Grass Valley opened more than a few eyes at IBC when it introduced the new Infinity camcorder, offering multiformat acquisition with a choice of compression formats, SD and HD acquisition, and multiple types of removable media built-in. Notably, the Infinity moves users away from the choice between proprietary DV and MPEG compression formats. It’s positioned as the first in a new generation of low-priced, flexible products.
The Infinity Digital Media Camcorder and Digital Media Player support 1080i and 720p (at 75 and 100 Mbps) as well as 625i and 525i (25 or 50 Mbps) via 14-bit digital signal processing. They do not, however, record 24p. Users can encode video as DV25 (compatible with DVCAM and DVCPRO), MPEG-2 for SD or HD, or JPEG 2000.
It records to an Iomega REV PRO disk (about $70) and CompactFlash media made by SanDisk. A 35 GB REV PRO disk offers about 45 minutes of 75 Mbps 1080i HD and more than two hours of HDV or DV. SanDisk’s Extreme-III (sizes up to 4 GB) media is recommended for high-bitrate
HD, and Ultra-II (sizes up to 8 GB) for SD and 25-50 Mbps HD. An Extreme-III card costs about $350.
Although designed for newsgathering, it could suit the indie shooter working with multiple clients and different project types. A full-featured SD/HD camcorder that does all this for $20,000 can’t be easily ignored.
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