Cupertino, CA—Celebrating 17 years of performance leadership in flash memory card markets, the CompactFlash Association (CFA) announced the CFast2.0 draft specification. The specification was approved by the CFA board of directors for a 90-day final approval vote by all voting members.
The CFA was formed in 1995 as the initial digital film format and continues to create specifications to meet the current and future requirements for professional imaging and video markets. CFast2.0’s performance capability of up to 600MB/sec enables CFA to serve new professional video markets such as high-definition TV production and cinema video production environments.
“As the chairman of the CompactFlash Association I am pleased to introduce CFast2.0 continuing our tradition of performance leadership. The higher performance provided by CFast2.0 will further increase the capabilities and value for photographers, videographers and cinematographers,” said Shigeto Kanda of Canon and the CFA chairman of the board. “I am very pleased and proud to see the CFA creating standards that address new professional market segments for CFA.”
The format will have VPG (Video Performance Guarantee) capability with profiles capable of supporting compressed digital intermediate video formats. Professional video features are growing more powerful, with 2K video seeing widespread use and 4K video gaining adoption in high-end production environments. HD TV production environments require digital intermediate compression formats where 2K at 120 fps requires performance of 200MB/sec to 250MB/sec. 4K production environments require 4x the data rates of 2K. These next-generation video applications produce videos with incredibly high resolution that exceed CompactFlash cards’ data recording maximum capability of 167MB/sec for CF6.0.
General availability of the CFast2.0 specification for nonmembers is expected in Q4 of 2012. compactflash.org
