mr. Kamen, who designed the two-wheeled Segway balancing transporter and several high tech wheel chairs, and who has a wealth of robotic engineering expertise, said that he initially thought the idea “was nuts.”

A more extensive review of the two parts of the project is at Wired’s Danger Room where Noah reports on the two phases of the program.

Project 1 – the Holy Grail: Kuniholm and his fellow engineers at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, or APL, are at work on the most ambitious prosthetics project in history. They seek the field’s holy grail — to build an artificial human arm that acts, looks and feels to its user like his native arm, and to do it with astonishing speed by the end of 2009. (called Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009)

Project 2- Hedge your bets: The Kamen project: produce the best prosthetic arm possible with currently available technology

For now, both Deka and APL are based on cutting-edge myoelectric control systems pioneered by Todd Kuiken at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, or RIC. Conventional myoelectric controls use electrodes on the surface of the skin to read muscle signals from some part of a user’s body unaffected by his amputation — his back for example — and pass the signal on to an artificial limb. The user twitches her back, and the limb moves in response.

A video has been released of the project’s progress so far in a demo. It was shown at the DARPA tech conference. You can check it out here (sorry can’t get the youare.tv player to run in wordpress blog engine).

Another video is here

DARPA’s Battlefield Robot Medic to Deploy in 2009

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

This year is the 50th anniversary of DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon research arm who turns science fiction fantasy into military reality. DARPA conducts high-risk military research and in the process develops amazing medical technology. To kick things off right at their 3-day DARPA tech conference (or official site here) they announced the upcoming deployment of the remote battlefield medic/surgeon Trauma Pod robotic system by 2009! Surgical robotics was initially conceived by DARPA as remote battlefront or space surgical robots and this technology is now widely available in the DaVinci surgical robots.

As Popular Mechanics reported from the Conference: (skip to the end for links to videos)

the first portable, self-contained surgical robot will be deployed in the next two years. Brett Giroir, director of the research agency’s Defense Sciences Office also announced that the system, called Trauma Pod, has successfully “treated” a mannequin during a test, with no complications.

A single human will operate the robot remotely during surgery, but Trauma Pod will be able to perform a number of functions, such as fluid administration and surgical assistance, autonomously. The goal is to stabilize injured soldiers as quickly as possible, and previous Trauma Pod designs have included related systems that evacuate the patient. Giroir said that a prototype will be delivered to troops within two years.

Details of the System and its Use:

According to DSO Director Brett Giroir, the goal of the Trauma Pod is to conduct “emergency control surgery.” That means diagnosing and treating major trauma, focusing on airway management, head wounds and, as Giroir put it, “controlling uncontrollable bleeding.”

And while a surgeon will be controlling some of the Pod’s functions, such as the more invasive procedures, the system relies heavily on autonomous control. The robots in the Pod would insert breathing tubes and IVs, but the surgeon would direct the scalpel. Even during remote operation, auto-targeting systems will assist the surgeon, completing or fine-turning certain actions. “It’s not doing surgery the way a person is,” Giroir said. Instead of an exercise in advanced telepresence, the Trauma Pod is a synthesis of human judgement and robotic precision. Much of the surgeon’s input will be to tell the robots not to do something, such as inserting a breathing tube. Many of the systems are still up in the air, but Giroir expects the Pod to rely on CT scans for diagnosing trauma, and various surgical instruments that, as depicted in the video, the robots will literally grab out of a rack. It might incorporate technology from other programs, such as a device that triggers coagulation in a severed artery through high-intensity focused ultrasound.

Getting the patient off the battlefield and into a hospital is another matter. While the Pod is supposed to eventually meet certain size and weight restrictions, there are no plans yet to incorporate specific vehicles. Giroir does believe it will be compact enough to fit in the back of a Stryker vehicle, for example, and the experimental model that will be delivered in two years might still need to be trimmed down. The Trauma Pod is expected to be used by the Army initially, with possible, full-production deployment happening between 2011 and 2013. That’s a very rough estimate from Giroir, and much of the timing will depend on how quickly the system can be miniaturized, and whether it actually works.

Giroir was also excited about the Pod’s potential civilian use, for when trauma centers are often too far away to save a patient’s life. Local hospitals could stock a single Trauma Pod, and have a surgeon thousands of miles away assist in stabilizing the patient.

They say there are no video or photos available but here at docinthemachine I posted a report and videos of the systems concept and prototypes back last year. You see the post and all the clips at Awesome Army Videos-Terminator 2025 Battlefield Surgery Built NOW!

