HD For Indies

If you've been a regular reader of the blog, you saw my MWSF coverage of Silicon Color's Final Touch HD. I called it the most significant video product at MWSF 2005.

It does realtime color correction on HD footage, (including logarithmic footage) with realtime primary & secondary color correction, including masks, including tracking, including all kinds of stuff. Very very powerful, very very impressive.

Today I swung by the Silicon Color booth and talked to Roland again about the progress they've made with Final Touch HD.

My takeaway - with better workflow (editorial process can continue while color correction is going on), tighter FCP integration, FTHD is the best bang/buck color correction solution out there. It has a few problems left - NOT everything is realtime (blurs slow it down, for example), and you don't get realtime playback through a BlackMagic or AJA card (it'll take the advent of a PCI Express bus in a Mac for that). You can evaluate in realtime on a computer monitor, but if that isn't calibrated to your target deliverable, it's a guideline, not a reference monitor. You can get output to a "real" HD monitor, but it's not realtime, it's reduced speed playback (1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4 or so speed), and that's a hindrance to creative flow. But the ability to do things like primary and secondary color correction with masks in real (or near real) time is HUGE improvement. The rendering is all 32 bit float, so that should be pretty clean. I'll be getting a demo key tomorrow to start messing with this stuff upon my return to Austin.

The biggies:
-better XML support, such that they can handle nested timelines (woops, what's FCP's word for that? I'm using AE's term) properly. The XML gets all fubared if you write it out that way. FTHD will now properly read in nested timelines and then write them back out
-new control surface options
-conform & reconform tools (see below)
-new control surfaces from Tangent Devices, three separate modules available a la carte. Center is the CP200BK (for Balls & Knobs), the other is the CP200K (knobs for lift/gamma/gain for 3 channels), the CP200T (is transport), $4375 pounds sterling for the BK & K, the T don't know price.
-the original CP100, MCS Spectrum, option as well
-$5100 panel, a $17K panel (just described), and $28K for the biggie with buttoms for all functions (it's full desk sized, pics from last time, I'll take more)
-full Xsan support - Silicon Color is happy that it works OK with their system
-been working with a lot of drive manufacturers who can sustain throughputs and not drop frames. The new Huge fiber channel 4 gigabit array works with their 2K system, does a consistent 450 MB/sec, hasn't hiccuped once
-Serial ATA drive setups for all 3 versions (SD, HD, 2K). The DR drives from the DR Group on LA work great. 290-300 MB/sec. Qualified for AJA with Kona 2 for native 10 bit RGB.
-AJA card playout - if it's 720 get 24fps, 1080p get 10 fps...depends on writeback speeds from the card over AGP/PCI bus. PCI Express will fix this, when Apple eventually ships a box based on this
-CAN work with log footage on the HD product (somebody said otherwise)
-when working with 2K product ($25K), can play back 1K proxies, pause on a still and see full 2K res...it handles the proxy stuff
-the 2K is $25K, HD is $5K
-filmstream captured to log direct to disk, and graded it on site
-Kona2 and DeckLink can capture 10b444 stuff
-filmmakers worldwide using it
-having an impact on the indie market
-at least 100 indie producers on the first half day of the show
-the workflow & integration is the right kind of workflow
-can't find any other color corrector that integrate as well as they do with FCP
-not Nucoda, not Discreet, not Iridas, etc.
-rewrote a conforming and reconforming tool, so this means that the colorist gets his first cut list, starts grading, the edit is still moving, then you can re-conform, gets a list of shots moved/edit/deleted/etc. Non-destructive, lets edit keep moving forward while CC work continues
-less realtime than would seem at first...if want to do a blur, it slows to below realtime. If you want to play out AJA/BMD card, it's way below real time
-can do ZPR (zoom, pan, rotate) in realtime, animated
-can do a splitscreen for shot A/shot B color matching, to match the look
-rendering 720p24 is 2-4 fps...so it's pretty darn fast, not anywhere near After Effects speeds.
-uncompressed is the preferred format and doesn't make a difference in working/rendering speed
-something about Miranda for 10 bit preview, but I missed it -FOLLOW UP ON!
-SEE THE WEBSITE FOR THE REST OF THE STATS etc.