HD For Indies

Hey all -

it's nearly midnight and I'm BEAT, was on location at 6:45 this morning. Not my usual timing!

Short Version - see annotated pictures from the shoot.

So here's what happened:

PREAMBLE, WHICH YOU CAN SKIP, MOSTLY ME WHINGING ABOUT HOW LATE AND POORLY I PLANNED, DESPITE MY "HEROIC" (read: frantic and ill-advised) EFFORTS:,

Saturday through Wednesday - order gear, try to get organized, email shot list ideas back and forth with Adam Wilt, Chris Hurd, etc. Try to find recruits to help run the capture stuations - we've got SIX cameras that we are going to record from, simultaneously, uncompressed to disk. Gotta get six G5's together, with RAIDs, HD-SDI cards, etc. UGH! Mucho mucho mucho logistics to be run. Arrange for camera talent. Buy/rent duvetyne backdrop. Do we have a trumpet or trombone available. Will it rain, if so what day, if so what fallback contingencies. Try to arrange an F900, and provide what the rental house requires to make them WANT to donate it instead of rent it to a paying customer. On and on and on.

What actually happened: Gear shows up Wednesday not Tuesday. Drive model desired isn't available, go with new replacement (DANGER! Unproven!). Order a disk array enclosure from one vendor, drives from another (Danger again! No one stop conflict resolution!). Major, major trouble with array. Vendor goes to HEROIC lengths to help, emailing in the wee, wee hours Thusday morning. Thurday more gear shows up via FedEx, start hooking up yet more gear. Don't start packing up until after noon. (I should have arrived at Omega by that time at the LATEST). Don't get UHaul truck until about 2, only with HUGE HELP from Rhonda Schneider, sweet friend that she is, who in fact Rocks Like Slayer for dropping everything and helping me out for several hours. Zane Rutledge shows up and helps me load the truck with basically everything that has an electrical plug in my house - 3 G5s, 5 RAIDs, every monitor I own, somebody ELSE'S entire HD editing station (Thank You Neil Halloran!) including 19" HD monitor. I don't arrive at Omega until about 20 minutes before they are supposed to close.

Jordan Hristov (in charge of rentals) from Omega Broadcast Group helps me unload the truck into Area 1, but I am massively behind. I am so hosed.

Brief aside - Omega was INCREDIBLY generous with us in terms of giving us space to work in, letting us borrow an ungodly amount of gear for the testing, and staying late to let us do our thing. Big, BIG props to Jordan from rentals and Allan Barnwell from sales (who babysat our mad crew into the late hours), and David Fry (owner) for letting us come play in his yard, so to speak. Omega has cameras to buy or rent, the rent and sell edit systems, do training, all kinds of stuff. If you're in central Texas and need stuff, they are absolutely worth talking to. Jordan Hristov is in charge of rentals, and Allan Barnwell is in charge of sales.

Chris Hurd shows up, eventually we all (me, Nate Weaver, Adam Wilt, Li, Greg Boston, Pete Bauer with his XL H1, Mike Devlin who came down with his own F350 XDCAM HD, and I forget who all else at this late hour as I type this) rendevous at Omega Broadcast, the incredibly generous hosts of this event, opening up their space and their rental department to us (the fools! : ) ). We more than took them up on it, looting, I mean pilfering, I mean borrowing a lot of cables and whatnot. Seriously though, David Fry and Allan Barnwell and Jordan (runs rentals, The Guy To Know) of Omega have been a huge help, they have tremendous resources ("You need 4 HD monitors with HD-SDI inputs and built in waveforms? Yeah, we got at least that many sitting around available...").

We decide to relocate into the smaller, shorter, but air conditioned adjacent space. Realize I need to hump 600-800 pounds of gear into the next room. EEK.

FRIDAY MORNING, SHOOTING DAY ONE:
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I arrive extra early at 6:45am (traffic's a snap if you get up before God), and start setting up gear. There are so many untested, newly arrived, or never configured solutions it is just ridiculous. I could have spent 2 full days just transporting, setting up, and testing everything to be ready. With Zane helping, we managed to get through the day.

(Tidbit learned - unlike some configs I've worked with, you can change the input format on an AJA Kona2 without rebooting and it'll recognized different flavor video inputs - not always the case as in the past)

We get a couple of capture stations up and running while Adam and crew (Boyd Ostroff showed up, Mike Devlin, Nate Weaver, Pete Bauer, Li who came down with Adam, who am I forgetting?) set up the set. Stuart English (Mr. Varicam) dropped by for a bit to check in on us and talk stuff.

About the time things were moving smoothly, a band started playing on the other side of the wall and we lost power to all the computer stuff. Fortunately, UPS' were plugged into everything mission critical and we were able to save and quit and shut down....mostly. Well, at least save anyway, so then we had to source power from elsewhere in the building using extension cords. Sigh. The area where we were wasn't really designed to do a 6 camera shoot with lights and 6 HD uncompressed capture stations all with HD monitors as well as computer monitors.

SHOOTING AND TESTING

Today was setup, charts, and high dynamic range testing. Here's random thoughts about the day that are flopping out of my head.

