HD For Indies

Listen to it here.

Austin, Texas-based Forgent Networks announced late Thursday that its Compression Labs Inc. subsidiary has filed suit against 31 companies for patent infringement -- among them, Apple. Compression Labs alleges that these companies have infringed its U.S. Patent No. 4,698,672. The patent describes a "coding system for reducing redundancy" that Forgent says is integral in JPEG image compression. [MacCentral]

Mike's Comments: File this one next to the SCO Linux lawsuits. Quite quite possibly frivolous. I don't know the nitty gritty yet, but it's quite striking how all of a sudden smaller companies are trying to exert pressure on larger, ah, shall we say, more profitable companies over possible patent infringement.

Perhaps when this most recent spate is over, maybe maybe MAYBE the government will reform our patent process, and hire more (and more qualified) examiners, etc.

Readers discuss expensive, high-performance Mac storage area networks. [MacInTouch]

Mike's Comments: This thread has been running since XSan was announced at NAB. Folks are talking about other options already on the market. I finally got the salient answer to my question about "What's the big deal about XSan? What does it do that I can't do already?"

THE ANSWER: You can hook up MULTIPLE Macs to that 2 GB Fiber Channel connection, instead of just one Mac. Enables workground functionality, not just server or single Mac connection

Capture Now time limit not functioning [MacInTouch]

Greetings all - I'm back in Austin, sitting at a funky little south Austin coffee shop (Bouldin Creek), wirelessly blogging whilst awaiting my breakfast tacos. Oh, God, I'm becoming one of THOSE people...

STILL haven't had a chance to sit down and go through my audio notes. And with 500 video clips to sift, color correct, and recompress into 1000 DV files for a client's project by Tuesday morning, I may not for a few days yet.

OK, sorry, I'm getting into personal blog mode which Charlie Wood of GlobeLogger.com made me promise not to do if he was going to help me.

SO, TO THE POINT:

While I was at the Digital Cinema track at NAB, one of the panelists made a point to the effect of (not an exact quote):

"When was the last time you heard a Kodak or Fuji rep talking about how much better film is than digital? (Mike's note: he was talking about reps for the consumer 35mm film industry)

"No? Me either."

"The motion picture film industry lives at the behest of the consumer film industry."

Keep in mind, that gorgeous 35mm film, that has better lattitude, better resolution, nearly infinitely variable frame rate, is all based on consumer 35mm still photography film. The professional still 35mm film industry is also just an offshoot based on the vast infrastructure, technology, and especially the economies of scale that allows motion picture film to leverage all those benefits I just mentioned of being a big industry.

As digital still photography continues it's aggressive takeover of the marketplace, the amount of film being sold decreases. (How many of your NON movie junkie friends still shoot film for their snapshots? How many digital pictures do YOU take as compared to film?) Polaroid filed for bancruptcy not too long ago. I need to check stats on it, but I'm sure Kodak, Fuji, Agfa, etc. sales are down for 35mm film.

So how long until the price of 35mm film stock goes up, because there isn't as much of a consumer industry to amortize those research and development efforts across? Do the new stocks being advocated for DI (Digital Intermediary) work, such as Kodak's 5218, cost more or less than their predecessors? It's always easy to claim something new costs more to amortize that recent R&D, but that is an easy way to hide the fact that it just NEEDS to cost more since there isn't as much consumer industry to support these efforts.

Assuming this logic is correct, it is inevitable that the cost of film stock will rise.

In the meantime, digital acquisition devices, such as the Thomson Viper, the Dalsa Origin, the Arriflex product (only a "functional demonstration unit" at this time), wil drop in price. Dalsa hopes to rent their bulky camera, with the bulkier drive storage device, for around $3000 a day. Ouch. But then again, that includes all the footage you want to shoot (assuming you don't exceed the storage capacity of the attached heavy heavy HEAVY disk array), and it's already digitized imagery, so no need to develop/process film and scan it in. And oh yeah, it's previewable immediately on set. And it has excellent dynamic range, blah blah blah.

I need to do some spreadsheet work here - what is the breakeven point, in terms of how much footage shot per day, developed and scanned, equals the cost of a Dalsa Origin? And if it isn't feasible to match those, how long until it is? At what price point will Dalsa be on par with film, at least from a cost perspective?

It is clear that the cost of digital acquisition devices will drop over time - that is the nature of digital technology. Moore's law and all. Plus, it's clear that this is the brand new, just invented tech - we're at the most expensive point in the price/performance scale. These technologies are just getting into the cost effective, product-izable point in the development chain.

So film is going to get more expensive, digital is going to get cheaper.

How many years until a movie will advertise "shot on glorious film, just like in the Golden Era of moviemaking, not this new cheap digital stuff"?

It'll happen. Or at least it's certainly possible. Just a matter of time and changing opinions.

First off, sorry so much of this is so raw, unedited, and lacking links. I've been in a huge hurry to get it all posted (late for a date as I type this even now).

I am a Bad Blogger. Bad bad blogger. Don't do it again.

Secondly, there were some issues with the Atom and RSS feeds such that you might have missed some posts. We think we have them fixed, much thanks to Charlie Wood from GlobeLogger.com for his ongoing help and support. (See? I linked! ...once....)

UPDATE Saturday afternoon - site adjusted so that all NAB content is still on the (ridiculously long) main page. But I have posted 30,000 to 35,000 words since I arrived at NAB last week (I'm back home in Austin, praise be.)

Notes from the show floor, Day 4:

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posted some new pictures of the following:

-Rorke Data Systems' Galaxy 16i RAID setup, utilizing RAID 5 with 16 SATA drives. Tweaked firmware in RAID controller allows for awesome 500+ MB/sec transfers

-Jeff Cree from Band Pro - this guy (and everyone else from there I talked to) sell a LOT of HD gear, and REALLY know what they are talking about. Not the cheapest vendor, but you get what you pay for. Training etc. included in the package deal, I spoke to some of their clients wandering around the booth asking their own questions and EVERYONE spoke glowingly of them.

-Element Labs is an Austin, TX (where I'm from) based company that makes a pixel wall - each of those squares is a single color, and you can drive it from a QuickTime or AVI file. A few pictures showing different images being displayed.

-some images of the user interface of the Da Vinci color correction ystem. Here, they are doing secondary color corrections. They grey middle bar shows what color area in the spectrum you're adjusting, the pyramid/diagonals around it controls the falloff (this is very much like Photoshop's Hue/Sat controls). Above it are controls for Black level, gamma, gain, and knee, much like a traditional lab color timer would do. Also note in the second pic the arbitrary area defining tools (for color correction in a particular area)

-a JL Cooper control surface, the left side is about $3000 and the right side is about $2000. Synthetic Aperture is working on a a version 2 of Color Finesse that will allow use of this hardware (the controls drive Color Finesse.) Very cool, very high end.

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OK, Day 4, everybody's verrrrrrrrrry tired...

Went by the Da Vinci booth and checked our their product line, first time I'd been able to sit down and see how their workflow works. Finally got a tour of how the system works, their workflow for primary (overall scene) color correction vs. secondary (channel/color range specific) color correction. Interesting to see, sdie by side, old school style lab type color corrections next to modern, Photoshop like color correction tools. They can do realtime from telecine systems at 2K, but from disk they are 6-15fps, limited mainly because their isn't a sufficiently fast/robust data pipe to do it realtime. Drive throughput and a bus to run it over seem to be the limits. But a 2K realtime system runs into the 1.2 to 1.5 million dollar price range.


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follow up on the Kodak Look Management System: it will be supported (and integrated into?) the Discreet Lustre color grading system. They talked about having the client version available for something like several hundred to one thousand dollars for a price point, which is reasonable considering all that it is going to do.

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clarification: color correction and color grading are really the same thing. Sorta like the difference between lawyer and attorney: attorney sounds more expensive.


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Went by the Christie booth and talked geek with them some more. Internally it can handle data up to 15 bits per channel, but there is no transport that supports that as yet (no pipe, be it the digital transport protocol nor a defined hardware connection for it to run over). But it will handle 12 bit SMPTE 372M, which is 2048x1080 at 24fps 12bit, which looks GREAT. Also, the price point is the same as their 1280x1024 (obviously non-square) version, at $120,000. This is good news, my gut expectation was around $200K.


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Went by the Rorke Data Systems booth and had a long talk with John Rorke. Their primary user base is medical and industrial image archiving. Clearly they make some very powerful, robust, well thought out products. I haven't checked pricing, but I'm sure it's not cheap. They get a full team in on a bid, so they offer EXTREMELY thorough, competent solutions....that may be overkill for the lower end of the market that I'm addressing. But if I were working on a full sized Hollywood feature, I'd be talking to them.

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At the Da Vinci booth, noticed Element Labs was right next door. These guys make configurable (different pixel dimensions) pixel walls that you can feed from a digital file (AVI/QuickTime type stuff). Not in our area of needs, but still way cool. See notes above about their color correction tools.


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Stopped by Reflecmedia. They make a greenscreen backing that has the same kind of glass reflective microbead stuff that is in the shiny tabs on your running shoes. you know, the stuff that reflects light directly back at the source. But rather than having it on your shoes to keep from getting run over at night, they put a ring of LEDs around the lense of your camera that are either green or blue (or a combo kit that'll do both) so that you get green light (or blue) bouncing back to the camera. It makes FANTASTIC green screen backing. you can bunch it up, fold it, etc. and it still generates a GREAT matte. Imagine putting a 60 degree bend in it...and it generates no shadow. See their web samples to get the idea. The backing itself is neutral grey, it just reflects whatever color you throw at it DIRECTLY back at the source. So all your fill/key lights don't get into the key color, just the stuff from that ring around the lense. Very very clever idea, hampered by the cost. But it makes it possible to do things like have a grip walk along carrying this thing behind actors somewhere, and be able to key them out without requiring a huge painted, perfectly lit wall.

