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The idea was for the VC-300HD to be able to
deal with most of the popular formats at present.
So why did they want to have a go at perfecting
the huge number of conversion patterns other
manufacturers weren’t interested in? Let's take a
look at initial product concept and the technical
backbone. Let's interview Hironori Mikami of
Roland, the person in charge of VC -300HD
development.
The plan got underway with the idea “We
want to record to HDV simply and easily.“ The
company already makes the V-440HD, a multi-
format video mixer and can output from it be
recorded or not? At Roland, we often have events
that call for use of the V-440HD, but it is not that
easy to record the events. We felt that many V-
440HD users must have the same desire and need
for recording from the mixer.
Currently, the only option for line recording in
HD is expensive broadcasting equipment that has
HD-SDI. It is not easy, however, to prepare and
afford this kind of equipment for recording live
events. Then, even if we did record on it, it’s
better to convert it down to HDV, since we can’t
justify keeping the expensive format unchanged
just to have it always easily on hand for editing.
When DV first came out, everyone was putting
converters on the market. With HDV we’ve
hardly seen the same kind of thing. What’s more,
virtually nothing has become available for two-
way conversion of HDV-baseband. This situation
has opened the market for the VC-300HD.
Real-time conversion was an extremely high
priority for us. After all, one of the things that all
Roland products share is a capability for use in
live show production. That goes for both music
and images.
Coming down to specific technology, the
company already had some converter know-how
that we could apply. Our way into the market
was via experience with scaling control, which
has been built up from dealing with video mixer
products. When talking about video conversion,
you may assume audio is a comparatively minor
concern. But, as you know, audio processing
technology involves a mass of expertise with
real-time processing as well.
Products, of course, can't be created simply by
combining existing devices, so we carried out
various technical surveys. These were not
confined within the company. We also needed
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