Most NFL teams, and prominent NCAA football teams have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-linear video editing and viewing systems. The goal of TD Video is to provide an affordable subset of these expensive systems to the high school football market.
What Can I Do With TD Video ?
You can watch any play in a game instantly. You can watch a play several times with near zero rewind time. You can view high quality digital video on your Mac at regular speed, in slow motion or fast motion, in forward direction or reverse. You can draw on the video when its not moving. You can analyze your opponents tendencies using TD Video's scouting reports.
TD Video and your Macintosh become a digital VCR for your camcorder. You can transfer video without loss from a digital camcorder to your Mac and view it with TD Video.
What is Non-Linear Video Editing ?
Linear video editing is tape based. With a tape based system, you have to fast forward or rewind to get to anything in a game.Non-linear video is stored on a computer hard drive in a digital format. Once its on the hard drive, you can access any video clip instantly.
With TD Video, you capture game video in your computer as play clips and enter data for each play. When you're done you can produce play footage on demand with no fast forward or rewind time. You select plays in a game that you want to see, either manually or based on the data that you enter, and view the plays immediately. You can also select multiple plays in a game, and have TD Video present them in a sequence. When you create cutups, you don't have to wait for the master VCR to fast forward from one play to another.
Technology Used
BW Software is developing "TD Video" for Macintosh computers using Apple's QuickTime multimedia technology. Our focus is on digital camcorders equipped with IEEE 1394 ports. Apple's name for an IEEE 1394 port is "FireWire". Sony calls these ports "iLink". You can also import video from Apple's iMovie software which gives you access to high definition and hard drive based camcorders.
Video captured from a digital camcorder over FireWire is stored and displayed in its original digital form (no generation loss). With TD Video, Firewire, and QuickTime you can view game video, cut it up, and save it to Digital 8 or MiniDV tape without generation loss. When you transfer digital video (Digital 8 or MiniDV) to VHS or SVHS, you lose lots of picture quality. If you view digital camcorder video using a projector attached to your Macintosh instead of using a VHS VCR, the quality improvement will be obvious.
Analog (VHS or SVHS) video can be digitized using a device called a Media Converter with minor quality loss. Some digital camcorders will convert analog video to digital. Analog video that has been digitized has good quality, just not as good as video that came directly from a digital camcorder.
Why use a Macintosh for TD Video ?
Every Macintosh is a very reliable and affordable video editing machine. Every Mac built for the last several years comes with Apple's iMovie video editing software and one or more Firewire ports installed. So everything TD Video needs from your Mac is built in and tested by Apple. No need to debug hardware. Newer Macs with Superdrives also come with iDVD - free software for burning video DVDs.
Apple's iMovie and iDVD software compliments TD Video's capabilities. TD Video can import video from iMovie, and export video to iMovie and iDVD. iMovie lets you add transitions, titles and music to your highlight video. With TD Video, iMovie, and iDVD working as a team, you get a lot for your money.