They have a 7x7 square of the stuff (It's $30 sq/ft), with the lighting ring that goes on/around the lense, the lighting intensity controller, for either $1700 or $2700, I can't recall without checking my notes.

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Went by the Plug In Pavillion and saw a few things:

Trapcode had a very interesting 3D particle system running in After Effects, and it could interact (including bouncing off the alpha layer) with 2 other AE layers (no more).

Jim Tierny of Digital Anarchy had a new plugin to do a 3D layer that you could feed an animated bump map. Both this and the Trapcode (another one man shop) show further integration of 3D into After Effects as true 3D stuff, not just 2D renderings of 3D stuff. Both of'em could use the AE camera to pan around'em and stuff. So they are "real" 3D within AE

Talked to Bob at Synthetic Aperture, makers of Echo Fire and Color Finesse. Bob was showing Color Finesse 2.0, due this summer, that is both a standalone and an AE plugin. Allows for 32 bit floating point color correction, and renders at about 1/4 real time (10 second clip takes 40 seconds to render). Talked about 8, 10, and 12 bit support. 10 bit in Final Cut Pro works, 12 bit was a bit vague, will have to talk to the FCP folks and see if/when that exists. Bob was also showing integration with a nice JL Cooper control surface to do color correction with controls like the big boys have. Very nice. See pictures, link at top of this report.

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Personal note: while talking to Bob from Synthetic, they made the "the show is OVER. Go home!" announcement. Fetched my bags from bag check, waited 1/2 hour for a cab, hooked up with Steve Roselle from Alias (friend of mine from Austin), went to airport, got on my delayed flight and CAME HOME.

While I was at NAB, I was debating the wisdom of pursuing all this stuff. I met so many people that knew so much more than I did (although I knew more than a lot of others, and nobody I talked to knew all the stuff from all the areas). Most often I was learning tons from the vendors, sometimes I had useful information for them that they'd write down (so I don'think they were just humoring me). So it was daunting being the diletante amongst the knowledgable and experienced.

So was I nuts to want to pursue a digital filmmaking career in Austin? Was I crazy to think I could make a living, let alone make a difference?

And then, from the airport, as I caught a cab home, I was talking to the cabbie (Doug Sivad, driving whilst he finishes an advanced degree), and he asked where I was coming from, and he tells me he's working on a documentary about native Seminoles down in Mexico (I may have this wrong, it was 1am). We chatted all the way home about new stuff I'd seen, and about the workflow they were undertaking, and about how to get all this stuff done, and what a cool doc it was going to be when finished.

See?

This stuff is EVERYWHERE. People DO want to get involved, are involved, are doing things, they just don't know how to get it all done.

I think there is a lot of this stuff going on in Austin, I'm always hearing about how there is a ton of low level film making/video making going in Austin, but everyone is off doing their own thing and not talking to each other. Not to be secretive, they're just busy doing their own thing, getting (or trying to get) it done and just DOING it, rather than talking about it and crowing about who they know etc. etc.

So yeah, that felt like a great vindication of where I'm going. I do think I can make a meaningful, empowering difference....

...but can I make a living? Time will tell.

Tell me your thoughts - email me at mike@hdforindies.com

PS-this sounds like such a convenient set-up, that the cabbie is a scholar making his own doc. Sounds like a perfectly made up, Shattered Glass type story. But it's absolutely true! : )

-mike

Day 2 Pics

Day3 Pics

Update: I fixed my math on the Dalsa section.

Day 3 Afternoon/Evening Notes

It's taking too long each night to go through my audio notes, so I'm just going to go over what I recall off the top of my head from each booth I visited.

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I have updated pictures of the ARRI functional demonstration unit, a couple of screen grabs from Kodak's look management system, a picture of the Lumiere developer, a picture of an HD block camera from Sony, pictures of the mythical Sony products (pictures of pictures of them), Pinnacle's proposed workflows, Tony my new British friend, yet another incredibly high speed digital video camera (1000 fps at 1600x1200), indoor helicopters (I forgot to mention the unicylist), the Thomson Viper digital camera, it's capture box and inputs, the Dalsa Origin camera and it's side panel readouts, and some screenshots from the presentation on how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was put together in post. Go here to check them out.

I'll come back and fill in the details after I go through my 10 or so hours of audio notes.

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Went by the ARRI booth again, called a functional demonstration. They'll ship in hopefully a year, and they want it to be price competitive with a similarly equipped 35mm camera. They see TV shows that are shooting film that are being pressured to shoot HD as their primary target market.

It's 12-bit 4:4:4 dual link HD-SDI 2048x1080, which is SMPTE 372M....I think...I'll have to confirm against my notes.

Still, it's a big heavy beast...but intended for studio usage, and can record to a standard HDCAM SR tape...at least in 1920x1080 mode.

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Went back by the JVC booth to grill Frederick, the Lumiere developer, on writing back to HDV. HDV is an MPEG-2 transport stream, so you need an MPEG-2 encoder. The Heuris folk had expressed doubt that Lumiere had it's own encoder. I very explicitly asked Frederick about this, and he said yes they DO have an encoder, it's built from some open source/public domain stuff. The question then is how good is it as compared to Heuris', which has a long history of making high quality, broadcast grade encoders. I'll try to figure out a way to do a side by side comparison on some various test footage.

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Went by the Sony booth after all the hype about them getting into HDV...and it's all RSN-Ware (Real Soon Now). Although it's not RSN at all. First the bad news: intending to ship by winter.

The good news: Sony is going to do HDV the usual way they do HD: 1080i. Although I was suprised to see a slide that said 1440x1080 interlaced. I'll check my notes, I coulda sworn we were talking 1920x1080i. Talked to a technical guy, he said 25 megabit 1080i (JVC's 720p is 19Mbit), NTSC for sure but PAL who knows (we want 25 close to 24 fps, we could work with that). Definitely going to be 3 chip as are all Sony high end products (they have dibs on 3 CCD HD stuff, everybody else has to go CMOS).

In the demo (of nothing, so I guess it was just a presentation) they mentioned monitoring, and that the Luma series LCD monitors would have FireWire in for viewing HDV. That implies the presence of a hardware codec, likely to be $400-$800 additional for the unit (probably an add-in board).

The deck would read/write HDV to mini-DV presumably, and I don't know what other tape formats. Deck would cost less than camera, not stipulated how much.

Camera and deck shipping winter hopefully, didn't catch when the improved Luma monitors were expected.

Oh, and he said it'll do "real" timecode as metadata, but not VITC or longitudinal timecode, since this is after all a digital bytestream of MPEG-2 transport stream. So they're fixing one of the big problems we've seen. How's that for torture - JVC does the progressive format, but only at 720 without real timecode, and Sony does the right resolution with timecode, but as interlaced...and perhaps as a 4:3 aspect.

All together now: AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!

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But video lenses and film lenses are set up ENTIRELY differently. Film lenses expect to focus their image on a perfectly planar 35mm imaging area of essentially zero depth. Video lenses expect to go through a prism for 3 CCDs, or a Bayer type filter for a CMOS imaging setup. When someone asked for commentary on qualitative comparisons between a Bayer filter CMOS and 3 CCDs, the cinematographer audience groaned, and the moderator said that was a seminar or conference unto itself (that interchange was during the Digital Cinema summit).


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"ingest" is replacing the word "capture" which replaced "digitize" in the industry lingo. You're not trendy if you didn't call it ingesting this year. Perhaps it will migrate to "ingesting content" rather than "ingesting footage" since the foot in footage was feet of film. (Say that 5 times fast.)

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One nice thing about the new Panasonic $25000 DVCPRO HD deck is that it will read everything back to mini-DV. So mini-DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO HD, and I might have missed something in there. But a pretty wide gamut of medium quality footage at each resolution (but no uncompressed). Even D-5 is 4:2:2, don't forget.

One bad thing that came up during the Final Cut Pro user group (and boy, that was detail laden!) was that the $25000 Panasonic deck would let you Print To Tape just fine from FCP, but that you couldn't do a frame accurate insert edit - such as if you wanted to replace a scene in the middle of a tape. For that, you'd need the more powerful/capable $66,000 deck. OOUCH!! So just lay down a new tape.

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Swung by the Leitch booth, they have a $10,000 HD editor called Velocity HD. But the most interesting things in their booth were the short scifi film by Blur Studios (Tim Miller, continue to kick it in the Major Bad Ass department, I was on a panel with him a few years ago and impressed with his forthrightness). Then I saw Tony my new British friend, so I was done with Leitch and left. It does some realtime stuff, blah blah blah, I'll read my literature on it later. Can you tell it's a long show? Can you tell I'm getting tired?

