HD For Indies

Hey all -

I'm sitting bleary eyed in McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, plane is set to board in half an hour.

Today was the blitzkrieg assault on NAB for what I hadn't seen yet. I missed a lot of stuff, but saw a lot of stuff too. Flipping through my pictures, I see that I visited the following. More to follow, just touching on what I saw, it'll take me some time to write it all up. So consider ALL of this Late Night Beer Talk until I can go back through my audio notes and confirm stuff. If I get stuff wrong, tell me but don't bitch at me - this is alll off the top of my head! And yes, I should be posting links to all this, but it is now (as I revise and edit) 1am and I'm on an airplane at 37,000 feet travelling hundreds of miles an hour. Even if the WiFi signal got up here, I doubt I'd be able to surf for free on an unlocked network for very long!

: )

Stuff I saw on NAB 2006 Day Four:

Silicon Color - makers of Final Touch HD that I am intimately familiar with but need to finally write a review of - recently released Final Render, their distributed rendering product. It is shipping and everything.

-ADTX makes very high speed fiber channel RAIDs, I think I recall seeing 585 MB/sec - wow! uses ATTO 4 Gbit cards for PCIe Macs (other choices too, that works though)

-S.two has a new packaing of their field recorder, they call it S.two Take2, it costs something arouind $50K. There is also a docking station and ADIC tape storage, either SDLT 600 or LTO3, I can't recall which. It does two simultaneous backups, the idea is one drive mag to two identical backup tapes. Slick, solid workflow, kinda pricey, is that the only way to do it?

-LaCie has some new itty bitty storage options that are bus powered, 160-320 GB, but my image is corrupt and I can't see much. I'll have to refer to my audio notes. And my &*^($&^$ card in my camera is corrupting images, so I'm losing a bunch of my pictures and don't know it until I try to review them. Time for a new chip! They got some award too, I have in notes somewhere. for Litle Big Disk (that new little bus powered guy - and it's cute!)

-EditShare is a hardware/software NAS solution that runs on GigE for shared workgroup stuff for Mac/PC. They specifically are addressing the workgroup edit needs of sustained throughput, etc. Definitely need to follow up with this, could be lowest cost workgroup editing solution I've heard of (except for that 10GigE Small Tree solution I saw at MWSF but haven't followed up on).

-Panasonic was showing a 103" 1080p plasma HDTV. Wow. Damn. Gimme!

-also a model "only" 65 inches across (about 5 1/2 feet!)

-the FireStore DTE FS-100 is shipping, This is the gadget that plugs into the FireWire port on your Panasonic AG-HVX200 and replaces the functionality of a P2 card mostly, but the price/GB is vastly better. $2200, holds 100 GB, and ALL recording modes go onto it at 100 mbit, so it is inefficient in it's storage. Got an imperfectly clear answer as to whether you'd have to manually remove 3:2 pulldown or not when shooting 1080p24, etc. Guy thought so, not sure.

-Panasonic's AJ-HDX900 is very much like the SDX900, except high def. I think writes 1080p23.98 but with 3:2 pulldown. Jeff somebody was back who explained Varicam pulldown to me so well two years ago. Tape not P2

-Saw a P+S Technik Mini35 adaptor on an HVX200...but it had tape around the lens joint. For real, or a mockup?

-Ikegami Editcam - no 1080p23.98 supported at this time, so no indie filmmaking, but records to DNxHD codec, so great for Avid users, suxors for everyone else. Records to a hard drive.

-Grass Valley Infinity - I think I missed it...Doh!

-JVC GY-HD200 and GY-HD250 - they BOTH record to 720p60 in HDV....but still using 19 mbits for 60fps, not 30fps - sounds like with lower data rate per frame, which scares me in terms of image quality. They are downplaying that, saying they'll probably go with a 10 or 12 frame GOP (so obviously that is still up in the air). Due September, $8Kish for the 200, more for the 250. 250 also available in studio trim. 250 has an OPTIONAL S16mm lens adaptor, ability to flip image at the chip (for when using the adaptor), and has HD-SDI and timecode out BNC ports. Oh! And RUMOR (totally unconfirmed) has it that it is essentially the same codec - so the "sticktion" problems of pixels sticking in patterns between GOPs in subtle motion may still be there, and that is a darned shame, because that is one of my quibbles (not lethal, a quibble) with that camera.