For Those Who Want More DARPA Hi Tech Medical Information: I have prevously written about DARPA and the medical offshoots of its research . You can read about why DARPA can take the big risks in medical development private industry won’t in Risky Business:Why DARPA Does What Medical Industry Won’t. Be sure to read Army Axing High-Tech Soldier of Tomorrow- MedTech Losses Predicted for all ofthemedicalbenefits of the Soldier of Tomorrow “Land Warrior” Program. You can read about the history and future projects planned by DARPA in 2007 in DARPA Releases Strategic Plan 2007 and about it’s amazing array of projects in DARPA 2007 Pt2: Major Achievements, Future Plans, & Medical Benefits (including Newton’s Laws for Biology, Prosthetics, Biological Warfare Defense, and Real-Time Accurate Language Translation).

Come back tomorrow for my next post reviewing the other robots they showcased…

Photographic Archiving – Insight for the OR From the Library of Congress

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

As part of my posts on my research on high definition surgery (and its recording) in the operating room, I posted on the limitations of still photo archiving in the operating room and potential future advances from new compression systems.

I received a great email today from Ronald Murray. Ron is a Digital Conversion Specialist (& Registered Biological Photographer) in the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress. He is an expert in digital media with a degree in Media and Cognition who has written about digital media standards. Here at docinthemachine I love to share insight from outside of medicine that will impact on the future of medical technology.

Here is what he writes to me:

“Intensive medical imaging technical evaluations of the other still & motion image file form that you mentioned (JPEG 2000) have been underway for some time. (There is no motion image component to Windows HD Photo, as Microsoft already has a prior interest in Windows Media 11) A PubMed query (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) using the string –>> jpeg2000 OR “JPEG 2000″ returns 97 citations, with the earliest reference to the format in 1997. Many studies cited in PubMEd report results from Receiver Operator Characteristic studies, results which appear to have been sufficiently satisfactory to warrant the inclusion of JPEG 2000 codestreams in the DICOM standard. One would expect that serious evaluations of Windows HD Photo follow this evaluation path.

Our small team here at LC has been following the development and adoption of JPEG 2000 for the last eight years, and has been encouraged more by the analyses found in the medical imaging literature than by what we see in the press or in blogs. For instance, the “JPEG 2000 as memory and processor intensive” line currently offered seems somewhat misplaced as processor technology improves – and as interested parties continue to exploit JPEG 2000 primitives built into Intel-based processor microcode. The advent of multiprocessor CPU’s like the Cell Broadband Processor and the increasing use of Graphic Processing Units also argue against the “too many clock cycles” line.

Also, when one directs one’s focus away from away from consumer photography – attention to which is frequent even in the library and archival world – one encounters an increasing amount of JPEG 2000 activity in critical imaging areas. You are probably also aware that other large-scale, critical quality imagery users like the National Geospatial Agency and NASA (http://j2karclib.info/node/101) employ JPEG 2000. European utilization of JPEG 2000 is significantly in advance of US activities…and European JPEG 2000-based solutions all tend towards the hardware-assists that the JPEG 2000 Committee assumed would be part of any serious implementation process.

…For more information on JPEG 2000′s evolving presence in library and archival environments, see: http://j2karclib.info and http://www.dltj.org/ and the Library of Congress digital format sustainability pages at: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/still_fdd.shtml ”

thanks for the fantastic info and insight Ron!

New HD Photo Compression System Could Help Surgical Archiving

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) is considering standardization of the company’s HD Photo file format. Tentatively titled “JPEG XR,” HD Photo was introduced with the release of Windows Vista.

Medical Opportunity?While not as glamarous as a fashy new gizmo the file format could provide an opportunity to obtain very high resolution photos with better color reproduction with higher compresion and imaged and archived faster. All of this will benefit our ability to image from endoscopic surgery and help propel the OR to a wireless environment.

You can read about operating room surgical image archiving and what I have been doing with HD video here and about recording video in HD from the OR here

HD Photo – once known as Windows Media Photo is a new file format for digital photography that Microsoft claims offers better image fidelity, higher image compression efficiency more flexible editing features. It supports both lossy and lossless compression. Microsoft claims that HD Photo offers image comparable to JPEG-2000 with less performance and memory drain, and that it can deliver better quality images than JPEG at less than half the file size. They also claim”

The HD Photo image-coding technology, incubated in Microsoft Research and developed by Microsoft’s Core Media Processing team, offers a host of new features and benefits focusing on the current and emerging needs of digital photography. The technology, which shipped in Windows Vista^®, is a new file format for end-to-end digital photography that offers better image fidelity, higher image-compression efficiency and flexible editing features benefiting today’s and tomorrow’s digital-imaging applications. This next-generation digital image format unlocks new potential for digital photography capture, printing and display devices as well as applications and services.

and further ” “Higher compression efficiency offers faster wireless uploads for longer battery life and an enhanced dynamic range that will help improve photographs taken in low-light conditions with a mobile phone or digital camera that does not offer sufficient flash assistance.”

here

How We Recorded the World’s Highest Resolution Surgical Footage

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Steven F. Palter, MD

My last post outlines the equipment I used to perform the world’s highest resolution endoscopic surgery. Here I wanted to share what we had to do the record the footage at full HD resolution to get it to National Geographic for their HD feature “Inside the Living Body”. Archiving HD surgical footage has been a significant shortcoming of many of the existing systems.