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Swung by the Kodak booth to check out their Kodak Look Management System that I'd heard such high praise for at the Digital Cinema Summit over the weekend. It looks very interesting, very promising. Let's you use it as both a previsualization tool ("What if we....") and a defining standard ("Yo! Everybody! THIS is how I want it to look when we're done!"). Kodak has DEEP knowledge in these areas, and I have a fairly high degree of confidence they'll be able to pull this off. It let's you tell it what film stock you used, what kind of positive you made from that, what film you used to make a print or what telecine device you used, etc. It can then generate a 3D lookup table. How big? 17 cubed data points, with "tetrahedral interpolation" if I heard that right from the very young but frighteningly sharp tech guy. 17 cubed 3D color lookup tables with tetrahedral interpolation. Yeah, um, right. 220, 221, whatever it takes...you want fries with that, sir?

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Went by the Pinnacle booth where they were showing off their Liquid line of products, all the way from DV to uncompressed HD. Booth was swamped, I'll have to read the literature to see if they told me anything real in there.

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Checked out Canon's booth, no HDV products to show here. But they're working on it. Man, GL2's are small and cool. I want one.

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Went by Huge and Medea's booths. Both have similar products, both are expensive. Did learn that RAID 3 is what they recommend for video. Woops, I covered this already.

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Sauntered into Thomson's booth to check out the Viper. I've seen too many cameras. It's another contender in the 1080p24 space. Shoots high enough res that they have a digital capture box with drives in it. Details to follow, but pics online. I'm pretty sure this one can do 12 bit data, the guy was interested when I told him BlackMagic for sure and maybe AJA can handle 12 bit data, and BlackMagic was writing their own 12bit codec, and BlackMagic had 14 bit linear D/A component monitoring, which would allow for 12bit log conversion to 14 bit linear, with loadable CLUTs in their converter box for 23HD 8bit monitoring, blah blah blah I'm getting lost here but you get the idea and so did he since he wrote it down.


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As 6 pm approached, I zipped over to Dalsa's booth to see some more about their camera. 4K, 16 bit internally, they're sending 12 bit (log I think, could be linear) down their quad fiber connection to a rather LARGE box (padded rack width, about 18-24 inches tall, 2 plus feet deep) that is basically a whompin' big disc array with just enough brains to know where to put all those zeroes and ones. Again, sufficient data pipes are what is slowing them down. They are perfectly capable of 48 frames per second at present, but the imager could go to 60 fps (if you had LOTS of light), but there is no interface to handle that kind of data rate at the moment. So the math is this: 4K x 2K (I don't know the exact res off the top of my head, so go with me here) is a 46MB file in 16 bit color. 24 frames per second of that is 1.1 gigabytes PER SECOND. 48 frames per second, which they can do, is 2.2 Gigs PER SECOND. DAMN. 60 would be 2.7 GB/sec.

Now I see why storage is such an issue for 4K.

want a 2 hour movie? Even just the final movie would be 126 terabytes at that size, not including the source scans, the color corrected scans, the shooting ratio, the editing ratio, the DI copy & extra files, the effects files, etc.

Let's carry that out. You wouldn't keep everything 16 bit, but let's call a 2 hour movie's worth of 4K 16 bit 125 TB (terabytes). Multiply all that out and it would be EASY to have a petabyte of info for a movie. Obviously not everything would be 4K 16 bit, but still...It would be cake to use half a petabyte or more (or a LOT more) for one movie.

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Finally, I then walked straight over to the Final Cut Pro User Group Meeting at the Stardust. Easily 500 people there for the meeting. Cool. Among other stuff they showed some footage from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

OK, that's cool, but why you ask. Because the whole movie was done on the desktop. They shot HD, edited and color corrected it in 8 bit in Final Cut Pro 3 and 4, did a lot of their compositing in After Effects, and did the 3D with Maya, all on desktop machines. All the editing was on Macs and digital dailies of effects and treated looks on DVD with DVD Studio Pro using Compressor or Bitvice, and After Effects work was rendered on a PC render farm. All done on Macs. I think Shake may have been used some too, and the original plan was to be all desktop in one facility to do the whole movie. The studio wanted it out in time for summer, so 1/3 of the effects shots were sent out. Now the render farm keeps getting added on to so they can get the movie rendered out in time.

Every frame of the movie is a render, and virtually always a bluescreen shoot composited on 3D backgrounds.

So very very impressive.

All done with KonaHD boards. Ironically, they had playback problems up on stage. Poor guys...in front of a room full of hard core Mac-head editors, no less. But the whole movie was done with that as the crucial lynchpin of production...

Day 3 Notes from mid-day:

-went by the Apple X-RAID area to ask some more about disk throughput stuff, wanting throughput info to know how it performed when the array was full. The guy I spoke to said they have some patent pending tricks (check out the PTO office site to find details) about disk file location optimization. It doesn't just write from the outer edge towards the spindle, and it doesn't just counter stripe (one drive writes edge towards spindle, every other does spindle towards edge).

Went by Eyeon to see their Digital Fusion 4.04 (shipping soon). it's way cool, very powerful, does float, supports ILM's .efx extended exposure range format, etc.

Matrox booth was previewing their HD system to ship by end of year. they were demoing real time 2 layers uncompressed HD, with 4 layers of graphics. Wow. Also will do real time color correction, etc. Shipping end of year. What codec? He wouldn't/couldn't say. No comment

Medea was showing the same array with either SCSI or fiber channel connectors. Does 250 MB/sec, down to about 180 MB/sec at end. RAID 3. Still not cheap.

-Huge blocks off part of the drives as inaccessible to make sure the throughput is all there...but doesn't make it available for anything else...why not make it available for graphics, etc.? they do have some great looking cases that look like mini-G5's, with drilled fronts and round hoop handles. Nice idea, not as eloquently implemented as Apple's. You can see the difference quality machining makes. also expensive.

I happened to have caught a cab over with the the CEO of Popwire, maker of Compression Master. In the Sky Micro booth I finally got a power demo of Compression Master. Why does this project exist? I asked myself this when I saw the press release for the launch of the product. It is going after Discreet's Cleaner. Why? I wondered. And then I found out - Discreet laid off the Cleaner Mac team - they're walking away from it.

I'll cover this in depth later, but it's really powerful, better controls than Cleaner, faster/better MPEG-2 than Cleaner.

If you haven't bought cleaner and you need a solution, buy it. If you have Cleaner and want something better, buy it. About $500.

Went by Curious Software - not Curious Labs, maker of Poser - these are some guys that used to make Matador Paint. It's aimed at broadcast market, where their mapping software rules the broadcast world. It is for matte and effects artists. It's like Photoshop animatable, or After Effects with paint. Not sure if it's a sufficient Commotion replacement, but he was saying there are a lot of disgruntled Commotion users coming over to them, unhappy with the way things have gone since Pinnacle acquired Puffin Designs, original creators of Commotion, written by Scott Squires from ILM. (I used to office a few hundred feet away from these guys in Sausalito)

Went back by QuVis booth and talked to George Scheckel some more at QuVis, their VP of Biz Dev. Their product does 30:1 visually lossless compression of 4K footage at 16 bit (internally), and does a realtime conversion to 12-bit, dual link HD SDI 2048x1080 to a high end DLP projector such as a Christie. The biggest bottleneck right now for better projection is a physical connection standard to send higher than 2K imagery to a projector. Panasonic has a 3800 some-odd resolution projector in the works, Sony supposedly has a 4K they'll show at InfoComm in June.

I'm going to walk back over to the JVC booth to verify the write back to HDV capapbilities of Lumiere.

Mike, 2:12pm Wednesday

NOTE: My RSS feed seems to be screwy, use the Atom feed for most up to date results.

I couldn't get online this morning to post yesterday's reports, so here's my comments from Day 2 on the NAB trade show floor.


Had a long talk with various guys at the BlackMagic booth, and got lots of encouraging news. Talked to Erick who has done about 20 HD projects with BlackMagic's own PhotoJPEG and offlines with 1080p24 all the time, says it works great.

Talked to the CEO about the 14 bit D/A analong monitoring, he said 14 bit linear is about the same as 12 bit log, so that will work for film folks. The HDLink can load in CLUTs, they are working on software to build/load your own high bit depth CLUTs. They are working on their own 12-bit codec. The spec, if I am interpreting this correctly, allows for 40 bit - 4:4:4:4, with is 10 bits per channel, including an alpha. By dropping the alpha, you can add two more bits to each color value, thus allowing the 12 bit.

But nobody's gear supports that...yet. There is no 12 bit tape format. But for film and DI workflows, this could be quite quite useful.

The HDLink product supports 12 bit dual link connections (so 4:4:4 12 bit), and I have yet to hear any functional distinction between what it does and what the eCinema does and what

Talked to a guy from Bluefish 4:4:4 about why they left the Mac...basically they tried and tried and couldn't get G4 to work properly for their needs...found out Apple had never tested some things, and Bluefish was essentially doing Apple's QA. Then they saw in the high end industry that sequential files was the way all the high end gear was going - that was what they were using - so they wanted to go that way. Then the G5s came out and things worked, but they'd already committed to a #'d file approach, and were going on the PC. They could still come out with a Mac product if they wanted to...

had a long talk at the Panasonic booth with Stuart, he explained how the Varicam really works. The tape format is built around 720p60, so it has to write SOMETHING for each of those 60 "slots" as it were per second. The catch is, internally, it can buffer, and separate what it captures and what it writes.

So it can do true and correct time sampling from 4 to 60 fps. It just writes repeated frames whenever there isn't a one to one correlation between the shooting rate and the writing rate....then adds user bits to identify which frames are different and new, and other metadata identifies the correct duration of that frame.

