The Iomega REV Drive portable storage system is getting a new life as primary storage for a new line of recording and storage devices for the broadcasting industry.
Used primarily by small businesses for data backup and disaster recovery since its introduction in April 2004, the Iomega REV drive has now been adopted by Grass Valley,an analog and digital entertainment equipment manufacturer that is a strategic business unit of the Paris-based Thomson media and entertainment industry conglomerate.
Grass Valley said it plans to incorporate either the REV or REV Pro removable disk-based storage solution into several of its recording and playback products, including the Infinity Digital Media Camcorder and the Infinity Digital Recorder.
Grass Valleys products are typically used by television networks and other types of broadcasting outlets.
Using disk-based storage in equipment designed for the broadcasting world is a fairly new idea, replacing the videotape that is standard in most cameras, editing decks and broadcasting servers.
Moving to disk will allow broadcasters to enjoy several benefits, including faster capture, editing and archiving of information, said Werner Heid, CEO of San Diego-based Iomega Corp.
“Tape is linear and tape transfer rates are relatively slow, so it can be pretty cumbersome to go through the entire digital workflow to capture, edit and archive information,” he said.
“When a cameraman shoots a news conference, for example, he might do it on Sony BetaMax or BetaMax Digital and then put the tape on an editing deck. But before editing the information, he would have to copy it from the tape to a hard drive, which would allow him to do on-the-fly video editing.”