First some historical background on archiving endoscopic surgery stills and videos. Surgical endoscopy is archived mainly via still photos. Surgeons keep a few shots of the main pathology seen or a few before and after shots. Those who like to keep videos have mainly used simple consumer VHS (there is a huge medico-legal debate in the field if it is protective or dangerous to record all of your surgeries but that is another discussion). You can imagine the nightmare of storage of a library of tapes that accumulate over the years! For more than 10 years I have used S-VHS to get a slightly higher resolution capture. I was limited since the OR systems best output was S-VHS. For years (sadly more than 10 years) I have been trying to get the surgical equipment companies to put a firewire IEEE 1394 output on the camera units. This would allow me to hook up either a mini-DV deck or digital disk based recorder that did not require analog capture and digitization. They never went this route. I wanted to use miniDV because of its higher resolution, ease of digital editing, and smaller form factor than VHS. Remember back when this started there were not small affordable devices that could capture analog video on the fly and convert to digital as there are now.

Next, the surgical video companies went to digital capture and archiving. I loved the digital still capture that let me capture photos for lectures or the patient’s chart and burn it to a CD-R or DVD-R (actually when this started we were using horrible proprietary strange disk formats now extinct unreadable and sitting in my archives). The captures are ok JPEG or TIFFs. I wish they captured at higher resolution with less compression artifacts. One problem I have seen in some ORs is that the machines are actually set for a low resolution capture which makes no sense at all. They then added direct digital video capture and recording onto the same disks. The quality of these captures is hugely variable between systems. Some capture full motion 30 fps video at a decent resolution whereas others look like blocky jerky garbage. Sadly, I usually have to jump into the capture system’s configuration menu before I start a case in many OR’s. Just today I was working with a state-of-the-art system installed in one of my local hospitals just last week. It was one of the newest HD systems. In fact the manufacturer’s rep was in this morning doing an in-service and configuring the system for optimal use. As usual, once in the configuration menu I found the still captures configured for the lowest resolution 640 x 480 BMP and the video on its lowest MPEG-1 setting. As usual, configured for the lowest quality settings.

New HD Recording System we used: Since we were operating in 1920 x 1080p for my HD project we needed something that could digitally record at this high resolution. We chose the new Sony XDCAM HD Professional Disc Recorder. This systems records 1080/59.94i, which Sony calls 1080 60i.

Because our camera outputs true 1080p, in order to record we first have to scale the image down to 1080i using a Gefen DVI to HD SDI scaler. The resultant 1080i signal is what is input to and recorded with the XDCAM HD deck to a proprietary Sony Professional Disc that is actually based on a Blu-ray disk (sorry won’t play on your PS3 – the disk is in a protective hard shell holder and recorded with a different format than consumer Blu-ray).

The XDCAM HD records HD input in MPEG2 HD, a Sony format. This MPEG HD 1) is designed to yield high-quality video and audio recording and playback. The MPEG HD 1) codec provides video compression compliant with the MPEG-2@HL standard. It enables HD 4:2:0 digital compression recording in the 1080i (1,180 effective scanning lines, interlaced) format currently in use in many broadcast facilities.

There are three selectable video bitrates: HQ at 35 Mbps, SP at 25 Mbps, and LP at 18 Mbps. The resultant “clip” is an MPEG HD file which bears the suffix .MXF.

Another aspect of this recording medium is that it converts the input 16:9, 1920 x 1080 video to a 4:3 1440 x1080, then stretches the output back to 16×9 using non-square pixels (1:1.33). this is similar to the way DV format handles wide screen in Standard Definition.

Next I had to get an exact copy of this disk to National Geographic in HD. As Eric Portlow the video engineer wrote me “We can create a 1:1 copy of the original disc. Because the Deck captures an MPEG HD file to disc and can be accessed as one would an external hard drive using File Access Mode (FAM) via an firewire interface, it is possible to create duplicate discs by importing all content from one disc to the computer, then exporting all files and directories to a blank disc. The result is a lossless copy of the original. If you would like to have an exact duplicate of the original footage in XDCAM HD format, we could do this but it would require your having access to an XDCAM HD deck to view or access the file.

Our other option would have been to use HDCAM SR, DVCAM or DVCPRO

Stay tuned for the next post on HD in the OR hype vs reality