They are working on an application (or acquiring one, or bundling somebody else's) to let you ramp your timing during a shot and then correctly re-interpolate it from the user bits in the datastream on the Mac. Or something like that. I'll have to listen to my recording of that again.

Spent some time at the Boxx booth to see their uncompressed HD stuff. No real time anything, they are using the BlueFish HD something card. Interestingly, all their literature art is by my friend Policarpo Wood who I used to work with at frogdesign. Rockin'.

So I wasn't impressed with the realtime capapbilities. About 10:1 render time for transitions, about 14:1 render time for color corrections.

However, Premiere Pro 1.5 is pretty interesting. A very After Effects looking interface. Most amazingly, you can highlight a clip in your Premiere Pro timeline, hit copy, go to After Effects, hit Paste, and it drops the clip into the timeline. NO EXPORT FROM PREMIERE AND IMPORT INTO AE. WOW Do some subtle keyframing of the layer - scale, rotate, etc., animate the values as you want...now copy it, go back to Premiere, and hit paste...and it drops into the timeline WITH ALL THE KEYFRAMING ATTRIBUTES!!! Many/most plugins will work interoperably. This easy moving back and forth clearly implies they have moved the incredibly high quality transform engine from After Effects and moved it into Premiere Pro. This is incredibly useful and powerful from a workflow perspective for all those needing to do some tweaking in their editing workflow. This is pretty genius, in that you get the best of both worlds. You wouldn't want the complexity of the AE interface in Premiere, but you can access all the power. This makes me want to have an FCP to Premiere workflow. Automatic Duck? This implies a possible desktop DI type workflow, even though very, VERY non-realtime. This ties into my next comment...

Integration and HD are the two big themes of the show. As the prior paragraph shows, Adobe is serious about tight integration amongst their products. Apple wanted similarly tight integration, so Audition, FCP, & Motion all play very nicely together. Avid is also in on this, with Avid XPress Studio - includes 3D (SoftImage), effects (Based on Boris stuff), audio (Pro Tools LE), editing, etc. etc. etc. They are REALLY trying to hit the soup-to-nuts solutions and have it all tie in nicely...and they've got top-quality parts across the product line up (well, I'm not a huge fan of Boris...). But still, it's mighty impressive.

I had a long talk with Algolith developers (plugins) about the need to port their image scaling and time adjusting plugins to FCP. They had been reluctant to do so because they had heard editors want everything real time....but it's understood that difficult effects take too long.

I also talked to RealViz aobut their Retimer product, and they have a $350 standard def and a $700 high def FCP version (only linear time transforms, no spline based, ramp-up retiming) in addition to their $1700 standalone app. 20% off at the show. The timing: a 1.3 GHz Pentium mobile takes about 30 minutes to retime a 20 second clip. Scale that accordingly to your computer. I'll be in touch with them about the FCP product.

OK, I'm off to see Dalsa, Christie, etc. today.

NOTE: My RSS feed seems to be screwy, use the Atom feed for most up to date results.

I couldn't get online this morning to post yesterday's reports, so here's my comments from Day 2 on the NAB trade show floor.


Had a long talk with various guys at the BlackMagic booth, and got lots of encouraging news. Talked to Erick who has done about 20 HD projects with BlackMagic's own PhotoJPEG and offlines with 1080p24 all the time, says it works great.

Talked to the CEO about the 14 bit D/A analong monitoring, he said 14 bit linear is about the same as 12 bit log, so that will work for film folks. The HDLink can load in CLUTs, they are working on software to build/load your own high bit depth CLUTs. They are working on their own 12-bit codec. The spec, if I am interpreting this correctly, allows for 40 bit - 4:4:4:4, with is 10 bits per channel, including an alpha. By dropping the alpha, you can add two more bits to each color value, thus allowing the 12 bit.

But nobody's gear supports that...yet. There is no 12 bit tape format. But for film and DI workflows, this could be quite quite useful.

The HDLink product supports 12 bit dual link connections (so 4:4:4 12 bit), and I have yet to hear any functional distinction between what it does and what the eCinema does and what

Talked to a guy from Bluefish 4:4:4 about why they left the Mac...basically they tried and tried and couldn't get G4 to work properly for their needs...found out Apple had never tested some things, and Bluefish was essentially doing Apple's QA. Then they saw in the high end industry that sequential files was the way all the high end gear was going - that was what they were using - so they wanted to go that way. Then the G5s came out and things worked, but they'd already committed to a #'d file approach, and were going on the PC. They could still come out with a Mac product if they wanted to...

had a long talk at the Panasonic booth with Stuart, he explained how the Varicam really works. The tape format is built around 720p60, so it has to write SOMETHING for each of those 60 "slots" as it were per second. The catch is, internally, it can buffer, and separate what it captures and what it writes.

So it can do true and correct time sampling from 4 to 60 fps. It just writes repeated frames whenever there isn't a one to one correlation between the shooting rate and the writing rate....then adds user bits to identify which frames are different and new, and other metadata identifies the correct duration of that frame.

They are working on an application (or acquiring one, or bundling somebody else's) to let you ramp your timing during a shot and then correctly re-interpolate it from the user bits in the datastream on the Mac. Or something like that. I'll have to listen to my recording of that again.

Spent some time at the Boxx booth to see their uncompressed HD stuff. No real time anything, they are using the BlueFish HD something card. Interestingly, all their literature art is by my friend Policarpo Wood who I used to work with at frogdesign. Rockin'.

So I wasn't impressed with the realtime capapbilities. About 10:1 render time for transitions, about 14:1 render time for color corrections.

However, Premiere Pro 1.5 is pretty interesting. A very After Effects looking interface. Most amazingly, you can highlight a clip in your Premiere Pro timeline, hit copy, go to After Effects, hit Paste, and it drops the clip into the timeline. NO EXPORT FROM PREMIERE AND IMPORT INTO AE. WOW Do some subtle keyframing of the layer - scale, rotate, etc., animate the values as you want...now copy it, go back to Premiere, and hit paste...and it drops into the timeline WITH ALL THE KEYFRAMING ATTRIBUTES!!! Many/most plugins will work interoperably. This easy moving back and forth clearly implies they have moved the incredibly high quality transform engine from After Effects and moved it into Premiere Pro. This is incredibly useful and powerful from a workflow perspective for all those needing to do some tweaking in their editing workflow. This is pretty genius, in that you get the best of both worlds. You wouldn't want the complexity of the AE interface in Premiere, but you can access all the power. This makes

I'm posting pictures of interesting things from NAB. See the following:

Best of Digital Cinema Track

NAB Trade Show Day 1

Check the top of that screen, I'll post further pics on an ongoing basis.

Saw both of these products yesterday back to back.

Both are doing HDV in, conversion to something the Mac can understand, then convert the footage to something you can edit with (your choice of offline codec), then you edit with the offline footage, then they both use the same Offline/Media Manager tricks in FCP to let you swap back out to the high quality footage. You then export that as a single file (not writing to tape from timeline) and can then write it back to HDV tape or D-VHS (both use the same format).

Both are standalone apps or single apps (Lumiere is just one program, Indie HD Toolkit is 3)

Lumiere seems to have a few ease-of-use advantages. It hands off to FCP from it's little program using XML so you can do batch type operations. If automatically "glues" the audio and video files back together in batch so you don't have to do it yourself, one at a time, in QT Pro, to EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL CLIP YOU WANT TO CAPTURE....which is what Indie HD Toolkit requires you to do. I asked about this, and got an answer from a high level Heuris person that I found....less than convincing. They said it was essentially no big deal, that they'd rather do it themselves, and you're going to toss the audio half the time anyway.

Both require you to MANUALLY go through your footage and hit Capture Start and Capture Stop. THERE IS NO BATCH/LOG CAPTURE feature in either. Both realize that is what customers want, and neither is able to deliver it at this time. Part of the problem may be the lack of "real" timecode in HDV, which is an MPEG-2 transport stream. It has some kind of tape code, but frame accuracy appears to be a problem.

The Heuris guy (Heuris make Indie HD Toolkit, and has a LONG history making MPEG encoders, and have a great deal of experience with it) expressed extreme doubt that Lumiere had an HDV encoder. He said something to the effect of "No way...that's 5 man years of effort to do that right." That's not an exact quote, but it was something very close to that. Part of his doubt may have come from how their product is set up. If you just want to capture and get into FCP, it's an approximately $500 product ($400 at the show). If you want to write back to HDV, it's another $4800 or so ($3800 or so at the show.)

Lumiere is $179, $149 at the show. So I need to go back to their booth and see them write altered, edited, composited footage back to tape. We'll see if it does the whole soup to nuts thing right after all.

So far now, Lumiere sounds better. I have complete trust that the Heuris product will work front to back, allowing you to make your color corrections and stuff. Heuris was casting doubt (or at least expressing doubt, I need to be accurate...and nice) that Lumiere was able to write back to the HDV MPEG-2 format.

But when I specifically asked the developer (Frederick, ex-CIO of Hooked on Phonics) whether I could create stuff from scratch - like motion graphics from After Effects - and get it back to HDV, he said yes. So I need to ask what they use to encode back to MPEG-2. Who'd they license, etc.?

OK, this is jumping back a few days to the Digital Cinema track/symposium. There was a panel on long term archives for all these movies we are making, for both the digital assets and the analog film assets.

