For more than 130 years, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) has been studying every aspect of the world’s oceans—from their geography and chemistry to their zoology and plant life. Now with the Outrider™ IDE board-level DVR, NIOZ is able to capture high-quality images from remote underwater regions with deep-sea video recording systems capable of providing up to 20 hours of recording over the course of a year at depths up to 6,000 meters.

"The key advantages that Fast Forward Video’s Outrider IDE provides for our underwater research efforts are its ability to record high-quality images and to store a significant volume of video, as well as its compact form and low power consumption," said Bob Koster, head of marine technology electronics at NIOZ. "By building a self-contained recording system with such a high storage capacity, we’re able to capture video at a much better resolution than we can acquire over cabled video systems, in which the long run of copper line ― as long as 5,000 meters ― allows transmission only of low-resolution images. It’s quite a unique system."

The first deep-sea unit employing the Outrider IDE DVR board is a self-contained video recording system comprising two color video cameras, two high-efficiency gas-discharge light sources, and an internal battery. Koster has equipped the NIOZ recording system with an 80-GB hard disk, which will store time-lapse video recorded at compression rates from 10:1 to 20:1. The preprogrammed system will be installed into a tripod-shaped "bottom lander," which will be launched in Spring 2006.

Fast Forward Video’s Outrider DVR board, measuring only 4.69 inches by 2.21 inches, is ideal not only for deep-sea exploration, but also for high-resolution recording in surveillance, law enforcement, emergency first responders, and portable broadcast systems. The Outrider IDE has a USB 2.0 port for file transfer and records to a standard 2.5" hard drive. The Outrider is also available with dual Compact Flash slots for recording to removable Compact Flash media which replace the hard drive for more extreme recording applications where solid state recording is required.

Featuring video capture and playback at 30 frames per second, the Outrider offers a resolution greater than 550 lines at 4:1 compression; user-selectable compression ratios ranging from 4:1 to 20:1; and recording times averaging from 4 to 20 minutes per gigabyte of storage. The motion JPEG compression utilized by the Outrider boards allows discrete access to every frame of video recorded, which enables features such as seek or scan forward/backward; single-frame forward/reverse; delete clips; play/pause and perfect single still frame viewing. Outrider also features a time/date stamp and character overlay, time-lapse recording, NTSC/PAL compatibility, composite and Y/C inputs and outputs, pre-event record, and loop record. Files can be recorded in QuickTime format which can be downloaded via USB 2.0 to PC or Mac for instant viewing or editing. External control is available via serial command protocol, external GPI triggers or through the supplied DVR Master™ PC software.