HD For Indies

Flip4Mac - MXF import component for QuickTime

I don't quite get why this is supposed to be so helpful - it lets you import IMX footage, which FCP 5 can already do. I think the clue may be that it does it on a file basis - you're pulling files off the XDCAM disc rather than ingesting as video. This is, of course, a guess, until I learn more as well...there's always plenty to learn.

UPDATE - THIS IS WRONG - FCP 5 CAN'T IMPORT MXF BASED IMX FROM XDCAM ON SONY EVTR NATIVELY - SEE WEDNESDAY'S UPDATE ABOVE

Toshiba, Canon Bet on New Flat-Panel TV Technology - Yahoo! News new factory won't be online until 2007, but it's nice to see their putting their money behind it.

Apple - Support - Downloads - QuickTime 7.0.1 - supposedly has something beneficial for Final Cut Studio (couldn't resist blogging just a little bit - it's my addicition)

MacNN | MegaPEG.X Pro HD 3.0 with "videophile" decoder encode/decode/transcode MPEG-1 & MPEG-2, including HD res MPEG-2 via Quicktime Exporter.

Gutting the studio - I've pulled all computer stuff out of the studio and am plotting out how to lay it all back in, but still be able to install/deinstall hardware conveniently, but still be able to bring clients over without describing it as "Umm...it's my lab." I've been doing some Deep Think about What I Want To Do, at a much bigger scale than just what I do on this site.

That Direct To Disk solution? Technically possible, financially viable, practically implausible (too big, heavy, and tethered), and pointless - the market for it is tiny, and those in the market are almost by definition poor. So not worth chasing.

Consulting? So little consulting comes in from the site that it virtually doesn't matter. I get lots of questions, but when I mention that I might like to be compensated for my time 90+% of it dries up and blows away. I need to pursue it in a drastically different way.

I want to get back to focusing on the high end stuff. While it's fun and I could have a moderately successful website (based on traffic, not derived income) based on HDV etc., it's not where I want to spend my time.

So I'm guessing the endgame on this will be something like:

-far fewer postings on news stuff - it's called RSS folks, you can do it as well as I have been

-far more focused writing - fewer posts, but longer and more analytical. More original content, not just links.

-more focus on higher end workflows - maybe starting with HDV or other low end origination, but finishing in uncompressed, etc. More focus on film-like production stuff.

-and I don't know what else, but definitely changes.

I'm still learning more about my Dell 2405 monitor..and I'm not so thrilled. Some low points:

-people are consistently having trouble playing back DVDs on these over the component video inputs (the best input for video, not computer, input). Apparently, the Macrovision signal throws off the sync, so nothing shows on the screen

-folks are also having trouble playing back 16:9 content - even though the display has 1:1, Aspect, & Fill modes, none of them properly handle 16:9 standard definition content

-I don't know if it's my own unit, as I've only seen one mention of it on the Dell & hardforums.com sites, but I get lines/bands in the video image when viewing HD content over the component inputs. Within 10-15 minutes it makes the monitor useless to evaluate content - wavy lines throughout. White type wobbles & vibrates side to side

-If I do want to call tech support, many people are complaining of hugely long wait times and utterly inept/poorly trained support staff they are connected to in India, who are working from a script and have never seen the equipment in question. Situations like "my monitor makes a high pitched whine when I turn it on" are responded to with "Reinstall Windows." to which the user replies "I'm on a Mac. It makes the sound with no computer attached." Support's response: reinstall Windows again? OK maybe not that bad, but lots of folks are complaining bitterly about crappy support.

At this point I'm torn - I could attempt to get a replacement, as a computer monitor this is pretty good - no dead pixels. Somebody claims to be have been shipped a refurb as a replacement for a faulty new unit. I need to decide whether I'm going to keep this one and just write off the video inputs as useless, or roll the dice and possibly face a lot of headaches trying to get a replacement. I deeply, utterly, abhorrently LOATHE dealing with inept tech support. I'm not the smartest guy at all this stuff, but it just makes my brain throb to talk knowledgeably with tech support who doesn't know anything but the script in front of them.

-mike

Ynetnews - Money - Scandal shocks business world In light of last post, more reasons why I like my Mac....widespread industrial espionage going on in Israel - via spyware on Wintel boxes.

-mike

Intel adds DRM to new chips | MacMegasite Interesting. Intel is saying they are going to support Microsoft's DRM (Digital Rights Management) right at the motherboard/processor level. In THEORY this is good news for appropriate rights protection. In practice, I think it'll be further closure of the Fair Use doctrine. Intel isn't saying how it works, wanting security through obscurity. Another major feature that was announced was the ability to reload the operating system and administer the machine remotely, REGARDLESS of the operating system used by this Intel motherboard/processor combo. How long until the hackers figure a way into THAT? Viral based extortion? "Send us $XXXXX and we'll be able to recover your drive (....that we hosed via virus)." Not that it isn't possible now, just more damage possible remotely.

The article ends on an over-the-top pro-Mac bit of advocacy.

But overall, motherboard based DRM should give Hollywood/content owners greater confidence about the security of the DRM implemented. Of course, how strong, robust, defensible, bypassable, etc. this DRM is remains to be seen.

-mike

Spent yesterday with Nick Smith from Matchframe finally getting into, and starting to understand, how Final Touch HD works. I'm going to hold off on my detailed commentary until I talk to the company some more, but a few thoughts:

Wow, this is NOT a typical Mac application. The intended user base is colorists that may be used to, or may be expecting, an interface like this that looks like a Unix operating environment. As a Mac user, I find it confusing, awkward, frustrating, and glitchy - simple things like entering file names to save don't work the way you'd expect until you click off the name then click save. Just clicking save will save it as Untitled, not what you have in the dialog. This is the same in 1.07 and in 2.0b2. It's not as real time as I thought - it's easy to do stuff that brings it below realtime.

Today, I've been doodling with codecs - recreating what Marco Solario has done on his site but with the new codecs from Apple. Based on what I'm seeing so far, I'm not thrilled that BlackMagic is moving to Apple's codecs for 10 bit workflows. AIC, DVCPRO HD, and HDV all predictably don't fare anywhere near as well as the uncompressed codecs. There are substantial differences, even between the uncompressed codecs. All interesting stuff. I'll post some stills in the near future. I've also found some glitches displaying codecs in After Effects 6.5 under 10.4.1 (don't know if it does elsewhere) - the Apple Uncompressed 8 bit codec does not display if your After Effects 6.5 project is set to 16 bits, and Sheer's 10 bit 444 codec gets some crazy prismatic aberations if you look at it in a 16 bit project. Both are fine if you change project settings back to 8 bits/channel.

More thorough reporting by Monday...

-mike

Still Hope for Next-Gen DVD Accord - Yahoo! News Yeah but...they're talking about a merged format AFTER the initial hardware ships...which will be expensive....and prohibitively expensive to adopt if a merged format is due. If players were $100 to maybe $200 apiece, I might buy one of each. They are far more likely to be closer to $1000. As big a geeky technofetishist as I am, I'm NOT buying one or two of those, only to have them supplanted by a new common format.

The article makes a mistake in my opinion - they are implying one is slightly better than the other (probably based on Sony's greater capacity with Blu-Ray), and thinking that has something to do with the "quality" of the video. NOT TRUE. BOTH HD DVD and Blu-Ray will use the exact same encoding technologies. There will be no QUALITATIVE difference in the video, only QUANTITATIVE differences. You'll be able to fit more video on a Blu-Ray disc than an HD DVD in their intially specified sizes. But since both will be ample to hold a feature length film and (some) extras, it's a matter of how many extras could be squeezed onto the discs, not the quality of what's placed on there. The astute will note that you can compress more to fit more video on the disc, and that affects video quality; but again, since sizes are ample to fit the feature in high quality on there, that's a moot point.

Good gawd, that is just LAZY analysis on the part of the writer for not understanding the issues.

Bunch of little things of interest:

Ampede 1.1b - VersionTracker useful FCP plugin to render Illustrator and PDF files smoothly, even when scaled. Useful for graphics and titles

Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 recommendations for BlackMagic DeckLink cards

Media 100 sw - free time limited demo of software only version of Media 100 video editing software. I still think these guys are waiting to die.

celtx - Overview - script writing software that allows for breakdowns and stuff. I don't know beans about scriptwriting software, so read the following...

From FD to MMS: "Craig Mazin of Artful Writer has had enough headaches (and heartaches) with Final Draft. He's switched over to Movie Magic Screenwriter. You can read about his reasons why here, followed by a lot of opinions from fellow screenwriters"

--------
The Artful Writer: Dear Final Draft: GOODBYE: "Dear Final Draft: GOODBYE

Every vocation has its gear debates. I drummed for a while, and nothing's more amusing than listening to musicians scream at each other about which company makes a better tube lug.

There%u2019s really only one gear debate in screenwriting.

Final Draft vs. Movie Magic Screenwriter.

Before you comment about how you still use some other suck-ass program or, God forbid, Microsoft Word, let me dismiss you quickly and preemptively with a %u201Cfeh%u201D.

Not interested."

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johnaugust.com Survey up for screenwriting software: "The ongoing conversation about screenwriting software, prompted by the release of Final Draft 7.0, has gotten a lot of readers wondering why a better program isn%u2019t out there. After all, compared with the complexity of editing video or managing a website, simply formatting a script should be cake. It%u2019s just words, after all. And there%u2019s no shortage of good ideas for what the ideal screenwriting software should do."

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Grey_Scale_Imaging_Performance - best part is the opening post, guy talking about the F900 vs Viper tests they did for Collateral. The rest has a low wheat/chaff ratio IMHO.

Gross Misunderstanding - Forget about the box office. By Edward Jay Epstein: "These numbers tell the story. Ticket sales from theaters provided 100 percent of the studios' revenues in 1948; in 2003, they accounted for less than 20 percent. Instead, home entertainment provided 82 percent of the 2003 revenues. In terms of profits, the studios can make an even larger proportion from home entertainment since most, if not all, of the theatrical revenues go to pay for the prints and advertising required to get audiences into theaters. (Video, DVDs, and TV have much lower marketing costs.)This profit reality has transformed the way Hollywood operates. Theatrical releases now essentially serve as launching platforms for videos, DVDs, network TV, pay TV, games, and a host of other products. "

A good read to understand the true nature of Hollywood entertainment today.

Best way to migrate to Tiger & FCP 5 - get a second hard drive and install there, so you can still back off to 10.3.x and FCP 4.5 HD. This article gives a nice step by step guide on how to do it, with screen grabs and everything. Very well timed, since a lot of folks are getting their upgrades right now.

-mike

Remote HD Engineering

Kelly Dodds sent me an email to point this out. Here's what he had to say:

For the film "THE CAVE", they had a remote HDCAM SR head wired by fibre to a deck 2 kilometers away. That SR deck fed a DVCAM for offline, which fed a powerbook with FCP, and they used iChat for dailies. SWEET! (And how I'd do it).


Which just goes to show you, there's no one "correct" answer for how to shoot something - you need to look at the whole shooting scenario and analyze what's best for your circumstances. I'm looking forward to seeing how this looks up on screen.

-mike

Toshiba sees eventual unified DVD format - Yahoo! News

Both sides are saying that they foresee having both formats - HD DVD and Blu-Ray - on store shelves at the same time. For all the concerns about avoiding VHS/Betamax...here we go again.

-mike

There have been several reports in the media about Apple meeting with Intel, spurring rumors that Apple might be contemplating switching to Intel processors, or at least using the threat of that to lean on IBM to push harder for improvements. Even analysts are saying this, out loud, in English, to reporters. Amazing.

This is crap.

If Apple and Intel are meeting, who says it's about processors for desktop systems? Intel makes LOT of electronics besides main system CPUs.

Consider this: IF Apple were entirely fed up with IBM, and was committed to switching over to Intel, they'd have to:

1.) Redesign their hardware, substantially. The current motherboard and bus architecture (HyperTransport) is incompatible with Pentium 4 chips as I understand it.

2.) Assuming they were able to redesign all of their hardware, they'd then have to rewrite the OS. Or, at most optimistically, recompile for Intel, tossing out all of their PowerPC optimized code. I hear a lot of people saying Altivec is crap, it doesn't do much good...until you get into video and audio processing, at which point it can make a SUBSTANTIAL difference.

3.) After they re-wrote all of their OS code (or recompiled and optimized), they'd have to re-write, or recompile and re-optimize all of their own applications. iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, iWorks, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Sountrack, Logic, Shake, LiveType, etc., etc., etc., Lots of stuff.

4.) Oh, and then they'd have to convince all the other developers to rewrite/recompiile & re-optimize THEIR code. "Hey Adobe, would you mind porting (which is what this would really be) Photoshop to Intel OS X?"

5.) Assume all of the above has been done. Now developers have to support TWO code bases - one for PowerPC, one for Intel. At least 4 processors in play, easily 7 or 8 in the next coupla years as more dual core chips come out.

6.) Oh, and lastly, Apple would have to convince us, the existing users, to buy new computers to use this new stuff. Let's pretend the hardware and software add up to be incredibly convincing - let's pretend, for completely illogical reasons, that the combo runs twice as fast as the equivalent PC at a comparable price, so that we all want to. We now have to buy new computers for thousands of dollars.

7.) Oh, and on these new computers, we'd need new software. So go out and buy/crossgrade/upgrade ALL of the software you have to work on the new box.

8.) Now there is a mix of existing customers on PowerPC hardware, and new customers on Intel OS X hardware. The industry would have to continue to develop for BOTH systems for a few years during transition.

9.) This has been done before - the Mac moved from the Motorola 020/030/040 line (forget what they're called) to the PowerPC line. Emulation was carried out so that the old stuff would run, marginally, on the new hardware. So let's pretend there's a good PowerPC emulator built into the new Intel based OS X (another huge task for Apple to undertake), so you CAN run your old stuff, but you need to buy new stuff to run full speed. But it took some companies YEARS to get new versions of their applications out for the newer, faster processors.