NOTE TO SELF - I SHOULD WRITE AN ARTTICLE ON DIGITAL ARCHIVING...THEY TALKED AOBUT SAVING THE DIGITGLA MASTER FINAL AND THE SOURCE FILMED OCN, AND THE FINAL PRINT FILM ASTER...BUT SOURCE FILM HAS SO LITTLE TO DO WITH FINAL IN THIS DAY AND AGE, IT IS ALMOST USELESS...LIKE HAVING A PERFECT COPY OF THE CANVAS PICASSO PAINTED ON, OR THE MARBLE BLOCK JUST LIKE THE ONE MICHAELANGELO CHISELED INTO - IT HAS SO LITTLE TO DO WITH THE ART THAT TOOK PLACE, IT IS MERELY ONE PIECE , one raw piece. It is a creative piece, but just an element.

and also about archiving how to put it all together again in paper docs, include the app and the OS...ideally you'd include the machine as well, but that's unlikely. As a society, we are FUCKED in that any data over 20 years old stored digitally is incrasngly nlikely to be radable anymore...or if we do have the softwre, do we still have access to compatible hardware? Ongoing forward migration is the only truly guaranteed solution, but is so pricey...are you really going to stick a top end SGI box on the shelf with a movie? No F-ing way.

So what to do?

1.) Store it in as obvious a way as possible. Compresion is great, until you can't decode it anymore. #d TIFF files wouldn't be a bad digital mastering format, or something similar that is grunt obvious, and each frame had structure info in the header. LOTS of redundancy at this point is important.

2.) Also store the analog version of it - 3 strip color seps isn't a bad idea.

3.) Paper instructions on low acid paper saying what you have, where it is,what's the format, and what's definition/structure of that format. Sprinkile copies of this metadata in throughout the archive. Only redundancy ensures future readability when there's partial loss. Think about getting tax audited in 6 years from now. Some of your records will be lost, and if you used any shorthand in our notes, you better have a keyguide somewhere or it's USELESS.

More on this later...

In short everything possible should be saved and iterated in different ways: a print of the film, analog color separations on black and white film (easy to create from digital), VERY stably filed simple, obvious file formats: #'d TIFF files or somesuch. Then as many of the digital assets as you can keep, including the apps and OS if at all possible...or contracts with the vendors to hold such in escrow (if intellectual property protection issues exist) for a LONG, LONG TIME. Then stable paper records of what you've got, how to read it (description of the TIFF format, and how to read the media it's on). Ideally an eternally archived drive or whatever it was stored on.

AS FOR MARKET PROTECTION ISSUES I MENTIONED YESTERDAY....finally got a good answer on that. PAL decks are built to maintain a precise tape transport speed to do either 25p or 50i. Similarly, NTSC decks precisely do 29.97 or 59.94. Sony, to do their HDCAM that handles 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 59.94, or 60 fields/frames per second, has to be able to be variable...and very precisely variable. That's why the other formats don't support the 24p standard. It's difficult. Now, why 720p24 is supported and not 1080p24 in HD-DV, I don't know. Maybe because that would be one more drum speed they didn't want to support.

Panasonic's Varicam is really shooting 60 frames per second, and then selecting SOME of those in order to make up it's 24 frames per second. This is necessary, because the drum speed (the spinning thingy that makes the tape go by) was originally set up to shoot 60 frames or fields per second. The math doesn't seem to divide out evenly, I suspect if you shot something moving at an exactly consistent speed through frame that the distance moved per frame would vary slightly - indicating that the frames were not all taken at precisely timed intervals. They say it does a good job, but that just sounds fishy to me. I don't know that I'd see the difference.

The DVCPRO HD deck from Panasonic is $25,000.

HDCAM Sony F500 deck is "$80,000 and change...a lot of change."

I met with Ted Schilowitz, Product Manager, Desktop Video Engines, AJA and had a talk with him about working with 1920x1080p24 footage, and some Kona specific workflow questions. Below are my notes. Sorry, no time to clean them up.

-they're based in Grass Valley
-shot on HDCAM, what is offline workflow option?
-couldn't do RT color correction with PhotoJPEG
-there are 40 SE's on FCP - which one did I talk to?
-current and past projects could do PhotoJPEG offline option
-was cool to use PhotoJPEG in past to tiny offline PhotoJPEG
-those PhotoJPEGs were framerate independent in QuickTime, could play it online,
-Techicolor has used it on 4 or 5 big projects
-PhotoJPEG story is going away
-PhotoJPEG was supported to make this stuff work in meantime knowing something better was coming
-Apple is strict about release announcements, so they were supporting this knowing there were better options coming down the road (DVCPRO HD)
-as of yesterday, "there's a better mousetrap, better than the PhotoJPEG mousetrap."
-with their Kona 2 shipping this summer, can go from any HD deck, capture to any of the DV-100 codecs. HD 720p24, 6MBytes/sec.
-there is no 1080p24 framerate. Supports 1080i59.94
-bring it in at 720p24 for offline
-finish as 1080p24 uncompressed batch recapture, media manager, etc.
-what about effects, scaling appropriately?
-talk to Sony & Panasonic about issues he says
-will effects etc. scale properly? Some no, because blurs or other pixel scale effects wouldn't be quite the same. You'd have to "resize" your effects, and/or build it at the bigger size and make an offline version to cut it
-when people did the PhotoJPEG, he told 'em to build the Photoshop at 1920x1080, make a PhotoJPEG size (NTSC sized), and when they relinked media using the Media Manager have it link up to the larger 1920x1080 sized artwork.
-can work, but a pain if you have a lot of effects, etc.
-"never a perfect mousetrap, but chipping away at it"
-can do a realtime transcode, which is contingent on their hardware...as compared to a Decklink or Cinewave...he doesn't know
-he knows that their product will do the realtime transcode, doesn't know about the others
-if have a 1080p24 and don't want to worry about the scaling issues...
-IS IT POSSIBLE TO CAPTURE AT 1920X1080 USING PHOTOJPEG? SEEMS LIKE NO
-the NTSC sized offline works pretty well...play with it

-IT IS POSSIBLE BUT NOT EASY, IT WAS NEVER DESIGNED FOR THAT, IT'S HARD TO PLAY IT BACK, THERE WAS A BUG IN FCP 4 THAT IT WOULDN'T CAPTURE FULL SIZED....LOOKS LIKE THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO ME WITH MY TEST WITH GERALD THE GERMAN GUY

-they've recommended 960x540 to work with (1/2 res, 1/4 # of pixels)
-SO DON'T TRY 1080P24 PHOTOJPEG? "I wouldn't think it would be the way to go at all" to do 1080p24 - "it's more trouble than it's worth, to try to use it full size...."{break}....he says it's great to use to export some clips to see if it plays back well, "run it to a digital cinema projector, that kind of stuff...but as an editing workflow, I don't think I'd do that."
-I asked if it's because it's CPU bound: "it's going through and encode and decode process." it's too much at this point with current hardware "it'll play, it's just...why...the 720p stuff is gonna work so much better, look so much better"
-for an effects heavy piece, what is recommended workflow for 1080p24 workflow for an offline choice for offline? HD-DV doesn't support it. He says it would be very interesting to experiment how difficult that scaling would be, or build a bank of effects in 1920 x 1080, then scaling down for the 720p offline, then re-link to the full res ones for the final. His bet it is the EASIER route than to try 1080p24.

Talk to another guy for another approach, Anton Linnaker who works for Technicolor, working with Final Cut, PhotoJPEG, He would be a real good guy to talk about down sides of PhotoJPEG and some of the upsides.

Realtime SD downconversion...it's the same broadcast quality conversion they sell to trucks and stuff all around the country, significant events like Monday Night Football and SuperBowl...NOT a monitoring downconversion.

The monitoring issue - previewing on Cinema Display - "very viable" previewing or monitoring? "Both." How close is 23HD? Doesn't have SMPTE phosphors, LCDs are 8 bit displays, can't go 10bit. Not gonna see a 23HD running in a big edit suite or telecine room to do critical color judgement with...they use a $45K monitor."

for indies, DO use the 23HD converter stuff.

Can buy 2005 20L5 monitor, CRT, about $3 grand, SMPTE C phosphors and is a CRT. combo HD/SD model, only shows 800 lines of high def....tradeoff is 23HD shows every pixel...Sony monitor is component input. "Different strokes for different folks...you could do a certain level of color accurate work on it...talk to Martin from eCinema...they've built a little box that does gamma correction"

Martin from eCinema made the $7K box

at that point, you're better buying monitor with C phosphors

if price sensitive, there are lots of options.

The 23HD is pretty cool, "I'm looking forward to cutting something on a second Cinema display at 1920x1080...that's cool...I know there are limitations there too, I have to know what they are, refresh rate issues, gamma issues, as technology moves forward there is always a price to be paid, it's a good bang for the buck."

if doing 720p stuff, maybe the 20" monitor would suffice with the Martin (eCinema) box

KONA 2 CARD

The Kona 2 is a new HD/SD card from AJA. It will come out in late June for around $2500. A rack mountable breakout box is $300 extra (standard card has a huge gob of cables coming out the back

It'll do analog monitoring with a 12 bit per channel digital to analog converter. High quality.

Broadcast grade up and down conversion - these guys make the converters that are used for little things like SuperBowl and Monday Night Football, so it's good enough for you.


