Future technologies; future directions
BC. What about multi-core CPUs?HY. Very important and interesting. If you are able to tune your software to take advantage of multi processors or multi-cores - and we can - you get things to happen very much faster because it affects all the steps in the chain.
The Extreme Edition Intel CPU with dual-core and Hyper-threading gives very good performance in software.
BC. You only seem to be supporting Intel processors, not AMD, but it's widely thought that the multi-core architecture that AMD has come up with is better than Intel's. Will you be supporting AMD multi-core processors?
HY. AMD's architecture is better but the motherboard chipsets are not as good as those on Intel motherboards. Intel is a big company and does a lot of work on these chipsets and AMD is much smaller and does less work.
BC. There's been a lot of speculation after Steve Job's recent announced that Apple would start using Intel CPU in its Mac computers next year and move totally to Intel in 2007. I tend to think this means that Jobs has at last realised that Apple is missing out by not being able to sell its operating system on Intel PCs generally, and, despite saying it won't do that, will actually make that change, too, to challenge Microsoft. What do you think?
HY. No, I don't agree. I know Steve Jobs and he LOVES hardware. Anyway, Apple is too small to compete with Microsoft.
BC. What is Canopus focussing on for the future - short term, medium and long?
HY. We are concentrating on HD and HDV, they are key. All customers will switch in two or three years time to HDV instead of DV. Japanese camcorder companies don't like selling their camcorders so cheaply and they can't compete with the Koreans.
Our new, forthcoming, encoder for turning intermediate AVIs back into HDV will demonstrate how far ahead we are.
The only way for a company like Canopus to compete with big firms is to make much better products and that's what Canopus does as you know - think of Raptor, Storm, and the Edius cards.
And I'd like to tell you that we'll have P2 support for Panasonic cameras for Edius in April and US broadcaster like it a lot!
With the growth of HD, the broadcast market is a big one to play for, especially in Japan. Lots of editing in the broadcast sector in Japan has been carried out on linear systems, not computers. That was because Sony and Panasonic owned the market and wanted to sell VCRs. Japanese broadcasters do have some non-linear kit, of course, and Avid dominates but this is small compared to linear.
Japan's national broadcaster NHK recently bought 100 of Canopus's CWS100 systems. That is for SD editing but we believe we have the technology to establish a big share of the professional non-linear HD/HDV editing market in Japan - and elsewhere.