10.) And how many years of development would it take to make this transition? How much money, and how far behind would Apple fall if they pursued this direction, rather than staying the course with PowerPC? The salient question is this - how many years in the future would you have to look forward to find the date at which the new stuff was faster at the same cost rather than if Apple continued on with PowerPC? And not just in terms of hardware, but in terms of SOLUTIONS - hardware and software that is optimized and shipping? At least 3 or 4 I'd imagine, at best. And how many developers would they lose in the transition, based purely on "If it's going to be THAT much more expensive to support the Mac (now on two different codebases for two VERY different hardware architectures), we're going to bail on this already small segment of the market, now that Apple has effectively further subdivided it." Just because it'd be on Intel hardware wouldn't be any great incentive for current developers to develop for Intel OS X. How similar would it be to Unix/Linux on Intel? How much more appealing would this make it to do it on there? Dunno.

So do I think Intel OS X is likely?

Umm...no.

Not gonna happen.

Not unless IBM ground to a complete halt in terms of processor progress, and Apple felt that the pain of the above scenario was preferable to sticking with IBM. And things would have to be very, VERY grim before it looked worthwhile to go under that knife and cut out the still pumping heart of PowerPC architecture from Macs.

-mike

ATI Brings HDTV to the PC - Connected Home News - Designtechnica
-the next (or some future) generation of ATI graphics cards will have H.264 hardware acceleration. In much the same way that current graphics cards often have hardware MPEG-2 decoding, they're going to add H.264 decoding to future Radeon cards, so that they can decode high def DVDs on the fly. How much we can access that in other applications, such as editing apps & compositing apps, remains to be seen. This is cool.

-mike

...so after the last posting, I thought I'd try some more stuff.

If you drop HDV or DVCPRO HD 1080i60 on a 1080i60 uncompressed timeline, even "just" an 8 bit one, it won't play back without rendering. Same as always. Most likely due to scaling issues - 1920 pixel wide uncompressed doesn't jive well with 1280 or 1440 pixel wide compressed formats - the compressed formats have to be scaled up, and that's too much to do in real time with everything else going on. Maybe someday with CoreVideo help, but not today.

HDV, even on a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with ATI X800 card, requires rendering if you insist on setting Quality and FrameRate at High, rather than Dynamic (as well as Safe RT rather than Unlimited RT). If you drop to Dynamic Quality, it'll play back acceptably, even via the HD-SDI on a BlackMagic card (AJA Kona2 testing coming soon!) Dropping to Unlimited RT gives a yellow bar, which basically means "I think so but no promises, I may drop frames" in both HDV and DVCPRO HD (1080i60 both).

There are three settings in the timeline that affect playback performance vs quality:

1.) Safe vs Unlimited RT - Safe is the "This'll work, I'm pretty damned confident." Unlimited RT is "this ought to work, but I'm not promising." There's almost certainly a more sophisticated meaning and analysis to be gleaned from that, but I'm not sure. My understanding is that Safe RT shoots for flawless performance, and if it can't do it, marks it as needing to be rendered and refuses. Safe RT is the perfectionst. Unlimited RT goes for it, even if it has to drop frames or compromise. This trade off already existed in version 4.5.

(New to version 5.0 is Dynamic RT, which has the following two components)

2.) Playback Video Quality - you get 4 choices: Dynamic (adjusts on the fly to do what it can, dropping resolution in order to maintain frame rate), and then three absolute quality settings: High, Medium, and Low. Not all codecs offer all these choices.

3.) Playback Frame Rate: has three choices: Dynamic (again adjusts for the best it can do), Full, Half, & Quarter.

On my dual 2.5 GHz G5, running 10.4.1, with an ATI X800 and 3.5 GB RAM, a BlackMagic Decklink HD Pro with v5.0b1 drivers and Final Cut Pro 5, here's what I learned:

HDV Realtime Performance

This is testing with 1080i60 HDV. 1080i50 may be different, and 720p30 definitely will (so much less math involved there).

Starting with a demand for best possible quality - with Safe RT, Full Video Quality, & Full Frame Rate, HDV doesn't want to do a realtime cross dissolve. Probably due to the funky long GOP nature of MPEG-2.

BUT, it is happy to do realtime high qualty color correction, no matter which knobs and sliders you play with in the 3 way Color Corrector.

A two second cross dissolve took about 19 seconds between two otherwise unaltered HDV 1080i60 clips, so transitions render roughly 10:1. A 1 second cross dissolve will take about 10 seconds, etc.

A two second cross dissolve, when both clips have heavy color correction (all knobs and sliders changed), took just under 25 seconds. So about 12:1 for rendering transitions with color corrections on both clips.

So how does DVCPRO HD fare in comparison?

Opening up the 1080i60 DVCPRO HD Sampler that Apple has distributed at various events, I made sure I was set to Safe RT, Full Quality, Full Frame Rate - best it can do for RT.

Cross dissolves between two otherwise unaltered clips are realtime, green bar above ("all OK"). Adding a 3 way Color Corrector effect to one of the clips in the transition stays realtime IF AND ONLY IF you don't move any of the four sliders below the color wheels, including saturation (this is different from my uncompressed HD tests). So you can push black/white/midtone colors around, just don't adjust any sliders, otherwise it'll require rendering when set to Safe RT/Full Quality & Frame Rate. Adding a color correction to the second clip in the transition doesn't change the transition's rendering status.

Changing from Safe RT to Unlimited RT makes the above scenario - one clip in transition has a color correction - change from red (rendering required) to yellow (it might work) over just the transition, not the clip itself. Adding a 3 way color correction to the second shot doesn't change the transition's rendering status either. Playing it back, it drops frames with this setup. Changing Quality to Dynamic plays back without dropping frames, and if it's reducing video quality I can't tell.

If I leave RT set to Safe RT, and only change Video Quality to Dynamic, the effect changes to green - it'll do it, but it may drop video quality.

So it looks like cross dissolves are the hard part - the 3 way color corrector is pretty much a free ride, do whatever you want there, unless you want to cross dissolve at the same time, in which case drop to Dynamic Quality.

Dynamic RT is going to save a LOT of time in the editing process.

Basically, realtime effects were "brittle" before - yes or no, works or breaks. Now they are more flexible, employing graceful degradation - if it can't do a perfect job, you can set it up to gracefully degrade just a little bit if it can almost do the task, or degrade quality/framerate a lot if you're asking a lot of it (or asking a lot for your box).

You can also adjust your realtime performance in another place - go into the Sequence Settings, under the Video Processing tab, and change the the Motion Filtering Quality between Fastest (linear), Normal, and Best. Turning it down to Fastest will buy you a bit more realtime performance, although you will probably need to drop to Dynamic Frame Rate to get it to work realtime. Don't forget to turn it back up to Best and re-rende all your effects before you master your program, however.

Amazing what you can learn when you dig around. I have yet to crack open an FCP 5 manual. Who knows what I'll learn then!

: )

-mike

Did some testing, here's what this posting covers:

-mixing 8 & 10 bit, Apple & Blackmagic codecs on one timeline - what's RT and not, under what circumstances?
-Render times for color correction and transitions
-relative render times of 8 vs. 10 bit timelines & footage
-render disks - does speed make a difference in how fast renders take?
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I'd heard of folks successfully mixing different codec footage on a single timeline for SD stuff.

So I decided to mess with it for HD stuff.

Some notes:

-if you make a 10 bit sequence (4:2:2) using the Apple Uncompressed 10 Bit Codec, and drop 8 bit footage onto it, the 8 bit footage gets a red render bar and doesn't play back at all (blue/black screen with "Unrendered" on it)

-interestingly, all of the new Dynamic RT settings are NOT available on a 10 bit sequence. Your only choice is Full Quality checkmarked on or...still checkmarked on.

Mixing 8/10 bit and Apple/Blackmagic codecs on the same timelines

I started doing some testing that got confusing, so I did this:

I took 2 clips of the same footage that I already had:
-BlackMagic 8 bit 2vuy (4:2:2)
-BlackMagic 10 bit (4:2:2)
Using those as starting points, I converted them using the following Compressor Advanced Format Conversions:
-HD Uncompressed 10 bit 1080p24
-HD Uncompressed 9-bit 1080p24

So I now had 4 clips.

I made 4 comps, two from presets and two "illegal" ones

Legal:

HD Uncompressed 10 bit
HD Uncompressed 8 bit

Illegal

Blackmagic codec 10 bit
Blackmagic codec 8 bit

Then I dropped all four clips onto all timelines.

Here's what I learned about which did or didn't play back (fine or with red line requiring rendering). All are 1920x1080, square pixels, 23.98 timebase:

"OK" means no red line, and a quick test showed it playing back full speed.
"red" means it showed a red "requires rendering" line and

Apple Uncompressed 8 bit timeline
(playback quality and frame rate both set to "High")

Apple 8 bit: OK *
Apple 10 bit OK *
BMD 8 bit: oddly, red
BMD 10 bit: OK *

* (I could apple 3way color corrector and do anything BUT adjust sliders under color wheels and NOT get a render bar. COULD adjust saturation though)

-turns out this is the most interesting new twist.

-in this sequence, applying a cross dissolve between two Apple Uncompressed clips, one 8 bit the other 10 bit, required a render, even with NO other effects added to those two clips. Applying a 1 second cross dissolve betwen these two clips (with no CC or other FX) took 5 1/2 seconds (stopwatched) on my dual 2.5 GHz G5. Same render status with all other combinations of uncompressed Apple/BMD 8/10 bit codecs - rendering required on an Apple Uncompressed 8 bit timeline.

-dropping the Playback Quality to Dynamic gave a green render bar - it will simply cut the resolution in half to render it on the fly in realtime


Apple Uncompressed 10 bit timeline:

Apple 8 bit: red
Apple 10 bit: OK
BMD 8 bit: red
BMD 10 bit: OK

-there are no Dynamic RT choices with 10 bit - the only RT option applies to tape output, not timeline playback.

-a 1 sec cross dissolve between two Apple Uncompressed 10 bit clips took 12 seconds on my dual 2.5 GHz G5 (two and a half times longer than 8 bit!)

BMD 8 bit timeline (Blackmagic 8 bit (2Vuy) codec):

Apple 8 bit: red
Apple 10 bit: red
BMD 8 bit: OK
BMD 10 bit: red

Again, no Dyamic RT options here.

BMD 10 bit timeline (Blackmagic 10 Bit (DV10) codec, not the one used in v4.5):

Apple 8 bit: red
Apple 10 bit: red
BMD 8 bit: red
BMD 10 bit: red

This is a bogus test - the older Blackmagic 10 bit codec is unavailable in FCP 5 with the v5.0b1 BMD drivers. BMD really expects you to use the Apple Uncompressed codec.

Lesson learned: Dynamic RT offers one advantage for uncompressed HD work: you can put Apple Uncompressed 10 bit footage on an Apple Uncompressed 8 bit timeline and get RT performance. But that's it - still no RT stuff in a natively 10 bit timeline, regardless of whose uncompressed 10 bit codec you use.

10 bit rendering takes LOTS longer than 8 bit rendering. Applying the exact same ugly color correction, where I moved ALL color wheels and sliders (for a craptastic look), took this long on two setups of the same footage, one 8 bit version one 10 bit version (23 sec 3 frame clip):

Apple 8 bit sequence, Apple 8 bit codec: 1 min, 10 secs (70 secs to render on a 23.125 sec long seqence, so a 3:1 rendering ratio)

Apple 10 bit sequence, Apple 10 bit codec: 2 min, 55 secs (70 secs to render on a 23.125 sec long seqence, so a 7.5:1 rendering ratio)

Yowch - so in FCP 5, 10 bit rendering takes 2 1/2 times longer than 8 bit rendering.

I don't know how much difference it makes, but I'm using a 4xSeagate 400 array on a Sonnet Tempo X 4+4 SATA card striped into a RAID 0 with SoftRAID 3.1.3.

BlackMagic Disk Speed Test run on this almost full array (170 GB free of 1.46 TB) gave 90 MB/sec reads, 162 MB/sec writes.

Render Disks - does speed make a difference?

For compressed SD render disk speed doesn't matter, it's CPU bound. For uncompressed HD, dunno...let's find out!

I reset the scratch disk for renders to my cheapie little 120 GB drive I bought at Fry's for an alternaboot volume - a Maxtor 6Y120MO 120 GB.

Apple 8 bit timeline, Apple 8 bit clip - 1 min, 16 secs - took 6 seconds longer, or 8.5% longer for the Maxtor vs. the 4 disk array.

Apple 10 bit timeline, Apple 10 bit clip - 3 min 1 secs - took 6 seconds longer again, or 3.4% longer for the Maxtor vs. the 4 disk array.

For comparison purposes, I ran the Blackmagic disk speed test on the solo 120 GB - it performed at 46 MB/sec reads, 44 MB/sec writes.

An empty 4 disk array, or an 8 disk array would, I suspect, widen the advantage, but not by much I'd guess. It seems fairly clear that with a 2x read advantage and a nearly 4x write advantage (and rendering involves readng and writing), that Video Render scratch disk doesn't make a difference in render speeds. It definitely makes a difference in how many simultaneous tracks you can play back simultaneously (even if that number of tracks is or is not only 1 track).

An interesting test - for SD and compressed HD work, would renders be as fast over a GigE network as locally? I've done some heavy computation After Effects rendering tests in the past and network (even reading from a single drive) was about as fast as local disk performance for the very computationally intensive stuff I was doing.