I'll have more to say later, but some tidbits:
-HVX200 wasn't as good as I'd hoped, confirming earlier reports
-XL H1 HD-SDI contains neither timecode nor audio - repeat, NO AUDIO ON HD-SDI! Grr.
-24F mode - blah - loses vertical resolution. That or 50i and good software deinterlacer? We'll find out in post.
-XL H1 - looks pretty darned good, esp. with good glass on it. We did some lens tests.
-Adam mentioned something like kinda sorta ballpark 10% better res in 1080 rather than 720 mode with HVX200 - confimring my gut vibe from earlier tests, 1080 doesn't offer a HUGE advantage. Now, that's live feed. From tape, to be seen and figured out...
-BlackMagic Mulitbridge Extreme is darned handy - ran it as a standalone converter at first - HD analog component in, HD-SDI out to a "plain" HD-SDI card (forget whether AJA or BMD, wouldn't matter I'd imagine). THEN also ran component outputs to a JVC
-looks like I was wrong - the JVC 19" CRT does not appear to do 1080i50, unless I was doing something else wrong. All moving to fast to verify, so I need to double check that. If that's the case, that puts a dent in my "shoot 1080i50 and deinterlace and conform to 24p, you'll be fine." theory and plan for affordable (ish) hardware for post workflow
-but at same time, also running to 17" LCD for pixel-for-pixel preview of GY-HD100 output. My generic and non-spectacular Dell 17" LCD (1280x1024) is GREAT preview for 720p. Right width, 60Hz. Not a color accurate solution, but very good for discerning detail and focus (I thought anyway, have to ask others what they thought).
-this thing would be a great way to evaluate gear in the field - so many pieces in use. It'd take hours to days to log all learned, talk to folks, document what got used how...I'll have to save a Profile Report for each station, too much to keep track of!)
-tearing down is going to be a HUGE pain - even though I spent hours putting tape with names on stuff (and others did too), dissasembly and return to rightful owner will take a long time and inevitable mistakes.
-AJA HD10A rocks - used it on GY-HD100U in 720p59.94p mode, and on Z1U in 1080i59.94, and HVX200 in 1080i mode.
-ALL of the cameras tested that do some kind of 24 purportedly progressive mode send it down the HD Analog as 1080i60 - NOT 1080pSF. So no true 24p capture, gotta do pulldown removal in post. TBD best way to do that, which will probably be a bear.
-FINAL CUT 5.1 is starting to arrive to folks - Omega got theirs in the mail today, my friend Charlie Wan did too.
-more to say later, that's a start.
-the Apple 30" display is MASSIVE. Seven inches makes a BIG difference. I want one BADLY now. No time to test BMD Multibridge Extreme on it, but I will.
-Kona3 works like a charm so far - more on it later
-Multibridge Extreme has a specific capture mode for HD analog as a preset - THANK GOD! I was worried about how to config it.
-Kona3 - tiny litle mini-HD-SDI plugs - kinda cool. Yet another unique cable you have to keep track of - not so cool.
-same for the unique power cable of Quad G5's - not generic, not interchangable. Thought I'd lost one, was going to mean I couldn't use that computer - good example Standard Gear Matters - if the system relies on having exactly one particular cable, and that is a hard to find/takes days to order and get thingie, that is BAD
-note how convenient that 90% of rest of gear uses a standard computer power plug - no worries at all, I've got bags of'em.
-There is No Such Thing as having Enough Cables. Of any sort.
-AJA HDP is darn handy on set, and will scale a 720p signal to fill a 1920x1200 monitor (less black edge top and bottom, which is OK and correct) - great for getting focus Just So for chart tests. Not so great for super color accuracy, but it is not supposed to. We used it on Dell 2405 and it worked fine.
-this was my first field deployment of a Burly Box 5 bay hotswap port multiplying enclosure with 5 400GB drives. Working well so far in limited testing to capture uncompressed 1080i60 10 bit video - heaviest data rate you're likely to use.
-Got all six stations running, amazingly well considering how little prior proper planning was done on my part. Right now, one Mac's RAID is twitchy (keeps going offline), one RAID is having trouble and drops frames (I'll try and replace it by building up another one on set tomorrow), one RAID works but mysteriously drops offline from time to time.
-Everything Takes Longer When You Try To Do It Right. We basically shot charts for all cameras in various frame modes (24p or closest metric equivalent (24F, CineFrame, 50i, and 60i/60p). Then we set up and lit and shot high dynamic range test shots, shooting one camera at a time from the same sticks to minimize angle variance.
-tomorrow we have waaaaaaaaaaay more to shoot than we could every finish, so we'll do some serious battle triage to our proposed shot list.
-excited to have uncompressed to disk results of a bunch of stuff to compare to stuff on tape. Today was all static tests, tomorrow's motion tests will tax the MPGE-2 codecs much more heavily.
-if someone (uhhhh....me) forgets to bring tape stock, it's awfully nice when the facility has'em in stock for everything you need.
-slates are sooooo handy - even logging stuff into Final Cut as we shoot, even doing shot logs (Li is Scipt Supervisor, aka Shot Nazi, while Adam and I share Clock Nazi status, Nate and Pete are slate ninjas). Getting off track - point being you HAVE to have multiple places of collecting metadata, because it just takes so much effort to get it right on the fly in these situations with 9000 things going on, that you need LOTS of redundancy to be sure you get it right. Slates, log notes, AND logging info in as you go only defense as far as I can tell.
-lots of Adam conferring with others I didn't hear since they were at cameras and I'm at capture stations - what interesting info did we miss and not record that they were talking about? I'm not talking footage, I'm talking around-the-campfire good info about things they noticed, liked, disliked etc. Just too hard to record every bit of speech, notes, thoughts, etc. Too much going on, too fast.
-Chris Hurd rocks as social director
-really hard work can be really fun - I'm exhausted but having a ball.

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Tomorrow the talent shows up - model/dancers, actor/martial arts guy. Motion studies, low light performance, and other good stuff. All tethered and recorded uncompressed as well. Talent was told to bring camera unfriendly attire - we WANT to see how bad reds bleed, strips jitter, etc. to see which ones work best. So test footage won't be pretty, but it'll be informative.

OK, too tired to say more. Go look at annotated picky-churrs from the shoot today.

-mike