-talked to guy from red rock micro about his 35mm lens adaptor he was showing on the JVC cameras. Adaptor, rods, and follow focus for around $1600. Pretty cool, I'll have to catch up with him on this product. Nice guy.

-JVC working on a 24" 1920x1080 production monitor, the DT-V24L1D. Boy, that just rolls off the tongue...

-Doremi still makes DDRs, and they are still expensive. Looks like very competent, professional gear, but in the back of my mind I know I'm still holding a grudge against them for their snarky attitude towards me in the booth last year. Not fair to them, I know, but it makes it hard for me to like their product/be totally fair.

Along those lines, DAMMIT, I realize now that I missed out on getting over to RaveHD to talk to Ramona, who is a total princess of sweetness, and they are very open about client feedback and changing the product to suit the client's needs in their attitude. They have a new version that I have press releases on but I really wanted to talk face to face, she was very cool last year. If I had to pick a company to work with between those two, RaveHD would win in a heartbeat based on price and attitude.

-Thomson IS making a modfied Viper body, but it's not big deal - mostly to make it more robust to mount more heavy gear on it, maybe some ergonomic stuff. But nothing radical.

-oh yeah - the Sony F900R is lighter and has HD-SDI on it, but was largely built to be a green product that they can sell and be legal according to the stricter European regs. A Sony rep, who was manning the F900R station, said that if you put it side by side with an F900/3, it'd look the same.

-saw it they other day - the Sony 1080i 180i (yes, 180 fields/sec) is $270,000. Yeeeeeehaaaaaw! Sign me five of'em. Yeah, right. Oh, and they can do 720p180 as well (and 180i150 and 720p150). But for the networks to shoot high speed on the football field, these should do great. Output goes down a big fatty cable (I'd guess) to a big honkin' box of hard drives, roughly double microwave sized. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime couldn't have shot handheld with this on his back in his prime. Not a portable solution AT ALL.

-the Thomson/Grass Vallley Venom flash memory (no drives) recorder for the Viper is out, is about $50K, don't recall the capacity but hope I got it in my notes.

-the ARRI D-20 is getting rented out these days, around $3000/day, 3 day weeks. It does have an optical viewfinder/mechanical shutter arrangement, and BOY that makes a difference! Even with the 1080i viewfinder on the Panasonic HDX900 (which is B&W anyway), the clarity is a tremendous difference, and this is a BIG boon for the operator. ARRI is doodling with recording RAW at full 2800ish by 1400ish (I forget the 4:3 image sensor res, I'm doing this all off the top of my head) RAW feed to a modified Quantel eQ or iQ like device in a road case for recording, realtime playback of RAW and grading on set. No price yet, just experimenting and showing off the idea. This is a good thing, though. No plans to ever sell the D-20 at this point in time. They slap a rebadged Venom on it and give it an ARRI-esque name. Forgot to ask max frame rate, but take everything I say about this as potentially wrong until I confirm with their guy that he said it right and I remember it right. Consider this beer talk that might be wrong, in other words, as I write this now. Lots of cool modes on their modified viewfinder. If the ARRI guy is reading this - I said I'd check with him before publishing, sorry not doing that, but all are duly warned this is NOT verified, OK? Later stuff will be verified.

-ReflecMedia is cool stuff - grey cloth with reflective microbeads (like the shiny stuff on your running shoes that reflects headlights directly back). That combines with a ring of LEDs around the lens (in three different sizes to work with different lenses) that are either green or blue. Since the blue or green light reflects directly back, it works amazingly well (or at least it looks that way). When I was looking off-axis at it, it looked flat grey. But looking at the image from the camera, which had the ring of lights, it looked pretty darned blue. More on it later.