OK, enough for today. Time to go run in the 93 degree heat. Welcome to Austin! Crematoria is just down the block - "If I owned this place and Hell, I'd rent out this place and live in Hell." Well, I only feel that way during the summer, when I'm foolish enough to run at the hottest time of the day. By August I'll be used to it. Or dead.

Whee! :D

-mike, who wishes his conveyance would glow smoky red when he arrived at his scorched blacktop destination. Party Poppers would be cool, too, for sudden stops.

PS - (did anybody else notice that the Big Red Button for the retro jets was actually labelled "Party Poppers?" Somebody in props had fun) You'll get respect, and maybe a freebie question answered, if you know the name of that ship.

eCinema Systems, Inc. Martin finally got a page up about his new 23" LCD. It's VERY expensive, but should be viewed as a replacement for a studio HD CRT, not a desktop computer monitor. He built his own guts for the thing, and I had a long talk with him about accuracy and repeatability. If you turn it on, it'll be within a half a human color perceptual unit as compared to any other one of these in the world according to him. So basically, it's more consistent than your eye can discern. It will display a true 23.976 fps. With the proper input box that they make, you can load 3D LUTs.

About 600:1 contrast, SDI and HD-SDI inputs. Handles all video standards HD & SD. About 4 1/2 inches deep, 22 pounds. Much less costly than the big 24p capable Sony.

Stuff like this is the future of digital color correction I think. The biggest limitation at the moment is the LCD panels - we need brighter whites and darker blacks and faster pixel response time.

Why is this the future? Smaller, lighter, more consistent than CRTs, with more stable color, and doesn't require regular visits from an engineer to calibrate.

When I talked to a couple of colorists, however, both said the biggest barrier to adoption would be techno-balk. Colorists would balk at working on an LCD no matter how good it actually is based on what they've always heard about LCDs, and clients would balk at walking into a suite that purports to do serious color work but has an LCD panel up there.

So it's a marketing education issue as well.

-mike

PS - I emailed Martin about pricing and he sent this back:

MSRP for the DCM23 is $14,995.

The DCM23 is a complete system. In other words, just like you would buy a BVM-D24. The price includes everything you need to use it as a video monitor. It also includes a sophisticated graticule generator.

The two boxes are sold separately for applications where they are needed as separate items (for example, to drive a 2K DLP projector with 3D LUT's.).

The EDP100A starts at $6,295
The EDP200 starts at $12,995

You don't need to purchase either of the above for the basic DCM23 package.


I was still confused about how this was going to work and what was required, so I asked again exactly what's the dealio and he patiently wrote this back:


Some things may have changed since NAB. It's often the case with new
products and prototypes (which is what I showed at NAB).

The DCM23 will be sold as a package only. The initial package includes
everything you need to do single-link HD/SD video monitoring. Effectively,
it includes a specialized version of the EDP100A, with all the features it
has and then some.

So, it is a system a one-stop solution.

In that context, doing 3D LUT work should become clearer. Just like with a
conventional Sony CRT monitor, any LUT work becomes an external function,
requiring an additional box. In this case that's the EDP200.

Yes, I'll be updating the website with configuration data.


...so it comes as monitor and EPD100A, if you want 3D LUTs that's another external box, which costs $13K more. Eek. At that point, you're getting into Sony BVM-D24 (the big 24p capable CRT) pricing territory, which has better contrast, but requires more care and feeding, and doesn't come with 3D LUT capabilities....which cost.

Martin emailed back about 3D LUT stuff:


On the 3DLUT matter. Keep in mind that no 3D LUT solution exists much below
about US$30K...and this might not include software, calibration equipment or
related services. In fact, many DI houses have spent well over $75K in 3D
LUT systems after paying for the monitor or projector. A high-grade
spectrophotometer is in the $20K to $30K range. It's a high-dollar game no
matter how you look at it.

And so, if you purchase a BVM-D24 for $26K to $32K (depending on where and
who you are), you still have to spend another $30K to $75K to get into 3D
LUT work. The DCM23 + EDP200 solution opens the door for many others to
start applying these advanced techniques.

The EDP200 will not be available for a few months, all pricing at this point
is preliminary and subject to change.

-Martin


-mike

DVD Insider: Singing the Blu's Good article on the state of the HD DVD/Blu-Ray standoff....for those who care.

Lots of folks say that the two technology approaches are holding things up from getting burners, recorders and media to the market and making it hugely successful. But that runs counter to logic since the organizations are working really hard to see how they can make the units—profitably—for sale under $1,000 and to make media that is priced under $35 per disc.


It also talks about IF there is a compromise format, it'll delay rollout for about a year. Ouch. How tough and expensive would it be to make a double optical system player to do both? Harder than the Sony DVD+/-R solution to the DVD conundrum - HD DVD puts it's data in the middle of the disk, Blu-Ray uses a smaller spot laser and puts it's data up close to the surface of the disc with a 0.1 mm protective coating (hullo, scratches, anyone?).

Lest you forget there is one little item that also needs to be solved—content protection. The approach that currently has broadcasters’ and content owners’ blessing is the Advanced Access Content System (AACS). This is designed to control digital rights on downloading movies, burning them to DVDs , sharing them at home or using them in your portable/car video players. Hi-Def content won’t be delivered until this protection has been hammered out. And you can be certain that the music industry is working on a similar solution to get the horse back in the barn.


That'll be interesting to see how it gets worked out - does this mean my OS and OS level video software (QuickTime and Windows Media) have to be able to recognize, honor, and track DRM throughout? Ugh. Time/hassle/complication.

NewsBits for Wednesday, May 25th:

(keep reading, I added some stuff if you read this earlier today)

Blu-ray and HD-DVD Summarized - curious about what all this HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray stuff is about? Here's a nice primer. I finally get why the two systems are soooooo incompatible - HD DVD puts the data 0.6 mm away from the surface, like a DVD does, but Blu-Ray puts it 0.1 mm away from the surface of the disc. Different manufacturing stuff required, and more susceptible do dust/scratches.

Talking to somebody about the new Apple Uncompressed 8 bit and Uncompressed 10 bit codecs in Final Cut Pro 5, I was told that the codec auto-detects the size and chooses a color space (601 for SD, 709 for HD) based on the size of the frame to be compressed/transcoded. If 720 or smaller, 601 (SD color space). If larger than 720 pixels wide, then 709 color space (HD's color space, more color range possible). This is a good quick fix but I can see problems with it (such as if rendering in After Effects or other compositing program, it's necessary to make odd sized compositions that might require the "other" color space than what is assigned based on size alone). I'd love to see Options enabled for the codec - Automatic follows these new rules, but allow manual setting of SD/601 or HD/709.

MacNN | LayerLink plugin adds Illustrator support to Motion - very very useful for motion graphics work, akin to how I've worked with After Effects for years.

Mac vs. PC 5: Power Mac G5 Dual 2.7GHz - light on actual content, but it's nice to see the G5 not getting totally trounced in After Effects. A Vegas/Premiere Pro vs. Final Cut Pro would be more interesting.

MPG | Apple Final Cut Pro Keyboard USB & wireless keyboards, or keycaps for Final Cut/Final Cut Express (found on philafcpup.org)

SYPHA guides to NLEs, DAWs and DV cameras This is a pop-up driven web thing that lets you boil down your choices by things like price, formats, input/output options, OS, etc. Handy.

Final Cut Pro News (Phila FCP Users Group): Apple - Mac OS X Downloads - Video - TOKI Shot a shot list generation program. A long and tedious process, but necessary for certain efforts like picture and sound editors, music editors and musicians.

I found this list of where "Revenge of the Sith" is being projected digitally in the US that was mentioned on a CML List

This is even better than my two email requestors for serial numbers - guy on Avid board suggesting trading plugins. Uh, dude, not the place fo that... : )

El Duque sent that one in, thanks!

-mike

ProLost: using the eLin color model in floating point apps:

Another good article by Stu I think I missed before. Best quote to get the gist of it:

"Many of the image processing tools we use behave differently when performed at different gammas. If you gamma an image dark, blur it, and gamma it back up (inverse of gamma = 1/gamma), you get a different result than if you simply blur the image.When you convert an image to linear space, your subsequent image processing operations better match real-world physical properties of light. If you are accustomed to processing perceptually encoded images, you will probably find that switching to g1.0 processing will make your familiar effects look more organic (with a few notable exceptions to be covered in a later article)."


Again, this only really matters if you're trying to be serious about the work you do. The basic built-in filters provide decent but not great results.

-mike

Updated 9am Wednesday - see bottom

A client brought their HDV deck over to my studio for some stuff I was doing, and I got a chance to play with it just a little bit with Final Cut Pro 5.

I had previously mastered a project to DVCPRO HD 720p60, and tried the Compressor 2.0 setting to convert it to 480i60 and a 1080i60. It converted it as progressive frames (30p) instead of fields (60i). One might argue that it's appropriate to keep a progressive format progressive, but I look at it as a cop-out -- I have 60 time samples per second, I want them all represented. So I used After Effects to render a 60 field per second version of it. Time consuming but better quality.

So I have this 720p60 master, now I want to make an HDV tape of it, just to see how it works out.

I tried using After Effects to directly cook a 1440x1080 (native HDV resolution) from my 960x720 (which is the native DVCPRO HD 720p resolution) source file straight to HDV in the AE output settings. The file was much larger than expected - presumably it cooked out all I-frames from After Effects. Perhaps I should have told it to keyframe every 15 frames? Not sure, but it didn't work out as I expected.

So I cooked out an interstitial - 1440x1080 using the BlackMagic codec to a 1080i60. Then I used Compressor 2.0 to transcode the interlaced BMD codec file to HDV.

The HDV file I dropped onto a 1080i60 HDV sequence in FCP. I apparently did it right, because that file plays back in realtime and gives no red render bars.

I doodled with the menu system on the HDV deck behind the flip down plate, and managed to figure out how to switch it from DV input to HDV input, and eventually how to configure the analog outputs to display high def on the component outputs rather than a downconverted SD component output. Lots of choices on that little deck, pretty cool. It looks and feels like a nice little DV deck with a front mounted LCD panel. But it does HDV too.

I then used the Print To Video command and turned most of the geegaws on - bars & tone, slate with text, 10 sec black, countdown, 5 sec leadout, etc. It estimated 1 hour to prep the HDV (I forget the exact dialog, but it basically is reformatting the HDV to have a proper GOP (group of pictures) formatting structure.). What was probably going on was rendering the countdown, slate, black, etc. to HDV. It only took 5-10 minutes in reality, not an hour, since the program itself was already properly formatted.

At first it didn't work - I hadn't set the presets in FCP. Duh. So I used the Easy Setup for HDV 1080i60, then it worked like a charm - even started recording on the deck for me automatically, same as a DV deck would. It was a little disconcerting to see the image previewed on computer screen more than a second ahead of the image displayed on the video monitor attached to the HDV deck. This must be the MPEG-2 engine's delay.

Speaking of monitors, I'm running the component outputs from the HDV deck into the component (video, not BNC computer/VGA) of the Dell 2405 monitor. I'm still getting what appears to be an overlay of horizontal light RGB bands over the image when using video, not computer, inputs. I've seen it from two sources using two different sets of cables, so it seems to be endemic to the monitor unless I can get something else adjusted. That part is bad - it seriously interferes with one's ability to view and evaluate the image. That has to be fixed or this monitor is useless as a TV monitor. On the other hand, I dug around in it's menu sysem and found the Image Controls. YES Virginia, you CAN make it display a proper 16:9 image instead of the default stretch to 16:10. There are three modes - full screen, aspect (which properly handles aspect for 16:9 and presumably 4:3), and 1:1, which is pixel for pixel. I was relieved to discover that it wasn't that the image looked like shit, it was just showing a downconverted SD signal from the HDV deck at the time. SD is tiny on screen, 720p is about 1/4 screen, and 1080 res is full width but letterboxed slightly top and bottom (to account for the 1200 vs 1080 resolution difference) when set to Aspect setting in Image Controls (which is what I'd recommend). There's also a Video setting that affects colors. Video is richer/more saturated. That's all I know about it so far without, you know, actually RTFM.

If I can get rid of the travelling RGB bands on the image, it's a passable/decent but not outstanding HDTV. BUT the image quality is NOT close to what I see when running HD-SDI through an HDLink to the DVI inputs of the monitor. Even just sitting there with no signal coming from the HDV deck, I can see red/green/blue stripes across the black image. Not encouraging.

The HDV deck is pretty cool. At something like $3000 to $3500 it is out of my comfort range for now, but when it drops to $1500 to $2000 I'd think about buying one just to have one around because it's cool (I don't own ANY decks nicer than an S-VHS deck, which I pretty much never use - I'm usually burning DVDs for client review). I rent all the decks I need professionally, I don't have confidence in the amortizability of any of the decks for the infrequency with which I use any one particular model (I've used DV, HDV, BetaSP, DVCPRO HD, and HDCAM in the last few months).

I haven't had a chance to capture from the deck yet, but I'll play with that soon enough.

OK, 3am, time for bed.

But in short - FCP 5 drop to tape incurs a delay depending on the complexity of your HDV edit; I'm liking the Dell better except for one worrisome problem; and the HDV deck is pretty cool with lots of features for downconversion on the fly.

-mike

UPDATED Wednesday morning - I came into the studio this morning and powered up all the monitors, including the Dell 2405. Switching over to the component video inputs, I played back the HDV version of the project, and noticed the RGB bands were gone. Good news that it's gone, but why? Two possible reasons I could think of:

1.) The RGB bands were interference from another device. so that the bands would come back when I fired up the G5 plugged into the DVI input.

2.) The RGB bands were due to heat, and allowing the Dell 2405 to cool overnight had made them go away.

Which is it? I fired up the G5 and saw no changes to the image.

Upon the second playthrough of the 10 minute program, I noticed the bands coming back.