---------------------

KONA BOOTH - FIRST GUY

Kona has a hardware codec that will scale it, so your data rate is 1/4 of normal, Qrez, or use Apple's 8 or 10 bit codec, or Kona's codec which is no longer BlackMagic based.

can do dual link 4:4:4 but they don't have a codec yet

Does SD downconvert, breakout box (optional), same set of realtime effects that Apple does, so G5 handles those.

Kona 2 about $2500 - about the same price point as DeckLink's

Ted Shilowitz is The Guy to talk to...

-------------------------


AJA BOOTH: KONA 2 CARD

-Kona 2: single/dual link HD SDI, 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 HD SDI, SDI, PCI-x 133, 8 channel AES embedded, 10 bit downconvert, 10 bit upconvert, 12-bit analog component output, Qrez 4:1 codec, comes with cables, breakout box (K-Box) optional. Card is $2500, K-Box is $300.

-Qrez is inhouse developed. very good at digital filtering. Qrez comes in full bandwidth, hardware does compression/downsamping to quarter sized. Hardware on the way out upconverts. He thinks a lot of people wouldn't notice the difference. It is a workflow option, including laptop work, a lot of folks would never see the difference if run over the air. Can still read and write codec so long as had the codec available. 133 MHz PCI-X.
-SD and HD
-cross work - SD footage output HD and vice versa, assuming same timebase
-24p workflow for 1080p as well
-RT color correction, eventually mixes and wipes
-CAN do a cross dissolve now
-12 bit D/A for analog monitoring ONLY
-codec is 8 or 10 bit
-no current product handles 12 bit in
-4:4:4 is possible
-board in beta, not released (late June)
-roughly $2500 price point
-they had footage running from Jude law Sky Captain of Tomorrow running on these. Something I read talked about Final Cut Pro, Shake, etc. were used in it's production. Total desktop movie...rock on!

---------------------------------------------------------
working the 24p workflow question...never got 1080p24 PhotoJPEG to work.

DVCPRO HD - in conjunction with Panasonic, it's their new thing announced yesterday. Follow on to DVCPRO 25 and DVCPRO 50. Nine months or so working on this HD stuff. Using the HD camera, shoot native HD at 720p60, 720p30, or 720p24 or 100i59.94. UNFORTUNATELY, NO 1920X1080 AT 24 PROGRESSIVE FRAMES. DRAT!

Once shot it, plug it in through FireWire and suck it across. Don't need FW800, just FW400. The datarate is between 6-14 MBytes/sec. There is NO 1080P24 in the new spec. Drat.

His timeline is ALL realtime.

In low quality you can do 10 streams of HD.

The number of realtime SD streams hasn't been changed, but he had it doing 9 streams off of the X-RAID.

On his timeline, dark green is full res, orange is slightly downsampled to make it work in RT. His timeline was 90% green.

What wasn't doing it -
3 streams (2 type layers and a video layer) was orange
posterize effect
4 way split of same footage, 4 up layout
cross iris transition effect
picture in picture reposition with change in motion parameters
timecode burn onto window AND 3way color correction
opacity change with a widescreen matte box

his name is: Dean MacClain

The Preview on Cinema Display - can do EITHER the Cinema display OR the "real" video output

can do 1080 - anything you can do in your timeline can do Apple Display

with 23HD it is YUV, it is NOT real video, it is PREVIEWING not MONITORING, and you wouldn't do "real" color work with it.

You'd use it to show client work in progress.

Instead of having an ungodly expensive true HD monitor, you'd use this to see what you've got.

COMMENTARY: THIS IS HOW ALL THE CHEAPIES ARE GOING TO DO IT....AND IT'LL BE "GOOD ENOUGH" FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE...AND SINCE THE ALTERNATIVE IS SO MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE FOR NOT A HUGE CLIENT PERCEIVED DIFFERENCE, HARD TO COST JUSTIFY.

It IS a pixel for pixel preview, however.

----------------------

Other new Apple Goodies - mobile HD editing, PipePRO SDI,

Aurora's answer to IO is PipePro, a PCI card, is cheaper ($799) instead of $1200

uses FCP RT engine, everything you could already do with others with standard FCP RT stuff.

He's running 9 layers of realtime uncompressed...the whole Apple booth was running off a bunch of X-Serves...impressive...

--------------------------

looking at Powerbook 17", he has the SAME timeline as the dual G5 had, but it was almost all orange (downsampled)

...but it was set to High Quality. Drop it to Low quality and it does on the laptop what the dual G5 did on high quality

Can do the 23HD display stuff just as well on the laptop. Works on an attached Apple display OR on the LCD on the laptop itself...interesting....

it was at low quality, see some stretching artifacting, but it does it

a la Premiere Pro, if you ask it to do something it can't - in this case, setting the Sequence to high quality, it degrades gracefully - it shows you high quality frames, but the frame rate decreases (substantially in this case, like 8fps instead of 24)

you can flip with a hotkey between fullscreen preview and normal viewing mode - makes it more viable to work with a single screen setup, just got big when previewing stuff.

and it's FREE - $199 for everybody else, $999 new - same pricing scheme as always.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Grass Valley News Edit - don't have the full scoop, but they've chosen FCP to work with/share stuff with. The demo has a timeline set up on a PC with an app called News Edit, and a Mac running FCP with the same timeline open sitting right next to it. Not germane to my stuff, but interesting. I'm guessing it's leveraging FCP's XML roots to do file sharing, perhaps with MXF data (Movie eXchange Format).

MIKE'S COMMENTS: These types of deep data interchanges with FCP is encouraging. This, and Automatic Duck's products, and Lumiere, show how extensible Apple's architecture can be...as well as their WILLINGNESS to do so. OMF and AAF are out there, but Apple has been very quick and aggressive to actively seek an interchange of data with others. Helps TREMENDOUSLY that Apple sells FCP not so much as a standalone profit center (and I suspect/hope it is, check their 10-Q if they break it out that way), but as a means of selling more computers.

-----------------------------------------------------
more on FCP 24p workflow -

now there's a change so you can go 24fps to 25 fps more easily - you could go 25 to 24 before, but now it is easier because it just changes the QT header.

They have a DVCPRO HD sampler that I grabbed 3 copies of. If I haven't given them away to friends, email me and I might mail you the disk....I don't know if they (Apple) are going to mail these out to those who ask.

----------------------------------------------------

can capture from a D-5 to final cut Pro. D-5 is an uncompressed HD format. I need to find out what res/framerate/i vs. p it can do.

------------------------------------------------------

the new DVCPRO HD decks are about $25000 dollars

-------------------------------------
more from German HD guru dude from Apple:

eCinema one2one device - how is that different from preview window? You don't really have the HD signal, the quality is not that good, and this really gets the HD signal... it converts it...about $3500 for the new one2one from eCinema, it is a pixel for pixel translator...it's more of a monitoring rather than a previewing solution.

It has a USB connector to adjust color lookup tables and stuff...converts HD SDI to DVI-D, you can change your gamma, change your lookup tables etc. There existts some software to change/make/edit those LUT, but what does it cost and how easy is it, and knowing WHAT TO CHANGE IT TO could potentially be a non-trivial exercise...

MIKE'S NOTES: the preview will be "good enough" for many. It'll be tough to cost justify the extra cost (as much as a G5) when you can get "pretty good" results alone. Only if you're doing crucial work will most folks pop for the difference.

more on FCP 24p workflow -

now there's a change so you can go 24fps to 25 fps more easily - you could go 25 to 24 before, but now it is easier because it just changes the QT header.

They have a DVCPRO HD sampler that I grabbed 3 copies of. If I haven't given them away to friends, email me and I might mail you the disk....I don't know if they (Apple) are going to mail these out to those who ask.

----------------------------------------------------

can capture from a D-5 to final cut Pro. D-5 is an uncompressed HD format. I need to find out what res/framerate/i vs. p it can do.

------------------------------------------------------

the new DVCPRO HD decks are about $25000 dollars

-------------------------------------
more from German HD guru dude from Apple:

eCinema one2one device - how is that different from preview window? You don't really have the HD signal, the quality is not that good, and this really gets the HD signal... it converts it...about $3500 for the new one2one from eCinema, it is a pixel for pixel translator...it's more of a monitoring rather than a previewing solution.

It has a USB connector to adjust color lookup tables and stuff...converts HD SDI to DVI-D, you can change your gamma, change your lookup tables etc. There existts some software to change/make/edit those LUT, but what does it cost and how easy is it, and knowing WHAT TO CHANGE IT TO could potentially be a non-trivial exercise...

MIKE'S NOTES: the preview will be "good enough" for many. It'll be tough to cost justify the extra cost (as much as a G5) when you can get "pretty good" results alone. Only if you're doing crucial work will most folks pop for the difference.

-------------------------------------

Graham Petty is the CEO and engineer and honcho...on what? eCinema? What?

-----------------------------------
H.264 is an industry standard, recently approved (by MPEG group? No?). It's a new delivery codec...they're showing 1920x1080p24 at 6.8 MBits (roughly 800 kb/sec) and it looks VERY good...compression time is a factor still that they need to optimize, so they weren't willing to talk specifics, but playback on a dual G5 was where it needed to be...rock solid....it is Apple's implementation of the industry standard codec. They were showing Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed trailers.

----------------------------------

Pixlet is intended to a working codec, a previewing codec, that will play back on any viable workstation. They were showing 1920x1080@24p. The engineer I spoke with actually encoded the content, it was at 61% quality.

