Titan, the update for Oddysey recorders

Last week we told you about the latest firmware version developed by Convergent Design for the Odyssey and Apollo recorders, which optionally included the Titan HD Extract upgrade.

Today, to understand a little better what the new “Titan” is all about, we leave you the Spanish translation of this article by RedShark News. In it they talk about the capabilities of the new version and about the future possibilities that Convergent Design recorders bring(here the link to the article in question):

“Convergent Technology has a very distinctive business strategy that becomes more evident with each passing month. Their Odyssey recorder/monitor range has been around since early 2013, and when they came along we thought they were incredibly significant.

In retrospect, we were right, but not necessarily for the right reasons. It was certainly important to realize that they had high-quality OLED displays. This was a step beyond what any of their competitors had done up to that point. The quality they included was impressive. And, for the price, it was pretty obvious that they had something special inside.

It now seems clear that the processing power of the Odyssey range was and still is enormous. The reason we know this is because three and a half years after the range was first launched, we continue to see software updates that significantly improve the functionality of the devices.

In addition to a seemingly endless list of cameras that can record with the Odyssey, often in native raw formats, the same hardware can function as a multi-input switcher and can even take a 4K image, select multiple areas of it, and treat them as independent camera signals.

We will write more about the trend towards treating new products as “platforms”, where relatively few hardware products have been released, but to compensate for this, frequent software updates significantly upgrade performance.

But with the show that a battery-powered device can derive multiple camera views from a single image, we are no doubt seeing the beginning of a trend where an arbitrary set of camera angles can be extracted from an equally arbitrary number of cameras, whose outputs are stitched together in real time to provide a virtual ultra-wide angle.

Today’s efforts at 360-degree recording – sometimes in stereoscopic 3D – require software that can stitch together the output of multiple cameras into a video “sphere”. Techniques for doing this are improving by the day.

What Convergent Design has done with Titan shows the way to capture all camera angles at once.

With the advent of 8K, it may not be long before we see units like the Odissey taking the output from such a device and separating it into many viewpoints, although it won’t be able to change the “position” of the camera. Or perhaps it could: there is no reason why you shouldn’t take the output from two or more cameras, properly positioned, and derive the viewpoint from a “virtual” camera that is somewhere in between.

Titan (a software update for Odyssey) has shown the way forward with this: it’s a product that’s out there to buy now, and, as such, it’s incredibly useful. This can only be the start of a much bigger trend.”