This makes me think it's heat related, and this is bad. So perhaps this monitor is going to be sent back. Time to deal with Dell's purportedly horrible tech support on this issue (Cringely article). UGH!

Checking the Comments from my last post, somebody suggested it is a power ground loop problem, and suggested plugging the monitor and deck into the same power source. I'll try that, too. But the progressive nature of it from power up makes me think it's a thermal issue of some sort

-mike

Stu discusses log vs lin - that's logarithmic vs linear color spaces. If you're not going out to film or doing heavy, serious visual effects work you don't need to know/worry about this. But it's interesting stuff.

-mike

Two times today strangers have emailed me asking for serial numbers for Final Cut Pro HD or Final Cut Pro 5.

PEOPLE! GET REAL!

I can understand how the classic "starving indie" gets by on bootleg copies - in my early career I didn't own everything I used for work.

Somebody updated their Pro Apps Support file and their bootleg serial # didn't work and they asked me for one. Gee, let me think about that. Um, no. Hell no!

Somebody else just out and out emailed me out of the blue asking for a serial number. Never received an email from this person before.

Please, people, use your brain.

I try to be a resource for the indie community to get things done (and eventually it'd be nice to make some money doing it). But I'm NOT a resource to support or promote bootlegging. Buy a legit copy. Get one via educational outlets if you have to, but BUY the damn stuff, OK?

Please don't email me for that kind of help.

OK, end of rant.

-mike

Kung Fu Monkey: Writing: Plot and Story - back to basic moviemaking - STORY.

Read this before you even think about what camera to use. This may be basics to many out there, good fodder for me.

found the link on Cinema Minima.

-mike

Apple - Support - Downloads - Xserve RAID Driver 1.0 - Apple has an updated XServe RAID driver specifically for Final Cut Pro (and presumably other video application) users. From Apple's site:

About Xserve RAID Driver 1.0

The Xserve RAID Driver Update should be installed by all Final Cut Pro users using an Xserve RAID. The update reduces I/O WRITE latency by overriding behavior to periodically force the Xserve RAID to write its buffer cache to the hard drives. Lower I/O WRITE latency improves performance during video capture and is required to avoid dropping frames regardless of the video resolution used.

Since the frequency of Xserve RAID cache flushing to the hard drives is reduced, it is strongly recommended that an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) be used with the Xserve RAID to guard against the possibility of data loss in the event of a power failure.

Requirements: Xserve RAID Driver Update 1.0 works on all Macintosh computers running Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or later with a Xserve RAID.

Conveniently, I have a client that did a project in HD that I'm working with, and he wants to make a traditional DVD out of it. I'm helping him with some finishing touches. It's been an interesting project. In the beginning, he was debating whether to make this cable pilot with Digibeta or Varicam. The client is interested in producing the show in HD, so I had recommended they shoot with Varicam, edit with native DVCPRO HD in Final Cut Pro HD, and make a DVD out of that. They are experienced Avid editors, and with the help of a crossover editor (someone who'd learned on Avid then learned FCP) were going to make this their first Final Cut Pro HD project as well, since FCP is MUCH more affordable to do DVCPRO HD work with. There had been some discussion as to 24p vs 60p, and eventually it was decided, since it's a reality based show, to go with 60p, and that would be a more appropriate look for the material, as well as convert to 480i60 cleanly as well. Eventually they'd be able to produce a high def DVD of it, they'd get some experience with HD (new for them), and it all sounded like a good idea.

The Road to Hell is paved with credit cards, good intentions, and "It all sounded like a good idea."

Maintaining our damned theme, the Devil is in the details. One thing they didn't mention at our first meeting was that they wanted to integrate stock footage into this piece. All of the stock footage they brought in was standard definition, and much of it was from 24p source that had been telecined or had 3:2 pulldown added, and much of it was letterboxed 16:9. All of this had to be put on a 1280x720 (or actually, 960x720) DVCPRO HD timeline in Final Cut Pro HD.

This created all kinds of confusion and difficulty for the client, who has extensive experience in standard definition video production, but this was their first HD project.

They shot all of their Varicam footage at 60p, rented a Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck, and successfully captured all of their footage. I didn't hear from them during this phase, so purportedly all went well.

However...they also had shot some HDV footage, which again was not discussed during the initial consultation when Digibeta vs. Varicam was discussed. FCP 5 wasn't out, they needed to edit other SD & HD footage together, so Final Cut Express HD wasn't a valid option for a variety of reasons (quality, color correction, etc.) They didn't have, and didn't want to buy, HDVxDV or LumiereHD, so they used the Sony HDV deck to downconvert on the fly to DV, and dropped that into their timeline as well.

All of this could have been sooooooo much easier had Final Cut Pro 5 been shipping when they started editing a month or two ago. But of course, it wasn't.

PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED:

1.) New to Final Cut Pro - media is handled differently between the two programs. This led to some issues with scratch disks - render & capture files were spread across the internal drive as well as a sometimes present FireWire drive. Confusion over this led to some files being deleted off of the internal drive, so source footage (some of which captured on the fly from DVDs) could not be readily batch recaptured, as no timecode was involved. This left us with sections that were rendered and would play on the timeline, but couldn't be altered without losing a playable timeline (Big Red Screen of Doom- "Media Offline").

2.) Integrating standard def footage, with letterboxing, with 3:2 pulldown, with fields, into a high def progressive timeline results in some ugly video. Giant field lines, etc. By the time it gets scaled back down to standard def, ugh. The fix I suggested: take that source footage into After Effects, interpret as separate fields, drop onto a 720p60 timeline, scale it up, re-render. Smoother and cleaner than dropping it into the FCP timeline, scaling it up, and hoping for the best

3.) In retrospect, it would have been good to do all of this as a 16:9 standard definition project. With all of the SD footage integrated, to have captured the HD, done an "offline" of it at HD res using DVCPRO HD, and downsampled via Media Manager to uncompressed SD (or DVCPRO50) for online, and at that point brought in the standard def other parts, would probably have been best. Even writing that, I'm sure that wasn't quite the way to do it. Perhaps if the AJ-HD1200A could downsample to SD in realtime as anamorphic standard def over SDI would have been best - capture as DV, do offline, batch recapture as uncompressed for online. Something like that, since SD is all we're delivering.

4.) No pre-shoot camera/post testing - without a prep day to get used to gear, and a practice short bit to make sure everything would post as expected would have been useful. To shoot some random footage and cut it in with the SD stock would have shown some of the issues. HD is a different animal, and has to be learned about. There were basically two flavors of video before - NTSC and PAL. If you got fancy, maybe it was anamorphic. Since 24p and HD have come along, it gets much more complicated than that.

The project isn't a disaster - it needs some cleanup, and a few things look goofy, but are fixable in time. It's going to meet their needs. But had we all understood up front exactly what their plan was, and that they be including standard def, and letterboxed, and telecined material, it could have all gone more smoothly. A good looking DVD will come out of this, and that's all they really need for the moment.

-mike

More of Mike's FCP Notes:

Well, there's a lot of info coming out about FCP 5. To just run through features that others are covering elsewhere feels a bit foolish and wheel spinning-esque.

So instead, I'll focus on what I (think I) do best: poke around under the hood.

First up: codecs:

DVCPRO HD 1080i50 codec may well be the offlining format of choice for 1080p projects.

Here's why:

-1440x1080 for 1080i50 codec instead of 1280x1080 for 1080i60 codec. More resolution, same overall bandwidth as the 1080i60 codec. So compression is probably about the same on a "per pixel" basis, but you get more pixels since fewer frames per second. 1440x1080 is same resolution that HDCAM is recorded to tape. Different compression algorithm, but same size.

-realtime effects (I checked) work - so realtime color correction and cross dissolves. Hallelujah!

-relatively low bandwidth - 12 MB/sec or so

-transcoding time seems improved - I converted 1 minute of 24p footage to DVCPRO HD 1080i50 codec @ 24p in slightly under 3 minutes. I'll need to double check against FCP 4.5, but I think this is about twice as fast if I recall correctly and the hardware is the same as when I tested before.

Apple's 8 & 10 bit 4:2:2 codecs

According to the folks I've talked to so far, Apple has changed their Uncompressed 8 bit and Uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 codecs. Now anything over 720 pixels wide uses the 709 color space (the HD color space, as it correct), and anything 720 or fewer pixels wide is processed in 601 (standard definition video) color space. This is an improvement. It also implies that the Apple codecs are different. The testing done over at the One River website had previously indicated that the BlackMagic codec was preferable to the Apple one. New testing required.

Presets: what's changed:

looking at the list of presets in FCP 4.5 with BMD v4.8 drivers and FCP 5 with BMD v5.0b1 drivers, here's what I see has changed:

-Apple Intermediate codec has been added, with presets for 1080i50, 1080i60, and 720p30.

-nomenclature has changed - instead of HDTV 1080 25 Hz, the naming is more direct now, specifying interlaced from progressive formats. HDTV 1080 25Hz has become 1080i 50

-three new codecs have been added: HDV, MPEG IMX, and HDV, at the following sizes and frame rates:

Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i50
Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i60
Apple Intermediate Codec 720p30

HDV - 1080i50
HDV - 1080i60
HDV - 720p30

MPEG IMX 8-bit NTSC - 50 Mb/s - 48 kHz
MPEG IMX 8-bit PAL - 50 Mb/s - 48 kHz

as well as a new size of DVCPRO HD - 1080i50, which I went on about above.

BlackMagic has changed the codec used in their presets - they now use the Apple Uncompressed 8 & 10 bit codecs instead of their own.

OK, late and tired. To bed, nearly 1am.

-mike

My Final Cut Studio upgrade from Production Suite arrived this morning and I'm installing it now.

While it slowly chews it's cud on 8 DVDs, here's my notes so far. I'll post again once I actually start messing with it.

So finally, my Final Cut Studio upgrade is here.

And to say it's a big upgrade is no understatement - it weighs about 20 pounds, and comes with a ton of manuals (see pictures).

Apple, as usual, is very serious about their packaging and presentation - the upgrade package comes in a double layered box, with padded foam top and bottom, to keep it nice and tidy (see the first picture in above link).

INSTALLATION

The whole Studio comes on 8 DVDs.

Popping the first disk in the stack in, it's the Final Cut Studio Upgrade disk (to be specific, I'm upgrading Production Suite to Final Cut Studio). The installer has some new twists (see screen grab), allowing you to install specific parts as you wish, in specific locations as well. For instance, under DVD Studio Pro Content, there are 4 possible items to install - DVD SP 4 Templates & Transitions, as well as Templates and Transitions from DVD SP 3. New to this installer is a pop-up menu for Location - you can specify where the content (not the application) gets installed. This is great, in case you want to stash it on a non-boot volume, or have your own centralized location for such assets. The pop-up for DVD Studio Pro Content, for example, lists 5 likely locations where you might want to keep it, as well as "Other...." so you can put it anywhere else, including another volume. It's very nice to have this kind of customized control. Presumably, it will then remember all these paths so the host application will know where all this content is as soon as you launch it, without having to reconfigure anything (in theory).

You can also install iDVD Theme elements, but those are only for iLife 04, not 05. Bummer - some of those templates are really nice.

Estimated install size for the default "everything" install - 19.3 GB.

(This is being installed on my dual 2.5 GHz G5, with 3.5 GB RAM, an ATI X800 graphics card, two 1920x1200 monitors, a BlackMagic DeckLink HD Pro card (AJA Kona2 testing will be included as well), and a 4 x Seagate 7200.8 400 GB array attached to a Sonnet Tempo X 4+4 SATA card (presently with 1.0.1 ROMs until I upgrade the firmware on my drives, which requires 48 reboots of a PC, but that's another posting to follow). So this is a fairly high end setup. Once I get my Maxtor drives updated, I'll be running on an 8 port Sonnet eSATA (8 external ports).)

Installation looks like it'll take about an hour ten or hour and fifteen minutes, if I promptly feed it the disks when ready. At the moment, installing Apple Loops for Soundtrack Pro, it's reading in about 9 MB/sec, writing out about 12 MB/sec according to Activity Monitor.

Incidentally, as I was loading pictures onto my laptop to get pics up, I used the Compact Flash Card slot on my new Dell 2405 monitor to load the text of my notes onto it to transfer to my laptop - it worked like a charm, no drivers needed, even iPhoto autolaunches. More kudos to the Dell monitor - it's VERY sweet.

OK, main install finished - it took an hour and 13 minutes, with me sitting here to swap discs.

woops, I miscounted - there are NINE discs - two are in one sleeve. That two-in-a-sleeve is a DVD Video of the tutorial stuff, the second I'm presuming is the tutorial content. Eager to play with that, that'll be next. But that'll probably be tomorrow, since I have to go run, and have tix for Star Wars tonight. I'm going to drink for an hour beforehand at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar before the show. If you've never heard of Alamo Drafthouse, IT ARE TEH KOOLEST! And I mean that, grammar and spelling intentional. A big shout out and a hug (if she'd let me) to manager Julie, who helped me with a ticket fiasco this afternoon in the middle of a crazy day (involving ambulances, no less).

It's half movie theater, half bar/restaurant. No more sneaking beers into theaters (even if you're too old to do so, ya know ya wanna from time to time), they sell pitchers and pizza and salads and everything and bring it to you in your seat, and serve you on a bartop in front of the seats. It really is the only way to see movies from now on, especially event pictures like Star Wars, Batman Begins, etc.

In any case, all that means I'm Geeking Out in a different way than usual tonight, having beers and letting Melissa drive me home, where hopefully she'll take advantage of my inebriated state (and she'll probably read this too, the only interesting part is whether it'll be Before or After, and whether the Julie comment will Cost Me). :D

Oh, I'm having too much fun today. Talk to you all tomorrow, May The Force Be With You.

Always.