---------------------------------------

DVD Studio Pro 3 - transitions that you don't have to pre-render (like iDVD 4), and HD to MPEG-2 encoding (no great trick there), import of iDVD 4 projects (way way cool for making more rich & complicated), GO BACK AND SEE MORE!

--------------------------------------

X-Serve notes:

-here at the show, they have 60 TB of storage here in the rack. (TAKE A PICTURE!!!)

-3.5 TB of storage for $11,000

-talking to System Engineer about X-Serve stuff, it will do 4 streams with REAL playback with DVCPRO HD, deliver 10 streams using preview function...implies it's sending LESS DATA from the drives to the computer when you are doing this kind of work...SEEMS to imply it is sub-selecting SOME of the data from the drives to do this...clearly need to follow up on this

Talking to guy about Motion and title animation

every single object has apply modes a la Photoshop, has most of the new ones, works pretty much the same

can have a separate alpha channel like AE does

-has a lot of gestural UI controls - he does a doodle onscreen and it calls up different UI palettes

supports multi-layer Photoshop stuff...can tell it to bring in all layers or just one layer...can bring in all and drop out those not wanted too

doesn't do layer mattes discretely a la Photoshop files

Layer List - what AE calls a comp, Motion calls a Layer

can do track matte like stuff

when you bring in a Photoshop multilayer and drag it around, can move as a unit or sub pieces...so when it subcomps, can still directly click on all the children within the parent "comp" ...which is called a Layer here.

unlike AE track matte where it has to be one below, can take it out of project window so long as it's in media bin

Direct quote from the demo guy: "This is the one thing that is going to confuse the hell out of everybody coming from After Effects...AE any image is a layer, with us, images are objects, layers are comps basically....the cool thing is if you want to pre-comp something, you don't open a new comp, pre-comp it, bring it in, you just have a layer which is essentially a comp in and of itself...so I can have an arbitrary number of layers and organized it any way I want"

talking about layers (which can be a comp like assemblage): "it has all the same properties of any piece of footage"

You can manipulate a Photoshop layer in a Motion "Layer" (what AE users think of as a subcomp in a comp) and still discretely control all of it's subcomponents. Unlike AE, where there is lots of clicking and looking at two timelines at once to fix stuff.

it's realtime, what happens when you go beyond CPU abilities - it's all about your graphics card - it's OpenGL magic. NV40 is a newer graphics card and it'll push the capabilities of the program further-another direct quote from demo guy

"we have legs....every time a better video card comes out, the software will get better"

doesn't depend on us optimizing the engine a little bit more...as video cards get better, more layers, more filters, more resolution, more bit depth, etc.

the gigabertz bus sure helps

limited to the capabilities of the card - 2K texture size.

the R360 but next step has been seeded out to people, nobody's seen the 9800 Pro 256 MB version

It's an 8-bit tool at the moment. Video is the target, not going for film. But it will do HD, the demo he was showing me was 720p24.

The demo was DVCPRO HD, but it COULD be uncompressed footage, drive speed allowing, etc etc disclaimer disclaimer

can render it out to a QT if you wish

it has a native QT component...such that if you have Motion installed on your system, you can take any finished Motion project, open it up in ANY quicktime application and it will work anywhere QT will work if Motion is installed.

So can drop it into FCP and it all works, and works pretty well, since it is only taxing the GPU, not the CPU...which might bind in some circumstances, so you'd want to pre-render (or just render in FCP) to be SURE it behaved correctly.

But can drop it into Avid, into After Effects, into Cleaner, wherever you want it to go.

To share with anybody, you just render it out.

The whole file system library idea is XML based...so object can have animation attached to it as well, that you can use elsewhere...with all that animation and behaviors etc. attached to it.

POWERFUL.

It can handle relative paths not absolute file paths - drag everything to a folder and hand it off.

Behaviors are cool - is simulation stuff...for a "throw" or gravity, etc.

It has a keyframing environment, but doesn't give you as much subtle control as AE. No scaling of groups of keyframes, etc.

Realtime dragaround to define a motion path - like motion sketch

Like of gestural control for UI, Apple encouraging folks to use Wacom tablets in demos.

Doesn't have a smoothing keyframe tool to smooth them out temporally...yet.

Handles fields appropriately

Motion blur is present, but with a COST at the moment...It isn't per object the way AE works, it is full scene motion blurring.it does temporal oversampling, with the attendant cost in performance. Until they can access some OpenGL stuff.

It's fully configurable but with 8 steps it hobbles it pretty hard.

It's a broadcast oriented motion graphics application to supplement After Effects, "we think of it as a companion, we're not going after After Effects"

A motion graphics application for video guys, it's NOT a compositor (visual effects). There is some overlap but their goal is not to take on After Effects".

Want to be able to slap stuff together to keep the interface pretty simple. "Hit play, mess around, make some really neat stuff."

supports a lot of After Effects plugins. Sapphire works, Tinder, Delerium, even though they shag RT performance. Continuum (Boris) is in progress. Continuum will work better with Motion in the future he hinted.

MIKE'S COMMENTS:

So you wouldn't use this in a DI process at ALL. I liked the tight integration they mentioned with FCP, and that it allows realtime positioning, scaling, and coloring...but it's not a big heavy serious app...and it's limited (at this point the demo guy said) to 8 bit.

At first I was concerned this would instigate a war between Apple and Adobe...or at least continue to overheat their relations...but Apple is pitching this as a low end, fairly targetted solution for basic motion graphics needs for video editors...not so much a tool to take on AE, just to do some similar (definitely overlapping) stuff that AE can do in the lower end of it's capabilities scale. So for editors who need a quick title (woops, that in LiveType) excuse me, a quick motion graphic, they can do it here and it hands off to FCP quick and easy. Ideally, over time, these capabilities would be integrated directly into the FCP program and you could work directly in the timeline, even if it were to then be "collapsed" in view. Hmm, thinking about this, maybe not, since I might have dozens of layers in a comp, and you wouldn't want to have all those layers "live" in the FCP timeline for the rest of the project.

It's NOT a (full) After Effects compositor. It can do some of the same things, but is a small subset of AE's capabilities. I didn't ask about subpixel positioning and hyper accurate scaling...I need to go back and ask. I'd expect it to have good scaling, because that is a common need in OpenGL applications, but subpixel positioning? Maybe, since each object/layer is essentially a 2D piece of geometry being positioned. I'll check. So for keying, compositing, any kind of visual effects work, or for really detailed motion graphics work, this is NOT the tool to use. Stick with After Effects for your motion graphics and medium end compositing work (or combustion if that's your preference), and punt to Shake if your needs are that high.

I predict this will eat into the market for After Effects artists. Editors who want to tackle this more approachable (and far better integrated) tool will be able to do certain motion graphics tasks. They'll be encouraged to tackle this because of the tight integration with FCP, the approachaable user interface, and the very friendly price point. So smaller, simpler jobs will stay inhouse rather than going out to motion graphics freelancers (like me). So while some jobs will be lost at the low end, it will encourage further use of motion graphics in the marketplace...which may then prompt editors to punt to the experts when their needs (or deadlines) demand more than they can/want to do themselves. So they'll call one of us...or punt and do it themselves. Remains to be seen.

The inclusion of After Effects plugin support seems to be more of a marketing checkbox for support - AE plugs don't really fit into the workflow you'd want to use in this thing. They claim 90 or so filters...or was that 90 realtime filters? But plenty to get a lot of interesting stuff done. Those realtime filters are going to have to be written as OpenGL filters - in other words, written for the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). After Effects plug-ins are written exclusively for CPU processing.

This is a clever bit of work, an extension of what was started with Quartz Extreme a year or two ago. There have been applications that do similar functions in the digital lighting world (concert lighting systems that use video/image projectors mounted in an aimable, DMX programmable lighting-style head), but none with this amount of robust compositing capabilities...and certainly none with this slick of a UI.

Best summed up by the demo guy:

"Hit play, mess around, make some really neat stuff."

Livetype - no export and import, it's no making a QT file, so now whenever you save whenever you save in LT, that link between FCP and LT is automatically updates in FCP.

You're get a Flash about the file being offline, that is it breaking the link and relinking to new media

Yes, you have to re-render in non-realtime, isn't like Motion.

Same integration with Motion in terms of live updates.

Within Motion, when you hit save and go back to FCP, it updates that link in realtime. Any effects in Motion translates over to FCP. It's a one way link - you can

You can import projects - make a project within Motion, Save it, import as a regular file into FCP. It's just as if it's any clip. all that stuff still stays as if it was in Motion. When you render it out - you can't go in and change the effects in FCP from that Motion file.

Something changed in FCP or Motion, any time something changes on the Motion side, when you hit side, it has to be updated in FCP it will blow away the rendered file.

in FCP, tell it you want to change your LiveType, it launches LiveType (if not open) and opens the corresponding LiveType file, then ou make your changes, SAVE IT, go back to FCP, it updates the link, and signals LiveType to start rendering it's project....I think I have that right....I might be wrong....but in any case, there is good handoff and communication between the two.

Notes from Digital Cinema Symposium:

talked to Josh Pines from Technicolor, he said lattitude is still his biggest issue with HD. All the color tones, and blocking, and color gamut is not so much a problem, but that lattitude range is still the single biggest deal, he said cameras can capture extended dynamic range but the manufacturers don't want to tell you about that because you have to get in there and twiddle with it.

Mentioned the Orphanage guys and he said he helped them get started since they'd known each other at ILM.

