The Movie-2 Digital Audio/Video Expansion Bus

Abstract

The use of economical, general-purpose personal computers (PCs) in demanding professional video applications like nonlinear editing, graphics creation, animation recording, three-dimensional (3-D) rendering, video-on-demand, and commercial insertion continues to grow. In these applications, specialized PC adapters are typically used to handle the massive processing requirements for transporting natural data types in real time. Commonly used subsystems include video input/output (I/O), video processing (digital video effects [DVE-mixing]), video compression/decompression (codec), audio I/O, audio processing (equalization [EQ]-mixing), mass storage interface, network interface, and video-in-a-window console display. Although it is possible to accomplish some of these tasks with host central processing unit (CPU) software and a single highly integrated adapter, most professional systems require more than one adapter. How to connect these multiple video adapters together inside a PC is a question that system integrators have been wrestling with for many years. This paper examines the limitations of commercially available buses in these demanding broadcast video applications, proposes the Movie-2 bus as a high-performance open-architecture standard that overcomes these limitations, discusses the Movie-2 bus in detail, and finally, presents a model of a typical nonlinear editing platform as an example of system-level Movie-2 bus implementation.