-mikey, space cadet du jour

OS X 10.4 (and 10.4.1) and Final Cut Pro 5 involve a LOT of changes to how things work under the hood. If you have a working Final Cut Pro HD v4.5 station working happily under OS X 10.3.x, I STRONGLY recommend that you buy an inexpensive second (or additional) internal drive and install 10.4 and Final Cut Pro 5 on that, leaving your original install alone. Play with Tiger and FCP 5, but have the ability to go back. An 80 GB drive would be more than adequate, and they are dirt cheap. Or get a faster/bigger drive that you'll ultimately use in place of what you have now.

In any case, the ability to reboot to work with your previously working OS & applications can be invaluable under deadline, and is well worth the money in a production environment.

-mike

Upon opening a prior version file, I got a message about "This project contains one or more sequences which this version of Final Cut Pro can render with Motion Tab quality (Scaling, Rotation, etc.) Please choose a scaling quality to use. "Fastest" is the quality level 4.5 used."

This is good news - since there are 3 options, Fastest, Normal, and Best, and Fastest is what FCP 4.5 used, it looks like Apple has improved the scaling technology FCP uses. This is VERY good news, since scaling in prior versions was a weak point.

So now the entrants in the field for scaling video are thus:

-Cleaner 6.0.1 - high quality scaling algorithm, but doesn't handle 10 bits/channel to my knowledge. Also has known problems with luma/gamma shifts when dealing with YUV codecs. Need to test to verify exactly what's up. So not a great solution.

-Compression Master 3.0.x - good solution for 8 bit/channel codecs, so long as they are supported. It can't export to all codecs. No 10 bit/channel support

-Adobe After Effects - high quality scaling, handles up to 16 bits/channel, but everything gets run through RGB instead of staying natively YUV. This can have side effects potentially. Exactly what, I haven't tried it yet. But it's labor intensive and non-automated to convert

Final Cut Pro HD v4.5 - poor quality scaling, no 10 bit RGB support, but good 8 & 10 bit YUV support. But poor scaling quality. HD content is handled in SD color space unless using BlackMagic codecs, and perhaps even then internally in FCP.

Final Cut Pro 5 - improved scaling algorithm. Good 8 & 10 bit YUV handling, no 10 bit RGB handling (without being processed through YUV).

So FCP 5 and After Effects are the only good possible 10 bit solutions. The choices go downhill from there, depending on what codecs & color spaces you are using.

-mike

I've posted some pictures of some very crude comparisons between the Dell 2405 vs Apple 23" Cinema Display. Both of these monitors can display 1920x1200 pixels. The Apple arguably has a nicer frame/stand, but the Dell costs less, has a better image (at least from preliminary testing), and has a BUNCH more inputs.

The Apple has one DVI-D input, and 2 FireWire 400 and 2 USB 2.0 ports. List price is about $1500 (dropped several hundred dollars not too long ago).

The Dell as one DVI-D input, one VGA input, one component video input (auto-senses HD or SD input), on composite input, one S-video input, one composite input, 2 USB 2.0 ports, and a full range of digital still camera memory card/stick inputs that work sans drivers. Oh, and the Dell can be had for under $1000 if you work it right.

My first basic basic test - plug both into my ATI X800 card, set them to mirror mode so they both display the same thing. Oh, and both had properly set profiles in the Display settings of System Prefs. Nice to see the Dell's shows up and works just fine. So far I'm very impressed with the Dell's integration on the Mac - even the still camera card reader stuff works fine out of the box, no drivers or nuthin'. This is on my dual 2.5 GHz G5, BTW.

I cranked the brightness on the Apple up to max to try to get as close to possible to the Dell's brightness, but this substantially elevates the Apple's black levels, which is not such a good thing.

I changed the Dell from it's default sRGB setting to User Setting, and then didn't change it from there.

Neither of these setups - Apple at full intensity, nor Dell at an unaltered User Setting is probably what is best for this kind of testing, this is just a quickie first pass.

I watched the Batman Begins 1080p trailer running on both simultaneously. The Dell seems brighter, with more contrast, and possibly more saturation, but that may be my biased eye liking it otherwise so much.

I took some pictures in the studio with the lights turned off; I don't think the light coming through the blinds affected the Dell any more than the Apple. That is to say, just because there are blinds visible behind the Dell it shouldn't alter the recorded brightness of the Dell's image.

If you look at the pictures, there are three:

1.) both monitors with same images. Not black levels in unilluminated portions.

2.) Same thing, but with Apple monitor facing camera more directly.

3.) This seems to be the most telling - both monitors are displaying pure black images. Note how much brighter the Apple is. This is not a desirable feature in this context.

These are all the raw JPEG's - I did NO adjustments whatsoever in iPhoto - no levels, no cropping, nothing. So while this isn't any kind of scientific test, nor adequately set up, it does give a clue as to the relative black levels of the two monitors as set up.

So far, I'm preferring the Dell.

I've found no dead pixels on the Dell so far, even after using a dead pixel testing application. My first Apple 23" had a stuck pixel and I managed to get it exchanged after a lot of hassle.

More testing to follow, but this is a reasonable place to start.

-mike

Final Cut Pro/Express HD: Single-screen Digital Cinema Desktop Preview is unavailable in Tiger

Here's the entirety of that article:

The Digital Cinema Desktop (DCD) feature in Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 and Final Cut Express HD does not function in Main mode in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. This issue only occurs if you are using the feature in single-screen mode, which is referred to in documentation as "Digital Cinema Desktop Preview - Main." The other Digital Cinema Desktop Preview modes (which use two screens) work as expected.

This document will be updated as more information becomes available.

So FCP 4.5 doesn't fully work quite the same in Tiger (10.4) as it does in Panther (10.3).

-mike

Got my new Dell 2405 24" 1920x1200 LCD monitor set up very quickly (it's on top of a sideways G5 - how's that for a non-glamour install?).

Wow.

Wow wow wow.

Was on phone with client for an hour, looking forward to the chance to unpack the monitor (had to wait until packed for trip and had the neighbors set to feed the dogs).

First impression, based on no settings/adjustments made:

1.) Brighter than Apple 23" it sits next to.

2.) black levels are lower (this is good)

3.) No dead pixels (hooray!)

4.) Batman Begins trailer looks better on the Dell

5.) whites are whiter, blacks are blacker on the Dell

6.) Inputs, inputs, inputs! With component & S-video inputs, VGA & DVI, PLUS a bunch of camera card slots in the side that work with the USB 2.0 plugs, this is a phenomenal monitor.

7.) And YES, the component inputs work with HD from my BlackMagic DeckLink HD Pro card, but it's scaled vertically to full screen (as expected, 16:10 display of a 16:9 image) and also offset to the left a bit - perhaps that's tweakable in the monitor's controls.

So far, I DEFINITELY like it better than the Apple.

Oh, and you can get it for as much as $500 less than the Apple.

-mike

Blackmagic Design: Software Downloads

In addition to the v5.0 beta 1 drivers for Final Cut Pro 5 (and Tiger), BlackMagic has updated the HDLink drivers. From their website:

HDLink Utility for Macintosh & Windows 1.7
19 May 2005
LUT’s for Panasonic VariCam & Grass Valley/Thompson Viper cameras, "Blue only" mode for video noise, Interlace Simulation Mode, optional viewing of illegal YUV values, change settings without a power-cycle, support for displays lacking valid EDID data.


Again, I'll be playing with all of this next week.

Open HD. scalable. accessible. affordable.

This is a website that certifies hardware for HD usage for HDV, compressed HD, and uncompressed HD. If you're a PC user, this is a good resource.

And, if nothing else, you can peruse the specs to see if your existing/planned purchase matches motherboard, RAM, etc. specs for some clue as to compatibility. Clue, not guarantee.

-mike

Creative Cow - Read Thread

The gist seems to be this - you can drop standard def content on an 8 or 10 bit uncompressed HD timeline and it will play in realtime. The person who posted this did it using a Blackmagic Decklink card, and whether this is a Dynamic RT thing or a DeckLink thing is not exactly clear - somebody with a Kona2 have time to test this out? I'm packing to leave town for the weekend, no time to test.

-mike

UPDATED - see bottom for the latest twist

....so after making a pointless trip to the Apple Store only to discover that they had a different upgrade in stock from the one I asked for (they had Final Cut 5 upgrade, I wanted Final Cut Studio Upgrade), basically a more sophisticated thing happened AGAIN a few hours later.

I got an email from a local Apple reseller saying that they had Final Cut Studio in stock. I called and asked specfically for a Final Cut Studio upgrade. Yes, they had that in stock. So I drove down there in rush hour traffic. Once I got there, I discovered that they did indeed have a Final Cut Studio upgrade package, BUT it was the upgrade from Final Cut Pro, not from Production Suite. The guy was very nice and apologetic about it, saying he realized after we hung up and I was on the way that he should have asked to clarify. It was an honest mistake, but still yet another waste of my time.

Beware - there are THREE possible upgrades for Final Cut Pro users!

1.) A straight upgrade from Final Cut Pro version whatever to Final Cut Pro 5 ($399)

2.) An upgrade from Final Cut Pro HD to Final Cut Studio ($699)

3.) An upgrade from Final Cut Production Suite to Final Cut Studio ($499)

(and there's also a Final Cut Express upgrade, but that's another story)

Each one is a different SKU # (package) with a different price. Even though the second vendor had a box that included all of the software I wanted, he couldn't sell it to me at the price I should be paying because his reseller's price for the upgrade from FCP was higher than my retail purchase price for the upgrade from Production Suite.

Be VERY VERY CLEAR when you call and/or ask that you are getting what you wanted, otherwise you're going to pay too much or not get what you wanted.

And get PISSED at wasting an hour TWICE (dammit) because somebody didn't pay attention to what you said and what they had in stock. Well, that's not fair to them - you have to be VERY specific when asking about what you want. I asked for a "Final Cut Studio upgrade" which is imprecise and vague - I SHOULD have asked for "Final Cut Studio upgrade from Production Suite." to be explicitly clear about what it was I needed.

All of this in an effort to avoid Apple's lie - on their website, Final Cut Studio is listed as, and I quote using copy-paste,

"Upgrade from Production Suite
Ships: 1-3 business days"

...and not "we think" or "we hope" or "probably" or "It should" or "if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their ass a-hoppin'"

I ordered mine on April 25th, they started shipping on Tuesday, and even today is the third business day since they started shipping it, and my order is still listed as "Processing Order" as it has all week. The description for "Processing Order" is given as

Processing Order
In-stock items are processed immediately so that you can begin enjoying your Apple products as soon as possible. Generally, orders can be modified while they are being processed.


....which is incredibly vague and frustrating. Does processing order mean it is in stock? Or that once an item is in stock, orders will be processed immediately? There's no way to know. My order has had this status for 3 days now (starting Tuesday).

I don't have a problem whatsoever with Apple needing time to fulfill backorders. I have a serious problem when they are listing 1-3 day shipping times for new online purchases when outstanding orders have yet to be filled in more than that timeframe. Accurate forecasts would be difficult, but "at least 1-3 days" would be accurate, rather than "1-3 days" which makes it sound like they are sitting around in a warehouse waiting patiently to be shipped by otherwise not-too-busy people.

OK, end of bitch-rant. Woops, not quite, it's Dell's turn next....

As long as I'm cranky and bitching, this reminds me of the situation I have with a 23" Dell 1920x1200 LCD (the 2405 model) that I ordered for $1100 including shipping and everything - I ordered it online expecting it to ship promptly, saw nothing to indicate otherwise on the website whilst ordering, but a week later my credit card hadn't been charged. I checked the online order status, and it said three weeks. A friend of mine more intimately familiar with Dell's inner workings said "Three weeks is the edge of the universe as far as Dell is concerned." "What do you mean?" I asked. "That's the longest amount of time they list. There's two weeks and 6 days, then there's the heat death of the universe - in a little over two weeks, you'll get another email saying 'three weeks estimated ship time', and two weeks later another 'three weeks' email, etc. etc. Three weeks to them means they have no idea when it will ship. It took MONTHS to get my WiFi adaptor for my laptop, and they kept playing this same game."

Our petty conspiracy theory is that Dell stacks up these orders until they can make a bulk order of tens of thousands of these panels to get a bulk discount, then fulfills all the orders at once. Actually, that's not all so far fetched.

Bitch moan bitch moan shit Shit SHIT!

OK, now I'm done. For now.

-crankymikey

UPDATE: I called to find out what's up. It's expected to ship within 24 hours, and I was foolish enough at the time to select 2nd day shipment, which means I'll get it Tuesday...or Wednesday. Nearly a week. And of course, it's too late to change the order. Harrumph. Or more accurately, GOD DAMMIT!

-mike

UPDATE NEXT MORNING - so of course, later that night, in much the same way that your food won't arrive at your table until you go to the bathroom at a restaurant, only after I write my childish rant do I get an email from Apple - it's shipping and will be here Monday. And since I'm leaving town this afternoon for the weekend, that'll honestly be just fine.

And this morning, I got an email that the Dell monitor has shipped yesterday as well, I should get it on Monday or Tuesday.

Aluminum Foil Hat Wearing Conspiracy Theorists: You may now assume Dell & Apple watch the web for complaining customers and ship if they bitch. Hahahahahanot.

Sooooo.........OK!

-mike

UPDATED YET AGAIN FRIDAY 10AM: ...and then the Dell monitor shows up, but I need to pack to leave town for the weekend. I'll play with it next week.

Matsushita insists Toshiba yield on DVD format - Yahoo! News. But it has all the threatening weight of a British cop - "Halt!...or I'll yell 'Halt!' again!"

TDK announces 100GB Blu-ray disc - Engadget - www.engadget.com. - a four layer, 100 GB, twice-as-fast Blu-Ray disc. And what would manufacturing costs be? And yields? And selling price?