-Vision's Phantom Camera has a very interesting high speed camera - a big one with a 65mm sized imager that'll do 125 fps, and a smaller one (35mm sized I think?) that'll do up to 1000 fps at HD res. Much more on this later, very very interesting. But $100-$125K for HD model, $200-$225K for bigger one. Records the raw output from single sensor CMOS. They showed some super slomo (like 1000s fps) from their other industrial cameras in the booth that had clearly been color corrected, and it looked pretty damned good, so this bodes very well for the future of this product, I wish them all the best - Connie from the company was earnest and open about the fact that they have mostly done industrial cameras in the past (and for over 10 years I think), and are just showing these cameras for the first time here and

-Most Wicked Tech Award goes to the mk-v.com (that URL may be wrong, could be pron for all I know as I write this offline) for their incredibly bespoke bit o'gear - it is a steadicam rig that let's you rotate the arm on a pole and keeps the camera (mounted on a horizontal beam about 6 feet long) to stay up as you rotate it around. Hard to describe, amazing in action. About $80K, but obviously an incredibly specific bit of gear.

-Miranda has the DVI-Ramp2 that does DVI to HD-SDI conversion.

-JL Cooper has a Final Cut Pro control surface with jog/shuttle and a bunch of automated fader switches. Very slick in action. Also a smaller jog/shuttle and a bunch of buttons. Looks like serious gear, more robust and client presentable than the Contour Designs' ShuttlePro v2 (which I own and use).

-Cobalt Digital makes an HD analog component to HD-SDI converter for about $1200 I think it was. No DVI to HD-SDI.

-Teranex has dropped price on their big stuff to around $50K and does realtime dust removal, and user guded scratch removal. Supposed to do a very high quality upres, but I didn't have time to watch (got the 3 minute demo at 3:41 when the show closed at 4 and I had lots left to see).

-Quantum makes SDLT 600A, which is like their SDLT 600 tape drive, but with a GigE port and an FTP server on it (for one root user at a time - tape seek times are up to 6 minutes, not 6 milliseconds like a drive!). About $7K, and uses MXF wrappers (doesn't transcode/alter/degrade video content). Can even grab just sections of a clip based on timecode. Very interesting idea. Stuart English from Red booth talked to me for a few minutes about it and asked what I thought, said an interesting concept but I needed to mull on it - would it be stable, reliable, around for a while? What was the break even point as compared to just backing up projects to drives? 300GB per tape. Sounds like some possible workflow advantages, but my paranoid self wants to investigate the alternatives.

-stopped by Ciprico (now owns the Huge brand, Medea is now owned by Avid but I forgot to ask about'em during my interview the other day), they are making some KILLER fast storage, like 300 MB/sec plus from a single 10 drive 4Gbit fibre channel array (I think that is right, not sure), and they striped several of some sort of RAID together and got over 600 MB/sec. Better yet, they have what seemed a prototype (not pricing set yet), with 40 (yes, 40) 2.5" SATA 7200 rpm 100GB Hitachi drives, 4 groups of 10 drives, throughput (don't know what RAID level) in the 1.3 to 1.4 GB/sec. Yeah - gigaBYTES, not gigaBITS, per second. Wow. That'd be sufficient to do the full res output of the Red camera RAW I think at max size, bit depth, and frame rate based on my napkin math. I recall something about an Infiniband to fiber bridge for speed. Infiniband is FAST - 20bigabit/channel - so that's what, 2.5 gigabytes per second per Infiniband port? Fast stuff, bodes well for the future.

In the last few minutes of the show, I was practically sprinting around the show with my map folded to show the last few booths I wanted to hit. I did a hit and run at Flip4Mac, just enough to snap a pic of their booth graphic and steal 90 seconds of time from a very tired but polite rep who answered my last few questions. It looks like in about a month there will be an import module to pull Ikegami Editcam footage in (and transcode I guess? Gotta look it up on the website) and also one for XDCAM HD (but Sony will have their own import module - or are they merely licensing the one from these guys?). Both modules will be about $500 apiece, due in about a month.

