The future of digital video recorders

The digital VTR has essentially become the norm for professional work of broadcast quality, but it has not finished evolving. It still has too many similarities to its analog ancestors which owe more to conservatism than engineering necessity. The author calls for more creativity in future DVTR design and suggests multi-format DVTR transports which suit several types of video data. Perhaps a future DVTR will be format independent, accepting a range of formats and using a user selected compression factor to record on an incremental transport at any chosen data rate. The higher the definition of the input, the more compression needed or the higher the tape speed needed