At this point, 45 GB HD DVD and 100GB Blu-Ray are just specsmanship - both can claim their creations are real, and neither has to demonstrate, build, or make available at reasonable prices anytime soon.

This is all just posturing. Wheel out an engineer who says "Sure! We can do it!"

There are huge, heaping, festering mountains of money at risk here - these folks are playing for keeps.

-mike

After I posted about the problems with Spotlight interfering with some testing I was doing, I got an email from a developer about their Spotless application to disable Spotlight:

Dear Mike,

This morning (5-19-05), we released Spotless. It is a simple tool to turn off the Spotlight auto-indexing feature in Mac OS X 10.4. That should help with the video and external FireWire drive issues.

You can find Spotless on Version Tracker or on our web site.

----------------------------------
Regards,
John Goodchild
Fixamac Software
http://www.fixamacsoftware.com


I'd say this is a blunt fix - it stops all indexing, but what about your boot drive, that you might have email/pictures/text files/etc. that you want to search? Looking back, the real problem with Spotlight is with removable media having to be cataloged. Internal/permanent drives are just a temporary hassle to wait to be indexed. Once done, you're up and working. But removables keep doing this. Ideally, there'd be an app to do something like these options:

-disable Spotlight indexing on non-boot volumes
-disable Spotlight on FireWire or other external/removable volumes
-enable Spotlight ONLY for selected drives, forever not indexing others
-etc.

These are all ALMOST the same thing, but not quite.

-mike

Macworld: News: Spike TV utilizes Apple technologies for TV spots a very pro-Mac, pro-Final Cut Pro article. It's on MacWorld. Duh. But hey, the stuff does work great. I especially like the dig at Avid about pricing.

-mike

So I've got a Sonnet 8 port eSATA card, and Maxtor Maxline III 300GB hard drives, and finally traced down what the problem is - there's a known incompatibility between some early Maxtor ROMs and Marvell chipset based SATA controllers (all SATA Sonnet & Highpoint RocketRAID 1820a cards).

After some back and forth with their tech support, wherein I learned that YES, there is a fix, but NO, not for Macs, they sent me a PCI SATA card to install in a PC and update the ROMs, one at a time, for each of my 8 drives. Wow. What a pain in the ass. If I hadn't had a PC, then it could have gotten really messy. I was originally ticked at Maxtor for a.) shipping drives with this spotty mounting problem, and b.) not shipping a Mac firmware updater. But realistically, is a hard drive manufacturer going to test against every card out there? No. Problems happen. They found it, fixed it on later drives, and older drives can be fixed. As for the Mac thing, I understand it's a minority player, and that's one of many reasons I keep a couple of PCs around I fire up about 3 times a year. Plus, they were nice enough to loan me a card to fix the problem, and even shipped it to me on their nickel. Nice guys.

This afternoon I'm going to be updating the firmware, I'll see how that goes.

Also along those lines, I've got an editor friend (Herb Bennet) who'd suffered a nightmare while working on a client's documentary. ALL of their audio had been captured to a single FireWire drive, and that drive failed. So they had to go back and recapture hundreds of clips from I don't know how many tapes. Of course, this happened about a week before deadline for broadcast, so it was a huge hassle and cost them days of effort.

Not wanting to repeat that problem, I suggested he try a RAID 1 setup for his next large project. On my advice, he bought a Sonnet Tempo X 8 port eSATA card, 4 bay Burly Box from MacGurus, 4 300 GB Seagate 7200.8 drives from Silverado Systems (since they sell definite A Stock, not possibly B Stock as I suspect zipzoomfly.com might), and SoftRAID for double read speed RAID 1. While he was talking to MacGurus, Rick (from there) recommended running individual drives and doing nightly backups as opposed to my RAID 1 plan, because more often than not the problems likely to occur are from directory damage instead of drive failure - and a properly working RAID 1 will merely mirror that error, not avoid it.

So for now, Herb's setting up as 2 drives live, 2 drives for nightly automated backups, software TBD. The interesting part was during setup of the Sonnet Tempo-X 8 port eSATA card - I installed it into his dual 867 mirrored drive door G4, we spent an hour building up the Burly Box with cables & drives, flipped it on and...nothing. The card showed up in System Profiler, the ROM was the correct version, but no drives showed up, even when they were verifiably up and spinning. So then I connected that enclosure with 4 drives to my G5 with a Tempo X 4+4 card - worked fine. So clearly something up with the card. I started thinking way too hard about it and just punted and called Joel Vink, the engineer at Sonnet. He made the obvious recommendation - make SURE the cables were well seated. The G4's PCI slots are even MORE recessed than the G5's. I double checked my connections, and leaned the card over a bit to allow extra clearance on 4 of the 8 sockets on the back of the card (by loosening the hold down screw on the PCI card, leaning it over towards it's neighbor, then retightening the screw). Made sure the eSATA cables were pushed in ALL THE WAY, and immediately they all showed up.

So Herb is off and running. The one thing I did recommend he do was to Zero Write his drives since they are new and have nothing on them. Zero Writing involves clicking the Options button in the Erase tab in Disk Utility and clicking the checkbox labelled "Zero Write". This forces the disk to have ALL sectors checked, and if anything is bad, it gets mapped out immediately. Basically this forces the disk to be used and checked and verified thoroughly - every bit on the disk - to verify it's working. Yes, this takes approximately forever (hours apiece for large disks), especially if you have a lot of them. But I think it's worth it for the peace of mind.

As for my own card, as soon as I've upgraded the firmware ROMs on my 8 Maxtor Maxline III drives (which I verfied with tech support have the known bad/incompatible firmware version) I then should be able to safely update to the v1.1 drivers on my Sonnet card and have hotswap up and running.

I'll update later this evening as I progress.

-mike

As I have for the last three days, I called my local Apple Store (Austin) asking if they had the Final Cut Studio upgrades in. Whoever answered the phone today said "Yes," so I blasted on over to the Apple Store where they were holding it for me.

Except they were holding a Final Cut Pro 5 upgrade, not a Studio upgrade. When on the phone, I'd asked "Do you have Final Cut Studio upgrades in yet?" and the retail mall employee said "What?" "Final Cut Studio Upgrades." I repeated. "Let me check [long pause]...yes." The trouble with this stuff - it's like owning a Corvette or Honda S2000. Yes, you can take it to any Chevy/Honda dealership to get it worked on. No, they won't know [insert favorite four letter word] about it.

So that trip was a waste. But if you're in Austin and you want a Final Cut Pro 5 (not Studio) upgrade, they've got'em in stock.

I've received a couple/few emails from folks saying they've received theirs, but which? Final Cut PRO, or Final Cut Studio? Has anybody received Final Cut Studio yet? Use the Comments link below to let me know.

-mike

Final Cut Pro 5 - A First Look -

since I don't have my FCP yet, here's a place to look to learn some stuff about it, and how some of the new features work.

-talks about Multi-Cam editing and how it isn't just for multiple cameras - quite useful for multiple video track editing, such as montages, stills, etc. Open your mind to more than just multiple simultaneous cameras. What else would you want to be able to edit quickly and easily, selecting clips on the fly?

-discusses the ins and outs of HDV editing, such as how you'll have processing to do once you're finished and want to go back to tape

-Dynamic RT, new audio features, new Media Manager features, etc. are also discussed. Check it out.

-mike

Newsbits Wednesday, May 18th - cheaper eSATA cables, all next gen gaming consoles based on PowerPC, and Mark Cuban's cheeky retort to the RIAA's lawsuits.

Jeff Kreines (developer of the Kinetta camera) wrote in with a money saving tip for those setting up SATA arrays:

Mike:

I recently installed a Kinetta 4K Film Recorder at a lab, and part of the system included a G5 with 2.4 TB SATA array.

I decided to use the new Sonnet eSATA card, since the install would be a bit neater (no routing cables from the card's inside ports).

I used the Granite hot-swap 8 bay tower, which was fine. The Sonnet eSATA card has some flaws -- the connectors barely seat properly as they are spaced too widely and interfere with the slot's edges. But it works.

However, $100 more for a card and $25 each for cables seems excessive. Yet I ordered 8 of the $25 cables.

I misplaced one in shipping, and needed another overnight. Sonnet and Granite were both hopeless -- either terminal voicemail or too late (2PM West coast) to ship.

An internet search turned up Cruz Systems -- who make the eSATA to SATA cables for Sonnet! And sell them direct for half the price. They overnighted them, all was well. Terri was smart, fast, and helpful -- such a relief.

You might want to let folks know that they can save $100 on cables for an 8-drive array.

Contact info:

Terri L. Clarke
Sales Manager
CRUZ Systems
59 Old El Pueblo Road
Unit G
Scotts valley, CA 95066
terric@cruzsystems.com
(831) 461-3000

Post if you'd like...

Best,

Jeff


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

It's interesting to note that the Nintendo Revolution, Playstation 3, and XBox 360 are ALL based in some way off of PowerPC derived CPUs. Xbox 360 development is actually done on G5 Macs, although Microsoft is quick to point out that it's merely an "interim solution...to be replaced in the future."

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

Mark Cuban has an interesting post on his blog stating that since Yahoo's music service is $5/month for "all you can eat," the RIAA shouldn't be able to claim that students/kids/grandmas are really stealing thousands and thousands of dollars worth of music when they download/share MP3's.

A very amusing argument, it'll be interesting to see it used as a defense in a court case. "Your honor, we claim this 17 year old kid stole from us to the tune (no pun intended) of $25,000 by downloading dozens of songs illegally."

(Defense lawyer): "Your honor, the kid could have downloaded thousands of songs for $5/month. We plead guilty and suggest he be forced to pay the equivalent for 5 years of all the songs he possibly could have downloaded. Does that seem a reasonable punishment? OK, we'll pay $300."

Macworld: Review: Shake 3.5 - brief review that will clue you in to the differences between Motion, After Effects, and Shake. Shake is a compositing tool, period. Not a motion graphics tool. Period. It's quirky, different, and powerful.

-mike

Basically, Spotlight insists on indexing a drive, stealing HUGE amounts of CPU cycles. I first noted this doing my QuickTime H.264 tests last week. FireWire drives do not recall if they were told to not be indexed if they are remounted. A Macintouch reader described it best:

Mac OS X 10.4.1:

Matt Schultz

Our chief engineer refers to Tiger's Spotlight application as 'Stoplight,' because, he says, '...it brings all work to a screeching halt.' As of 10.4.1, 'Stoplight' still cannot handle many multiple 1394 drives attached to a single 1394 bus. 'Stoplight' still cannot remember a privacy listing of any particular drive once it's been unmounted and remounted. It must re-index regardless of what the previous preferences were. Under Tiger, it appears that all Mac users are opted-in to this indexing system whether they like it or not. There is no other find function available. We connected a chain of 23 1394b external HDDs of various sizes (the smallest of which was 80GB) to a PowerMac Dual2.0 G5 running 10.4.1. A vast repository of video data resides on these drives; some files so large they span multiple drives (RAID). Chains of multiple drives such as these are typical in the video production, editing, and post/pro business. The 1394 spec supports up to 63 such devices on a single chain and since Apple provides only one 1394b port on these G5s, they really should expect such chains of external drives. Once the chain began mounting, 'Stoplight' vaulted into indexing action. At the 3 hour mark, we performed a cold power shutdown of the machine. It is important to note that the same chain, plugged into a PowerMac Dual 2.0 G5 running 10.3.9, was available for work within 16 seconds and plugged into a Dell Pentium 4 Win XP machine with a 1394b host adapter board, was available in 9 seconds. It is a profound flaw of 'Stoplight' that it cannot maintain privacy preferences once an external drive is unmounted. Additionally, the app's ability to handle massive sized and vast numbers of files spread out and across external sources in a data intensive environment is suspect at best. 10.4.1 did nothing to address these fundamental issues. It virtually makes FCP nearly impossible to use under Tiger conditions and has rendered the 1394 bus ineffective. We hope Apple addresses these usability problems in a 'Stoplight' update as quickly as possible, so we can get back to work."


Eek. This is a serious problem. You can manually tell each drive to not be indexed, but that's EACH TIME you mount them or reboot. That's no good. Long strings of FireWire (or USB 2.0, or SATA, or any other external drive) are pretty much expected in video work, and expected to have hundreds of GB if not a number of terabytes of storage on them.

THIS MUST BE FIXED, AND PRONTO, as it SERIOUSLY IMPEDES the ability to do real work under Tiger. A simple checkbox for "do not index external drives" would be a good place to start. When digitizing, you're creating huge files pretty quickly. Stoplight, excuse me, Spotlight could interfere with this process.

I wonder if this indexing on mount issue is holding up BlackMagic's FrameLink application, that mounts QuickTime files as volumes with DPX files as the frames? I could see indexing being a serious problem for that application.

This is the biggest dumb mistake I've seen so far in Tiger.

Macworld UK - DVD format unity talks fail - more overt proof that the Toshiba triple layer 45 GB disc is HD DVD's rebuttal to merging the standards.

Ugh, as I said the other day, we're back where we started, and that's BAD.

-mike

24p In Final CDut Pro HD

This is a really nice article over on Ken Stone's site by Graeme Nattress (FCP plugin maker) explaining the ins and outs of 24p progressive video, where it comes from, and how it works. It's mostly centered on DV, but the concepts carry over to the HD world as well, such as if you're going to shoot a 1080p24 project but need to deliver it for broadcast on 1080i60.

-mike

If you can read this, there's no point in reading this. Other than to apologize for yesterday/last night. My ISP was under a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005.

So if you can read this, it's up for the moment, and that's why.

-mike

SONY UNVEILS NEW HDV CAMCORDER FOR PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHERS

-called HVR-A1U
-$3500
-CMOS based
-1/3", 3 megapixel sensor
-so if it's single chip, is that 960x1080 with three colors? (this is a total guess)
-2.7" LCD screen
-from the press release:

The HVR-A1U offers many of the same features as the HVR-Z1U, such as balanced audio, XLR inputs, SMPTE timecode and a Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* Lens. However, its smaller footprint makes this camcorder ideal for applications where space is at a premium or extreme mobility is required.