Rumor around the campfire from VERY unofficial sources (other showgoers talking to third party vendors) is that the next version of FCP might come out this summer. I could buy that for the support of new formats (the technology demonstrations of support for 24F mode on the Canon XL H1, 24p mode on the JVC GY-HD100U, and Sony's app to import XDCAM HD and edit it natively), but that doesn't feel at all like a major release. Maybe the next release is a 5.2 or a 5.1.1 or somesuch - that's the next RELEASE, not the next VERSION. The vibe _I_ got from talking to the oh-so-please-don't-quote-me-on-that Apple folks I talked to was that a new version would be out before too long, my own PERSONAL interpretation of that was that I might see it in the May/June timeframe, but that's just my personal guess based on them saying that technology demonstrations preceded shipping versions by a not very great amount of time. We'll see, we'll see.

Actually, after the show ended I was walking back to the RED booth to collect up my stuff and on the way passed by Matrox and realized I hadn't checked out this MXO thingy that I'd heard some buzz about. The folks there were nice enough to give me the 60 second scoop, and I asked for an eval once it shipped, so maybe that'll be coming my way. So here's what it does - it's a Mac (PC later) hardware device that plugs into the DVI output of your computer and converts the output to an SDI or HD-SDI signal. 720p, 1080i, 1080p maybe in future releases (all configurable hardware). BUT, unlike some other products that I've seen in the past or heard of, it ALSO has a software component - a QuickTime module that takes the QuickTime output and routes it to the DVI output to go to their hardware gadget for SDI/HD-SDI output. They say it does interlace correctly, and if it is doing what I think it COULD and MIGHT be doing, this sounds like a really, REALLY nice idea that could make it possible to do good quality output from even a laptop. So if your ingest if FireWire based, this could let you capture then monitor and then output to high quality stuff. I forgot to ask/look to see if it also has analog SD/HD component output, which is what would make this product killer. Oh, and it's $1000, waaaaaaay below other similar products. I think I recall something about gamma and white point control, BUT that might be me mixing it up in my head with another product. It is nearly 1am on the plane as I write this. Late night beer rumors, remember? Don't take any of this as gospel.

Somebody passed on a second hand story about how at a FCP user group my name came up (the good part) and a speaker dismissed me as a BlackMagic rep or on the BlackMagic side/team/something, with the possible implication that I was not to be trusted or was biased or something (the not so good part). To set the record straight - I worked for BlackMagic in their booth at last year's NAB, no secret there, and for doing so I got some "store credit" that I used to discount the price I paid for the Multibridge Extreme I bought - which was the same deal the other folks got working the booth who weren't BMD employees (mostly resellers). I wrote a review that went in some magazine I think, they have me on their site as a user story, and I had previously purchased some other BMD cards (at the time because they cost less than AJA products, and I am tight when buying gear for myself), so I have a tendency to write more about BMD than AJA - because I use'em regularly, and because I check for new versions of drivers and stuff. I have some AJA gear that I'm going to be running through it's paces, and I plan on a big ol' head to head review/comparo thingy in the not too distant future of all these bits o'gear, and I intend to be as non-biased as I can. But I like the AJA gear just fine, used it daily without major problems at the color correction business that I'm no longer involved with for about 6 months, and it's totally solid gear (that was a Kona2 for those keeping score). Their gear is solid, I love their UI to control stuff, and I get along fine with those folks - I just worked with Ted for a week with Red (he no longer works with AJA), but we've been totally friendly and cool over the last coupla years I've known him, and I hope to develop a rapport with Jim Thorne who is his replacement at AJA and I got to briefly say howdy to at the FCP User Group meeting Wednesday night (which Red totally crashed the party, coming on stage and giving away a Red "r", the paying sponsors must have been miffed when we took the stage and got wild, jubilant cheers from the crowd, I'll post pics and vids, it was OH SO MOST EXCELLENT to be the Rock Stars).

Interesting conversation with Grant Petty of Blackmagic Designs - he sees their market more as the indie content creators, and small shop creative professionals in general. Talking to Ted Schilowitz (formerly of AJA, now of Red), and hearing AJA messaging over the last year, they tend to focus their message more towards the broadast and more broadcast/business type of clientele. This is the first time I'd considered these two companies weren't aiming at the exact same type of users (although there is certainly overlap in their product lines).

