Panasonic looks towards media-less future

Away from the Olympic razzmatazz, Panasonic’s Christian Sokcevic, Director Professional AV Europe, is keen to emphasise just how important the company’s expansion of the AVC Ultra codec family has been. “The implications are massive,” he says. “Now you can generate the same or better image quality with half the bitrate.”

What’s more, he sees it as a stepping stone to a possible completely media-less camcorder. “In the medium to long term, that could well become a reality,” he says. “Everything will go through the cloud, with the user just using any media as a back-up on the camera.”

But it’s impossible to ignore London 2012 for long. At IBC it has been confirmed that OBS will be using the company’s integrated AD-3GP1 and AG-3DA1 3D camcorders to capture 3D footage of the games, though exactly how many it will be supplying is still to be determined. “They will be used for most applications,” says Sokcevic, “though of course there are still areas where rig systems need to be used, not just technically but for positional reasons as well. But remember we have solutions for rigs too.”