-shoots HDV & DV (DV can be 4:3 or 16:9)
-still image capture (1920x1440 in memory mode, 1440x10 in Tape & Play/Edit mode)
-on screen histogram
-basically, a big brother to the HC1 I linked to earlier

Picture 1 - front angle picture
Picture 2 - front angle w/LCD flipped out, LCD facing
Picture 3 - front angle, LCD flipped out but LCD facing away
Picture 4 - side view
Picture 5 - picture of CMOS sensor
Picture 6 - picture of Enhanced Imaging Processor, which they say is making a difference in image quality. Ummm....OK.

Mike's (further) Comments: at a price point below the Z1U, and with 1 CMOS rather then 3 CCD sensors, this is yet another entrant into the HDV field. By year end, this makes for 7 HD cameras that I know of under $7000. It may well be the Year of HD after all.

Again, it's a matter of waiting until we see quality of image from the cameras, but it's nice to have choices.

-mike

Blackmagic Design ships a BETA of FCP 5 compatible drivers ...but not a finalized one. Came out Friday, I missed it apparently. This is 5.0b1 (as in beta, not finalized). It lists support for:

-full support for Final Cut Pro HD v5 and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
-HDV playback via HD-SDI outputs
-Multi-Cam editing
-12 channels of audio capture and playback
-Dynamic RT Effects and VariCam.
-Compatible with Final Cut Pro HD v5.0 (not v4.5)

Does NOT include the eagerly anticipated FrameLink, which allows uncompressed QuickTime movies to be mounted as volumes full of DPX sequences. Mostly applicable to film and other high end applications, but very very nice nonetheless. Not available as yet. Harumph.

But, they have shipped soemthing prior to FCP 5's release, so brownie points for them. AJA hasn't yet (more on that below).

Details gleaned from the readme file:

-uses Apple's uncompressed codecs in 4:2:2 for SD and HD. What about the color space differences between SD (601) and HD (709)? Unless Apple has changed their codecs, this is potentially an issue.

-BlackMagic RGB 4:4:4 codec still used for RGB work

-Varicam setup now includes easy setup for 720p23.98

-support of mixed format 8 or 10 bit uncompressed media in same timeline (THIS IS NEW AND A BIG DEAL - LESS RENDERING)

Things not yet supported that I wish were:

-downconversion from 720p format at any framerate - should at least support 720p60 to 480i, but doesn't. Preferably would also handle 720p24 to 480i.

-FrameLink isn't working yet, wish it did

-final, not beta, software. At NAB they gave the impression that a production grade driver would be available upon release of FCP 5. Although, to their credit, they did say "at about the same time."

So what's up with AJA's Kona2 and Final Cut Pro 5 support?

I checked the AJA website, found this:

We plan on having complete compatibility for OS 10.4 Tiger with KONA 2 and KONA LS either before or in tandem with the release of FCP 5 (Final Cut Studio), as the KONA products support the new features in Final Cut Studio immediately when it ships.


So, it's time, but I don't see anything up on their website yet. Although they officially have until tomorrow, when FCP 5 will start landing in client's hands, and scant seconds later on their hard drives.

Their official statement on the matter, a press release from NAB:

NAB, Las Vegas, NV, April 19, 2005: AJA Video today announced that all KONA and Io products will support Apple’s new Final Cut Pro 5 and Final Cut Studio. The exciting new features will be functional when FCP 5 and Studio ship. Additionally, a new driver release for the Io product line will feature reduced latency and 23.98 frame rate support. AJA’s complete line of desktop video capture cards and devices can be seen in their booth at NAB (SL2514), next to Apple’s booth.

The new Io, Io LA, and Io LD driver will feature reduced latency on the FireWire connection to the Mac as the result of a driver update from Apple. This major enhancement in the functionality of Io will significantly improve its responsiveness. Also, the Io product family’s new 23.98 frame rate support adds new capability for Io to support many 24p and film related projects.

The new version 1.1 KONA 2 driver has hardware-accelerated support for FCP 5’s HDV playback codec, offloading the CPU to allow more real time effects. KONA 2 and KONA LS will provide full support for Apple’s new Dynamic RT Extreme, 8 channels of discrete audio input, the new MultiCam playback of up to 16 sources, video-out support for Motion 2 and the new version of Shake, and video out of SoundTrack Pro. Io will also support MultiCam playback of up to 16 sources, video-out support for Motion 2, and the new version of Shake.

“It’s been great to work so closely with Apple through the development process of the latest version of Final Cut Pro 5 and Final Cut Studio,” said Ted Schilowitz, Worldwide Product Manager, Desktop Video Engines, AJA Video. “We’re happy to be the first company to support these features as they’re announced, showing that our relationship with Apple has never been stronger. ”

The new Kona 2 driver version 1.1 is available now for download at the support section of AJA’s website. The new Io family driver will be available in May.


I'm guessing it'll ship pretty soon.

-mike

Studios Release Movies for Portable Device - Yahoo! News

Currently released or scheduled for release: The Rundown, Van Helsing, Dawn of the Dead: Unrated Director's Cut, Chronicles of Riddick: Unrated Director's Cut, The Fast & The Furious, I Robot, Napoleon Dynamite, & Dodgeball.

Yep, they know their target demographic...

...but this is yet another avenue of content distribution. Downloadable shorts playable on these could be fun.

The New Yorker: The Critics: The Current Cinema: "I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves"

...is about as nice as it gets. Read on for the brtual and probably accurate review. I haven't seen it, I have tix for next Monday - I refuse to support opening night. I loved the first (second?) three movies as a kid, and have been mildly entertained but overall let down by the recent trilogy.

I've received word from a number of readers and resellers that Final Cut Pro 5 and Final Cut Studio are officially shipping. The Apple web site now says 1-2 days shipping time instead of 4-6 weeks until it can be shipped.

I spoke with the local (Austin, TX, Barton Creek Square Mall) store and was told it is NOT in their system as something akin to "on the way." This just means that it hasn't left the dock from Apple Corporate to be released to Apple Retail. As in FedEx or whomever hasn't picked it up yet. So it's inbound, but hasn't arrived. I haven't received any "I have mine!" emails yet, but have received a couple of "It's on the way!" emails. And yes, exclamation points were included.

I was lax/slack/lazy/busy and didn't order my Studio upgrade until after I was home from NAB. A big mistake, because that puts me later in queue. I've been very slow about signing up for things this year. Harrumph.

As an aside, I've been getting into Final Touch HD while I waited for new toys to ship. And boy, it is not your father's OS X app. Different city time.

-mike

Sony today announced a new camera, due in July, that will be a more consumer oriented HD camcorder.

The HDR-HC1 is a tiny little HDV camera aimed at consumers (OK, those with $1700 to spend on a vacation camera).

Features:

- one and a half pounds. Yep, tiny
-Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonar lens
-HDV 1080i
-also does 2.8 megapixel stills, store on Memory Stick PRO Duo
-can shoot video and take 1 megapixel stills at same time
-2.7" touchscreen flipout LCD
-DV 16:9 or 4:3
-10x optical zoom (120x digital, which is meaningless)
-zoom ring
-zebra pattern
-spot focus
-manual white balance, shutter speed, and focus (good!)
-"Cinematic" mode - probably like CineFrame, in that it stutters 60i to simulate 24p or 25p
-Super NightShot Plus Infrared System allows low/no light shooting
-FireWire interface (of course), Sony calls it i.Link.
-PictBridge printer compatibility for easy direct printing
-bunch o' accessories - cases, lights, lenses, mikes, batters, chargers, cables, etc.
-CMOS sensor - sounds like a single sensor
-"intelligent" pop up flash for stills
-from MacWorld article:

The HDR-HC1 measures 71 mm by 94 mm by 188 mm and weighs 680 grams without the battery. In contrast the previous model measured 151 mm by 181 mm by 365 mm and weighed 2 kilograms.

-Three outputs from camera: component video out, iLink (FireWire/1394a), and "Japanese D3/D4 format signal" which I've never heard of before-JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) only plug? I wonder if the US versions will even include that.

Pictures


Picture 1 - front angle shot
Picture 2 - top angle shot
Picture 3 - shot from back
Picture 4 - Accessories! These are my guesses based on the picture, so I could be wrong: tripod, backpack (probably with padded compartments), a hard carrying case, a shoulder bag, bigger batteries, single and dual battery chargers (nice!), three different battery sizes, three or four different flashes & lights, three different mikes, and two screw on lenses

Unanswered questions:

-What's the size of the CMOS sensor (I'm guessing 1/3" or smaller)
-What's the resolution of the sensor? (Is it 960/1440x1080 like the FX1/Z1U?)
-what's the light sensitivity?
-does it have real timecode (99% likely it doesn't since FX-1 doesn't)
-is the component video output upstream of the MPEG-2 engine? (Most likely, since you want realtime feedback on screen of what you're shooting, MPEG-2 takes a fraction of a second to encode)
-when exactly are they shipping (mid-July is best guess, July 7 quoted for Japan with US & Europe "soon thereafter")
-what kind of tripod mount does it have?
-how much are the accessories?

Articles used/cited:

MacNN | Sony unveils ultra-compact HD video camera has tiny picture with screen folded out

Sony press release (most info gleaned from this)

MacMinute article

MacWorld article (has picture of unit)

There are a lot of articles that come out every day that are interesting, but not core to what I'm looking into. Rather than a zillion little posts per day, I'm trying to lump them into a new section I'll dub HD Newsbits. Might be new hard drives, or new plugins, or slightly off topic, or just little stuff that is of interest but not a big deal, but still of interest.

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

Macworld UK - Seagate ships 120GB notebook drive - ideal for those wanting to edit in the field on their laptops. 5400rpm 120 GB and a 7200rpm 100GB drives for LAPTOPS. As in internal. This is good.

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

Also, apologies for posting, unheralded, the "review" of Magic Bullet Suite For Editors the other day. It's a fawning adoration piece without a lot of substance. "Instantly makes it look better" is not a very objective statement. It's not instant, there's serious rendering involved. I posted that link in a hurry after a quick visual skim. Apologies, I try to "keep it real" on here.

Thanks to Martijn Schroevers for pointing that out.
------------

Goddammit, not again...two camps fighting over a new standard (this time UltraWideBand)

Macworld: News: Standards deadlock looms over ultra wideband

Mike's Comments:God dammit, people, once again, two competing formats for one need are locked into their own proprietary and different approaches and are going to "let the market chose" which means unhappy consumers and a slow launch to the market. For once, I'm happy there're big companies tossing their weight around - since MS & Intel are behind the WiMedia Alliance, it'll probably quickly emerge as the market winner.

--------------
Playstation 3 unveiled - MacWorld UK

Macworld UK - PlayStation 3 unveiled...and it includes a Blu-Ray player, and will play ALL variants of CD and DVD, including -R, +R, etc.

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

Cinema Minima: Municipal Broadband, Wireless in USA there are lots of municipal projects out in the US to get broadband out there...withOUT private companies getting involved.
Mike's CommentsIn Texas, however the opposite is true - there's a bill being promoted to BAN municipalities from getting involved. Hello, who's been bought in the government? It all boils down to whether it's a private luxury (old school) or more like a utility (new school) to be widely available.

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

Home Theater Projectors -- Highly Rated Models with Projector Reviews - found this on another blog, which I remembered which one so I could credit them (sorry!). But it's a bunch of reviews of home theater projectors. I'm interested but uninformed in this area.

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

Build Your Own HD Storage: we did! - from ten80 over in Europe, these guys built a SATA RAID. Slightly dated (there are some better choices out now), but somebody else is doing these, too.

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

Hands On with HVR-Z1U - another ten80 article from more of a shooter's perspective.

For starters, OS X 10.4.1 is available on Software Update - found it when updating something else. From Apple's website:

The 10.4.1 Update delivers overall improved reliability for Mac OS X v10.4 and is recommended for all users. It includes improvements for:

file sharing using AFP and SMB/CIFS network file services
using DHCP in wireless networks
user login when accessing LDAP and Active Directory servers
core graphics including updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers
synchronization with .Mac
Address Book, iCal, Font Book, Mail, and Preview applications
Dashboard widgets: Address Book, Flight Tracker, Phone Book, and World Clock
creating and burning disk images using Disk Utility
compatibility with third party applications and devices
For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n301517


That additional link goes into detail about the issues the update addresses. A quick skim didn't reveal anything Pro App related, just some iPhoto/iDVD/DVD Player issues.

On a more important note, I got confirmation that Final Cut Pro 5 and Final Cut Studio are expected to be available to start shipping tomorrow (Tuesday, May 17th). I would hope that they'll be in Apple Stores, but no guarantee. If Apple Store Austin has'em, I'll be cancelling my online order and fetching myself one locally (OK, actually the reverse of that order, but you get the idea).

Toshiba says: unifying DVD formats may prove too difficult - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Mike's Comments:....which makes sense. HD DVD and Blu Ray were miles apart in physical structure. With a possible 45 GB HD-DVD (three 15 GB layers) and a dual double layer disk (30 GB of HD on one side consisting of two 15 GB layers; and two layers of standard def DVD on the other for 8.4 GB), this might solve the needs of the Hollywood set. Now, whether we as consumers get more than 15 GB recordable discs remains to be seen. And if I have to flip the disc over, it might as well be another piece of media.

Assuming the double-dual HD/SD combo disc isn't just a smoke 'n mirrors demo, and assuming Hollywood would go for a disk they couldn't put branding on, this could be a winner in the marketplace for playback. (But remember early DVDs with 4:3 on one side, 16:9/letterbox on the other? The disc name was printed tiny around the spindle. No branding. Suxored.)