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from a seminar: Rob Hummel from Technicolor on their restoration efforts: technologies that affect the telling of the story, the public isn't even concious of the changes, what we're doing isn't affecting the telling the story, just helping to tell the stories in a more efficient way.

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Digital mastering for film and digital cinema release:

THIS ONE IS 2 HOURS 45 MINUTES LONG

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eTreppid is working on hardware based codecs, integrating that into video editors, lossless compression, integrating it into the backs of recorders, use it as a working codec all the way through - both an acquisition and editing format, and you could make the files smaller (still lossless) at the end of the process for archiving

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new stuff at ATI booth - Xileon - HDTV Wonder for PC, ATI THeater something, digital cable ready and ATSC, low cost alternative to cable and sattelite, expandable home theater products, it's where they're going, PVR/DVR networked video recorder

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Sony has a large HDV section I need to check out

OK, so I popped for internet access from within LVCC for wireless access. It's 4:40 and I'm finally stopping to have lunch.

Spent a bunch of time at the Apple booth seeing XSan, talking geek about uncompressed HD rates for XRAID, talking 1080p24 workflows for HD. The new DV-HD (or DVCPRO HD, same thing) format is really, really nice. Footage looks good, RT looks good, lots of good stuff. The only downside is that, once again, just like HDV, there is no 1080p24 option. 720p24 yes, 1080i59.94 yes, but not 1080p24. Someone said there was a technical reason for this, but it sniffs of market protection...but I don't know.

The best new product I've seen so far for our type folks is Lumiere, a piece of software to let you work with HDV. Based on preliminary demos, I like it better than Heuris' Indie HD Toolkit. I need to check my notes and verify a few things (I've been voice recording all day, 76 files), but it looks like a good solution.

AJA is also in late June going to ship a very nice HD card, the Kona 2. A 4:1 codec called Qrez sounds interesting, it does real time VERY HIGH QUALITY downconversion to SD if you are working at NTSC or PAL framerates, 12 bit analog D/A monitoring, good stuff.

I've seen one in the Apple booth but haven't learned more about a gadget called one2one, it sounds similar to Decklink's HDLink. HD SDI input converted to show on an Apple Cinema Display. Made by eCinema, I think.

OK, that's all for now, more later.



No time for links now, I'll get to'em later.

Once again, my horribly raw, incomprehensible notes from panels, this time in one miserably long screed:

OK, I came in late today.

Diving right in:

Advantages of Digital:

copying, changing, controlling, delivering

(CONTROLING - DRM!)

Challenges:

Immature, expensive, complex, impermanent

immature - disadvantage now, but that's temporary - Moore's law will help.

in the first 20 years of film, there were all kinds of early film gauges. Eventually, standards work themselves out

first oact of SMPE, standardized 35mm 4 perf

in film there was one worldwide standard...and within that there was room for other formats from silent 1.33 to Super Cinemascope 2.35




PICTURE 1: SCHEDULE FOR THE DAY

SCHEDULE 2: What Do Cinematographers need? panelists

Allen Daviau - Busy, ET, Empire of the Sun, and Van Helsing (bearded guy I saw yesterday?)

Lindenlaub - Made in Manhattan, The Haunting



Daryn Okada (Japanese guy from yesterday") Texas Rangers, Lake Placid

"Digital Cinematography MUST abandon all links to television" was said 6 years ago

Steve Poster said we don't know how we're affecting the audience - In The River of Conciousness, was written in NY Times:

Does our brain parts work like a motion picture camera?

HE'S TALKING ABOUT HOW OUR BRAINS PERCEIVE REALITY...ARE DISCRETE FRAMES GRABBED AND INTERPRETED INTO A COMPLETE FLOW?

Is conciousness tied to the individual perception of still images?

As people in this industry, wse need to find out how we are affecting our audience in this big change of how we're doing motion pictures

He's (Steve Poster) working on that over the next year with SMPTE

Cinematographer s need to follow the process from start to finish as they always have, now it's different

"The Horror of Video Dailies" and why they are so bad, and what can we do to invent a system for digital dailies to serve the purpose of alll the artists and all the people working on the film "Watching day after day on 1/2 inch video is a crime"

need end to end device independent color management, ubiquitous, industry wide

Allen Daviau - What do Cinematographers need? They need an open mind. He prefers film. It will be distributed on a LIMITED basis to be shown digital. Majority of folks will see it on film. They shot on film, evaluated on film (dailiies), but new they were doing a DI process. He's optimistic to it, thinks it looks great and likes the options available.

he's shot 2 shorts and a number of tests with digital cameras, but "I will rejoice in the purity of film"

finished shooting in July of '03, 2 week blue screen shoot, eFilm is where he's been working, with Steve Scott at eFilm, evaluated different sequences shot under different lighting conditions, but all tied together in the DI process

2 solid months in digital intermediate phase on Van Helsing

need in their contract to work all the way through, since sometimes shots are getting completed over a year later in the DI process

Daryn Okada: film is a proven tech, we know what the results will be, predictable. totally open to digital tech, Imperative that we (Cinematographers) follow a film from beginning to end. Every shot rejected by editor, director, & tudio were shots he never shot before they were composited...he didn't see them until they had been approved by others. "What woke my eyes up to participating" Just because it was scanned in at 4K doesn't mean it will emulate film on the way out...bit depth, linear vs. log, etc. affect it all. Just doing a simple dissolve an issue wif there was not someone with a trained eye dissecting that. Midtones blasting out, blacks crushing, taken us out of a dreamworld into CNN.

WAS THE PROBLEM THAT IT WAS WRONG, OR NOT FILM LIKE?

They need a cinematographer's eye to tell what's going on.

He was involved every day (208 hours a day, in the last month spent 48 hours in a row at the lab, NOT doing color timing) a 4 month operation. If he hadn't checked that final print last week, it was not the look they set out for. Need a cinematographer there to complete it, and make sure everything is the way it was supposed to be.

He DID NOT GET PAID for all that work during post, and had to buy his own lunches, too.

moderator sez: The only way to assure a quality finish, gotta have the cinematographer to time the scans before the scans go to the compositor, so they had abenchmark of what the movie should look like. Gave them a benchmark that was close enough even if not perfect final.

You have to fight with the editor to get them to call you to have you look at them.

Frustrating to come to a final timing session, with 10 different houses all doing thier own slightly different thing. Do you keep the effect shot fucked up, or fuck up all the original photography around it to match that digital shot?



IT'S A GOOD IDEA TO HAVE ONE SCANING HOUSE

Need a method to track color and look all the way through. Kodak is working on something.

Needs to be ubiquitous, non-proprietary standard, internationally.

MMichael Goi: Daryn is high tech, Mike isn't, have shot 2 features on high def, shot one on DV, done a feature through DI, shooting a movie tomorrow morning. Until 3 days ago it was 24p High Def. Shot on beaches with African American people. "in my opinion you're making a serious mistake." Now they're shooting 35mm.

Need to guard against hype. Know which tools are best for which job.

every producer has read all the same marketing stuff "cheaper, easier to light, smaller crew"

he educates people as to what works and what doesn't. Each medium has it's own strengths and weaknesses.

Steven was mentioning dailles. He shoots on location in foreign countries. He know has it in his contract he gets to print 3-4000 feet of film so can know what he's doing.

Dailies on 1/2 inch were to bad were going to fire the camera crew, had to get digibeta to see the difference.

Such a gross misrepresentation to see low res format with something that is not standardized.

Sephen: by doing the cheapest daililes you can, you're costing the project money. Everyone gets a sense of what the movie will be TV sized, not MOVIE sized. They lose the sense of the scope of the picture and tell the story in a way that is ineffective for that movie. Closeup head shots are too prevalent in today's movies. Hurts a production to not see dailies in a larger format.

For HBO, he brought in a digital projector. Watched highly compressed VHS dailies, but showed it in trailer 6 feet wide.

Needs more discussion on dailies other than film (fine in some respects), need a way to have hi def digital dailies projected that we know will represent the look of the movie. "I could go on about that for years."

Walter Lindenluab - approachef for a film in Africa about the genocide there, European production, wondering whether to shoot on video, would rather shoot 16mm. Remote location, not much tech support, rather have reliable tech. 16mm stocks are so good, blowups are MUCH beter than they were 10-15 years ago.

Working with HD and cables and remote screens is so foreign compared to .

Finding out that scans were done so differently on monster huge films (3000 prints, big summer release) that they can't be successfully composited.

Thinks it should be in their contract that they are paid for their time in post production.

He just did his first film with digital dailies, talked to them into doing Digital Intermediates, using Kodak Look Manaagement System, enabled him to control the look of the whole movie through all the stages.

color HD master for the test screening, got thorugh the whole thing in 1 day instead of 2 weeks. That Kodak thing helped, presumably.

Need to get everyone in post production used to that process

In the front end, everyone talks about the look they want, but can be lost in production. Kodak system "is definitely the way to go" since everyone in post production knows what you want to do, where you want to go.

If you had a digitla video camera that used your lenses, that was tough and built by cinmetographers for themselves, would you use it? "In a couple of years."

MODERATOR:

Kineticamera designed and built by cinematographers who have an end to end system. Arri has an exciting camera. single chip cameras are pretty exciting.

AT the other end of the spectrum, large capacity data streams,

Gil Hubbs: Cinematographers (CT) listen to the director to get their vision for the movie. Often important to simplify and not get lost in details. Digital production today is not defining a simple process. Easy to get