Maxell continues its immersion into the world of tapeless field recording with its massive iVDR push at NAB this year. Company executive and iVDR guru Rich D’Ambrise today walked me through the advances in Maxell’s iVDR strategy compared to a year ago, when the rugged field media device was first shown around. Today, iVDR-Xtreme is now available and shipping, and in addition to that, the company is diving into all sorts of other iVDRish arenas.

Among those areas, at the Maxell booth, you can now see work in progress related to iVDR for FireWire, iVDR smart adapters for cameras that do not have host mode capability, iVDR for field viewing, and iVDR desktop drives, not to mention iVDR consumer products, some of which are already available in Japan. These new gadgets and workflows, all built on the foundation of the same, rugged iVDR storage media about as big as an iPhone and various types of adapters to go with it, are all part of the creation of what D’Ambrise calls “generations” of iVDR-related tools that range from basic to sophisticated, dumb to smart, and so on. None of it means the venerable manufacturer is getting out of the tape world, certainly, but it does mean Maxell recognizes the industry is in transition right now.

“There is a migration to Solid State and disc based, non-linear recording, and this technology is meant to be part of that transition,” D’Ambrise emphasized.

–MG