Also, ran into Lisa from hdrvfx.com in the Red booth - they sell HDR panoramas, reflection maps, stuff like that for 3D rendering. All their stuff is real world shot, not 3d rendered, and is purchaseable onesy-twosey off their website, not on a big honkin' CD or DVD with zillions of other things you don't want (great thing about the web - make purchasing a hands off operation, no human intervention required, makes selling things in smaller quantities toally doable). Pricing starts low, I recall something was $4, something else was $13 to start. Available in a variety of resolutions, sounds good for those needing these niche products. Keep in mind these are HDR - high dynamic range - so it takes about 30 photos to make a stitched panorama with multiple exposures taken at each viewing angle. Haven't seen any of their stuff yet, but she gives good vibe as a reasonable human being (not everyone at the show did, BTW), so worth taking a look.

I ever so conveniently, late in the day, stumbled across eCinemaSys' booth, and was that a stroke of luck - I got there right as they were starting their last presentation of the show, and I had to sign an NDA (having to do with European patent stuff, so I got a "private viewing" not a "public demonstration"), and blazed into the darkened tent they'd set up in their booth and plowed right into Martin Eurejian (sp?) himself - The Man That Is The Company. He has a new, 40" LCD based critical color monitor that was doing some nice very low level blacks at a true 24p (dunno 23.98 vs 24.0, press releases coming next week), he said it was either 10 or 12 bits at the pixel level of real world response (I can't remember which, will have to check my notes), but that even after gamma and calibration settings should get at LEAST 1000 gradations of real world performance (so therefore must be 12 bit to be cutting DOWN to 1000 levels). Wow. Shipping sometime later this year, can't remember when. Martin's a very smart guy and has industry credibility, LCDs have been hard to make Do Right for color critical work, he's doing some of the most bleeding edge work out there.

CineTal has a 24" 1920x1200 pixel LCD monitor for color work, I talked for about 5-10 minutes with a couple of their guys; their product range covers from about $8K up to about $30K for 24" LCDs with various features (some of which are pretty hard core, like frame stores, built in wave/vectorscopes and such). They come with presets to calibrate for both rec 709 (HD) and for the DCI stuff.

Back at the Red booth, I ran an errand and got to meet Les, The Dude who owns Cooke lenses, and got to see a P+S Technik 35mm adaptor for the first time, face to face (seen picky-churrs, never held one). It's a heavy and solid thing, heavier than the redrock product (not that means one is better than the other, just observing here).

And DRAT! I also missed out on all holographic storage, and I really wanted to check into that. Sigh - that's the tradeoff of working 2 or 4 days at a humongously huge show.

They did have a MyNAB website that I was "too busy" to go look at, but I saw a sign at the show that it helps you find what you want, even helps plot a map or something - it would have been worth the half day it would have taken me to go through all that, because just like time on set is invaluable and never replaceable once it is gone, time during NAB is the same way - you need either sleep, or partying (excuse me, "networking"), or to be hittin' the show full on and it's VERY tough to find time get organized, or the potentially bad decision to blog during show hours, or even find time to keep in touch with the rest of your world back home during times like these. The right way to hit NAB? You make a list of what you KNOW you want to hit, then you use the MyNAB to find other things of interest, then you map out a course to efficiently work through the halls (it took 20+ minutes to go fetch something in Central from South hall), and you mark up your map with destinations circled, names written, and even then it'd be tough to see everything you want over 4 days, so you triage and prioritize - see the most important Day One, and work your way down to Day Four is follow up for new questions you thought of staring into space in the shower, and seeing those things that would "be nice to catch" rather than "I'll be hacked if I miss it" stuff. Leave a little time for catching the neat new stuff that there's buzz about, like for me the crazy revolution steadicam thing and the Phantom camera I hadn't heard squat about unti Jarred Land from dvxuser.com clued me into it (and it was Jendra that told me about the Revolution, for that matter).

OK, I think that is enough for now - I'll probably post this around 5am Austin time from home, right before I crash out.

I'll be going though notes and posting bazillions of pictures related to all this (unless my damn memory card decides to eat them all) ASAP, but I gotta roll back into my life once I get home - I've been gone for over a week now.

-mike

(edit - it's 4:35, got home 10 minutes ago, time for posting and BED!)

Labels: Red