HD For Indies

Martijn continues to report from IBC over in Amsterdam for me/us, and discovers a new Totally Cool Thing: the cine-one indi. From what I've heard so far, assuming it works as advertised, I think the Cine-one indi is the most interesting and significant NEW announcement from IBC for indies that I've heard of so far. Martijn also looks into NAS solutions that I'd asked him to investigate.

Below is his report in italics, my comments in plain text:

Cine-one's 24P and indi systems

(Here is a video Martijn shot at the show of it.)

In addition to the Mini35 system to use cine and photo lenses on (H)DV camera's there are now two systems from Cine-one. The Cine-one 24P system ($19,000) is for High-End (HD) camcorders. More interesting for us is the Cine-one indi ($3000) for the Sony HDV Z1 (Sony's HDV camcorder, the HVR-Z1U -mike) camera and other 1/3 inch camera's. The cine-one indi is a solid state aluminum enclosure with Carl Zeiss optics inside. Where the Mini35 uses a rotating ground glass that needs power, is vulnarable for dust, scratches and shock and loses two stops of light, the Cine-one has a purely optical way to transfer the image from a cine or photo lens to the camera that they call a 'virtual interframe'. The ZX1 (you mean Z1U? -mike) with cine-one has a widest lens opening of f2.0 instead of normally f1.6. Not a significant loss. In return you get the depth of field, depth of focus and angle of view of a Super 35mm camera. The system comes with a ground plate to mount the camera and lens. Camera, cine-one and lens together make a long set-up, so I see only tripod use of this system. (yeah, it's bazooka long. No one will mistake this for a consumer making a home movie) In the process the image is turned upside down. In post this has to be corrected. (no biggie) Additionally the viewfinder of the ZX1 has to be adjusted, too. There is already a switch for flipping the viewfinderimage inside the camera if you turn the viewfinder facing forward. An extra external switch is added by cine-one. On the monitor at IBC it all looked very well. Great depth of field, no loss of focus in the corners and no loss of light.

This all sounds very, very interesting. As indies have tried to use video to make movies, there have been a number of barriers to matching the look and feel of film: 24p vs 30i frame rates, 16:9 vs 4:3 aspect ratio, high definition vs standard def to get closer to film's level of detail, and now a more film like depth of field, so you can throw the background out of focus (without having to back up to Tulsa to get the focal difference you want). The last big barriers, as I see it, are dynamic range/exposure lattitude (improving but still a long way to go) and how highlights are handled - do they clip or taper? In any case, devices like this improve the craft.

The catch is, it turns your camera into a bazooka. It is LONG. Hand held is pretty much out of the question from the hoist it on your shoulder, stand there and shoot perspective. Maybe with a body brace, maybe with a Steadicam rig, but this is NOT a run 'n gun handheld rig with this device. But still an entirely shootable solution.

BUT it does look like a NICE option to have as an indie, and something I'll be looking into for my own projects. Disclaimer disclaimer, we'll see how it works in practice, but it sounds awesome.

OK, back to Martijn's report. I'd asked him to look into Exanet, which was touting a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution with lower than SAN costs (storage area network, think Apple's Xsan on XServe RAID).

NAS (Networked Attached Storage)

I also went to Exanet and Sledgehammer for NAS storage solutions. Both appear to be good for larger facilities where more than 5 workstations edit in DV or SD. Because both systems connect the workstations via Gigabit Ethernet, the bandwith is not sufficient for uncompressed HD. Both systems are quite expensive for small setups. With only a few workstations and 4Tb storage you pay around $60K. With a lot more workstations and storage the advantage over XSAN is the lack of expensive Fibre Channel cards and switches at the cost of bandwith.


OK, so sounds like Exanet is a bust from the perspective I was looking at. Really a facility or larger production tool, not something viable for 2-3 indie stations. Drat. I'm curious to see what a nice server could do for DV & SD and compressed HD usage - the big question there is QOS (Quality of Service) - can it reliably deliver, or do you drop frames? And at what threshold - with X # of DV streams? With one stream of DVCPRO HD, somewhere between 5 and 15 MB/sec depending on frame size and frame rate? One stream of uncompressed SD? Where? Somebody has probably tested this somewhere, I just don't know where. But workgroup storage makes life much, MUCH easier for video projects (or any projects really). 10 or so years ago I had a creative director that suggested I work with DV with footage on a server across a 10Base-T (10 megabit) network connection. His suggestion was that I was doing After Effects work and it didn't need to be realtime. It was a HORRIBLE experience, and proved to me the need for realtime feedback and high speed media beyond any shadow of a doubt.

So, it's back to SAN or some form of high speed sneakernet. I've been dabbling with hot swap SATA RAID sets with some success and will continue to look into that.

Martijn will have more to report on Monday. SO- a call to arms - if there is a vendor or product at the show that you think Martijn should check out that is of general interest to the readership here, please email me (mike at hdforindies dot com) and I'll forward the list to him and he'll see if he has time to check it out.

So far, the most significant new stuff for indies at the show is (and this is my ranking):

1.) Panasonic's HVX-200 - 1080p24 for under $10K. Sold. FireWire interface, native FCP editing. Rock The F*ck On. This is THE deal.
2.) Cine-one indi - $3000, but don't know shipping date since I can't read German (little help, someone?) Hopefully, they'll have a model for the HVX-200 soon.
3.) AJA intros $1800 Kona LH board that does pretty much everything you'd realistically want - SD, HD, analog, digital, in, and out. This card will literally handle all of your input and output needs no matter what you're doing (OK, not HDCAM SR 4:4:4 RGB, but virtually no indies use that).
4.) BlackMagic cuts prices on DeckLink HD line DeckLink HD Pro 4:2:2 now $995 from $1495, DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4 now $1495 from $1995, etc.
5.) Sony's XDCAM HD - not due until NAB (April) 2006, but will offer a midgrade quality bump, and maybe FCP will support it by then too. (Here's my summary of that tech.)

Of course, I haven't dug into the 254 unread articles in my RSS reader, so I'll be posting on those as the day goes by and I sift through it all.

-mike