Appendix J
APPENDIX J: A BRIEF HISTORY OF DPS
DPS was originally founded in 1975 as Digital Video Systems. We were pioneers in
the development of time base correctors (TBCs) and synchronizers. Digital Video
Systems was acquired by Scientific Atlanta in 1982 and the focus of the division
shifted to satellite encryption technologies. In 1988 the studio video product line was
spun off into a new employee-owned company called Digital Processing Systems
(DPS). In 1996 DPS went public, with a very successful initial public offering (IPO)
of over three million shares.
Post Production
DPS helped start the “desktop video revolution” with the introduction in 1991 of the
DPS Personal TBC, the first infinite window TBC on a PC card. The DPS Personal
TBC’s combination of features, performance and price was unique, and competed
with units selling for three times its cost. After the success of this TBC card, DPS
followed with the Personal TBC II, III and IV, each of which provided increased
features and performance. During this period DPS also introduced the innovative DPS
Personal VScope, the world’s first combination waveform monitor/vectorscope on a
PC card.
The DPS Personal Animation Recorder (PAR), a plug-in card which functioned as a
single-frame recording deck, was introduced soon after the first Personal TBC and
quickly changed the art of animation forever. Still being used in both PC and Amiga
versions — a testament to how far ahead of the rest of the industry it was — the PAR
provides component analog video (Betacam, MII), composite and S-Video (Hi8/S-
VHS) outputs.
The DPS Perception Video Recorder (PVR) was a significant advancement beyond
the PAR. First shipped in 1995, the multiple-award-winning PVR is a PCI-bus digital
video disk recorder which features 10-bit video encoding with 2X oversampling,
CCIR 601 4:2:2 processing and an integrated SCSI-2 hard drive controller. The PVR
was also designed to integrate with third-party non-linear editing software.
Fulfilling the promise of the PVR to be “the heart of an advanced digital video
workstation,” DPS has built a family of products that work with the PVR to create a
complete video-audio editing solution. These products include: the AD-2500/3500
Component Video Capture daughtercard; the SD-2500/3500 Serial Digital Video I/O
card; the Perception F/X transition effects accelerator card; and the Perception Audio
for Video (A4V) board. More than 17,000 PVR-based systems are in use around the
world today.
Digital Processing Systems’ 1997 desktop video offerings also became award
winners. The DPS Hollywood, an uncompressed digital (D1) video disk recorder,
won the “Pick Hit” award at its release during the National Association of
Broadcasters (NAB) convention in 1997. At NAB ’99 the DPS Hollywood received
Post magazine’s “Professionals’ Choice” Award.
Digital Fusion, the superb resolution-independent compositing and special effects
software program brought to market in a strategic partnership between DPS and the
creators, eyeon Software, Inc., also won a “Pick Hit” award at NAB ‘97. Digital
Fusion has won numerous awards since – including one of Game Developer
magazine’s “Front Line Awards” in 1998 – as has Digital Fusion Post, developed for
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