But the Blu Ray argument of the need for capacity is getting diminished by quality we're seeing from H.264 (and VC-1 as well, but I haven't played with that as much). If you can get good results from the same datarates that SD DVD's required, * why would you NEED as much capacity as Blu Ray offers?

As for data rates at quality, SD DVD's 6-8 megabits, or even twice that, would fit the existing quantity (by time) of media that fits on SD DVDs onto HD DVDs, but in high definition. That's just a resolution bump with no additional features. Will Hollywood go for that, or do they really, REALLY want to put more supplementals on the disc? And are they willing to pay more per disc (since Blu Ray looks to cost more to manufacture, in addition to the new tooling costs to set up for it) in order to do it? That's one of the crucial questions. But that's changed now with this possible triple layer disc from Toshiba. As much space as a 50 GB Blu Ray (almost - 90% as much).

But these simplyer HD DVDs would be cheap to produce, and that's really all Hollywood wants - secure, high def, good quality (probably in that order). Any DRM tech that somebody dreams up will be software based, and thus applicable to either format (Blu Ray or HD DVD), so no advantage for either format. Plus, HD DVD just makes more sense as a name for consumers to understand.

I'd still like to have Blu Ray's capacity available, but what do you folks think of this turn of events? We need one standard. Period.

The bad part about this is that Sony still owns it's own movie studios, and will still put out their movies on their own format if they stick to their guns. I don't see them folding on Blu Ray to join HD DVD just to make the industry happy.

So we're kinda back where we started.

Round 1 was when HD DVD had the smarter codecs (VC-1 & H.264) as compared to Blu Ray (MPEG-2 only). Blu Ray had more capacity in GB, but HD DVD was more efficient with it's codecs, so it wasn't as big a deal that it held less (15 vs 25 GB per disc). Roughly a tie.

Round 2 brought an advantage to Blu Ray when they added the same codecs, and now had the same efficiency but more capacity.

Round 3 was when it was pointed out that Blu Ray would presumably cost more to manufacture the discs.

Round 4 was when there might be a merging of the features.

Round 5 was the new double dual and triple layer HD DVDs announced by Toshiba.

I'm probably missing a lot of details, but this is how I see it thinking back off the top of my head.

We're sort of back where we started - two competing standards that aren't backing down, with the potential for some movies released on one format, others released only on the other. Unless consumers have a dual format player, they have to buy/rent their movies carefully, and they will NOT like that. At ALL.

What's changed is that both parties now offer the same codecs and roughly the same capacities, assuming Toshiba's proposed double dual and triple layer stuff are affordably and reliably producable, and all HD DVD players will play them (easier since there are effectively zero in the US market).

So the stand-off is back, but with both parties holding better hands than when we started.

Consumers are still facing a losing proposition, though.

What do YOU think? Use the comments link to below to sound off.

I did a little bit more testing with H.264 over the weekend - 30 megabit doesn't seem to play reliably, even on a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with an ATI X800 card for 1080p24 content. Some 20 megabit 1080p24 didn't play back smoothly in certain sections. I don't know if it was because it was at the beginning of the clip, or if the footage (confetti thrown into an open sky, tons of tiny details) was more complex to play back. But there are definite limits to what H.264 can do. 20 megabit 720p60 footage of a guy running around (from my camera test) played back OK. More details later when I can do some real testing with Compressor 2.0. I hope to pick up my copy tomorrow.

Thinking some more, after having a few email conversations, H.264 is just starting. I'm sure we'll get better playback and better encoding as time goes by. Even if that encoding is done elsewhere, not as built-in OS X/QT 7 encoding. Just like there are sophisticated MPEG-2 based encoders that deliver the best quality for commercial DVDs, the same thing will occur for H.264.

While the quality of H.264 is miles beyond MPEG-2 (even comparing prosumer (QuickTime 7 built-in encoding vs high quality MPEG-2 encoding), the workflows will probably be quite similar - decent results with consumer/low end professional tools (and I'll consider Compressor a low end professional tool, as compared to what Universal/MGM/Disney will use to compress their titles), and great results with high end tools. High end tools will also offer realtime encoding, which will matter since we're now dealing with a much more calculation intensive encoding process, and dealing with up to 6 times as many pixels as standard definition.

The interesting question will be whether we can get "good enough" looking video within the data rate limits of the high def DVD specs using the low end professional tools. If your movie/video/doc/content looks good at Compressor capable data rates, and will play back reliably on the still unshipped HD DVD/Blu Ray players, and FITS on whatever media you're authoring on, you're golden.

As for professional tools, we'll need them - H.264 is VERY slow to encode. Miles slower than MPEG-2 it would seem. Tomorrow I'll start being able to do some real tests I would imagine, if Final Cut Studio ships as expected. I want to see how good the HD MPEG-2 encoding is, and how long it takes to do.

Don't forget that at the moment, H.264 is for progressive footage only from what I can tell. 1080i footage needs to use HDV/MPEG-2. Can we make 1080p24 H.264 discs that play back at 1080i? That's a very, very interesting question. I can probably find that in the online docs, but I need to look it up. Anybody know yet? Post in the comments field please if so.

-mike

News & Useful Links for Monday, May 16 2005

Bunch of useful links from Philadelphia Final Cut Pro User Group site:

HD Log Combination Videologger for Mac OSX - logging software with a lot of features, including customizable fields. Make storyboards, RS422 or FireWire deck control, grab timecode right off the camera, scene detection, etc. etc. Got some serious logging to do, such as for a documentary? Check this out.

Final Cut Pro News (Phila FCP Users Group): Free three strip plugin Cool little plugin simulates Technicolor film look. Graeme Nattress helped out on this. Free, download, play.

Final Cut Pro News (Phila FCP Users Group): Apple - Mac OS X Downloads - Video - Russian Kamera simulates the Lomo camera look. Cute & fun, more stuff to play with.

Final Cut Pro News (Phila FCP Users Group): Magic Bullet For editors Review

With all the manuals and tech stuff posted, I'm thinking Final Cut Studio is coming out on Monday. Or maybe Tuesday, since Apple likes to launch product on a Tuesday. Maybe that gives the launch prep folks Monday to prepare, I dunno.

With no email saying my Final Cut Studio upgrade is shipping, I'm thinking I may have to go down to the Apple Store and just buy it locally rather than wait for Apple to ship it.

UPDATE
There's also a scheduled Final Cut Studio demo at an Apple Store on Tuesday given by an Apple heavy, so release is looking likely.

Also, I recall reading somewhere in the documentation that 10.4.1 will be required for at least some parts of Final Cut Studio.

10.4.1 release imminent according to the rumor sites, due in the next few days.

-mike

Apple - Support - Final Cut Pro

This PDF explains various workflows using Final Cut Studio.

If you don't know what all the parts of Final Cut Studio are, or how to use them, or even what they are for, this document gives examples of what they are, what they're used for, and how they might be used in a realistic simple production workflow.

Includes neat tricks like:
Embed Motion Content: When this option is selected, Final Cut Pro creates the Motion project as a clip in Final Cut Pro. You can think of that clip as “live” in Final Cut Pro, meaning it updates as it is worked on in Motion. Even while both applications are open, when you examine the Motion clip in Final Cut Pro, you’ll see that the content has been updated with any changes that were saved in Motion.


When you do export from FCP to Motion, it'll carry:
-Media
- Any relevant timing information, such as frame rates and In and Out points
- Markers
- All of the standard motion characteristics, including scale,
position, rotation, composite modes, and opacity, as well as any
linear and smooth keyframing of these parameters

From the docs:

If you choose to import your DVCPRO HD-based QuickTime movie directly into DVD Studio Pro, the embedded MPEG encoder will automatically encode the video using the HD MPEG-2 format.

...but this is less than optimal, since MPEG-2 is so much less efficient than H.264.

Also from the docs:

The HDV format is based on a configuration of the MPEG-2 format that is supported by DVD Studio Pro. This means that if you acquire and edit your video in the HDV format, it does not require transcoding before being used in an HD project. This not only saves time, it reduces the chances of artifacts being introduced into the video during a transcoding process. The ability of Final Cut Pro 5 to natively edit HDV sources makes this workflow an attractive way to create DVD projects using HD assets.

So it appearsHDV will drop seamlessly as is into high def DVD Studio Pro 4projects - it sounds like HDV is already formatted as an MPEG-2 that is acceptable for use in DVD Studio Pro 4. So you don't have to transcode it to anything else, it's ready to get muxed into a disc.

So it also appears that DVD Studio Pro 4 will transcode to MPEG-2 on it's own without discretely having to use Compressor 2.

Apparently, Compressor 2 will DEFINITELY handle 10 bit, 4:2:2 video conversions - this is great! You just have to be sure to enable Frame Controls, otherwise you'll get 8 bit output results. At least enable Automatic in the Frame Controls tab in the Settings in Compressor 2.

Unfortunately, DVD Studio Pro 4 can't import iDVD 5 projects. iDVD 4 projects yes, iDVD 5 no. Drat - since there are some excellent and cool templates in iDVD 5. Why doesn't this work? Previous versions of DVD Studio Pro could open the analagous version of iDVD projects. They were probably in a hurry to get it out the door and that was a feature dropped. Or else they didn't have a graceful solution as to how to handle them HD or SD. Either way, can't import them.

In order to do multi-angle high def DVDs:

When authoring a multi-angle or mixed-angle HD DVD project in DVD Studio Pro 4, the video streams in the track are limited to a combined maximum bit rate of 24 Mbps (this includes the selected video stream plus all audio and subtitle streams). 1080i HDV video uses a bit rate of 25 Mbps, which is higher than the maximum allowable multi-angle bit rate in the HD DVD specification.

It is possible to create a multi-angle project with HDV video if you use 720p HDV video, which uses a bit rate of 19 Mbps, depending on the number and type of audio and subtitle streams you use.


So I was wrong about maximum bitrates for high def DVDs You can encode HD MPEG-2 at up to 29 megabits/sec from Compressor 2, but 24 mbs is the max allowable combined datarate for audio and video in a high def DVD.

It'll be interesting to see how new high def DVD players perform based on this spec. While the max bitrate was 10 megabits/sec for SD DVDs, most discs are authored at 6-7 megabits for video in order to play back reliably on all players - far below the specified limits. Will high def DVD players be any better? Will they perform to spec?

DVD Studio Pro 4 supports additional Digital Theater Systems (DTS) audio formats.

You can now use DTS ES audio that contains up to 6.1 channels, as well as audio that has up to a 96 kHz sample rate and 24-bit sample size. Important: All DTS audio imported into DVD Studio Pro must use the compacted file format (files with a ".cpt" file extension).

Note: All DTS audio files that you import into a DVD Studio Pro project must use at least a 48 kHz sample rate. DTS files with a 44.1 kHz sample rate produce unusable results.

-mike

Presumably, these will be the limits for high definition DVDs. UPDATE: No it's not - 24 megabits/sec is the max allowable combined datarate, for audio & video on a high def DVD (at least according to Apple's DVD Studio Pro 4 specs).

HD MPEG-2: no more than 29 megabits/sec (3.625 MB/sec) from here

H.264: no more than 18 megabits/sec (2.25 MB/sec) from here

Good to know.

-mike

The Shape of Days: H.264 day three: Demonstrations at HD resolutions

More H.264 testing with downloadable samples, this time from "clean" uncompressed source. Worth checking out if you have QuickTime 7 installed on your Mac.

-mike

QuickTime 7 (Part 2)

Explanation of QT 7 behavior & performance under 10.3.9 and 10.4.

Under 10.3.9, CPU (the G5's) handled certain tasks, and 1080p trailers worked. Under 10.4, the GPU (graphics card) handles those tasks. If you have a below spec card, the same clips that worked under 10.3.9 don't work under 10.4.

This isn't Apple trying to screw people, it's migration to a new architecture that over time will push capabilities higher. The only thing they SHOULD be doing is checking for presence of such-and-such GPUs, and deciding whether to use GPU or CPU instead of straight GPU. Maybe in 10.4.5.

-mike

Integrated automated motorized controllers allow audio levels to be set from the console as your audio plays back for multi-track stuff. I don't do this but watch it get done, and integrated controllers make a big big difference in productivity. Here's some that are supported with the new Final Cut Pro Studio.

B-CONTROL FADER BCF2000 : Total Recall USB/MIDI Controller Desk with 8 Motorized Faders - usable with Sountrack Pro & FCP 5 - and only $200!

Mackie - Mackie Control Universal - usable with Soundtrack Pro & FCP 5

Edirol UR-80 USB Recording System - usable with Soundtrack Pro
& FCP 5

Thanks to Martijn Schroevers for sending this info in.

-mike

Apple Compressor User Interface from a friend online.

Note that H.264 and MPEG-2 are supported, but that MPEG-2, since it is less efficient, doesn't offer as much play time.

-mike

The Shape of Days: A demonstration of H.264 encoding

Another blogger plays with H.264, but posts his examples online.

Why aren't I posted samples? Because HD4NDs is hosted by the grace of a friendly acquaintance, and I don't want to create bandwidth spikes for him. Maybe someday, but not today.

-mike

2-pop - The Digital Filmmaker's Resource Site

I've talked about this before, but Steve Shaw supervised the use of a Thomson Viper in Filmstream mode to record uncompressed 10 bit log RGB 4:4:4 (that means really high quality) for a digitally shot and produced movie. Offline editing done with Final Cut Pro.

Talks a bit about their workflow, use of S.Two DFR systems, etc.

-mike

Apple must be getting very very close to releasing Final Cut Pro Studio - support docs are online already.

Support Page for Final Cut Pro 5:
Items to Check Before You Install Final Cut Pro 5
Step-by-Step Help for Installing Final Cut Pro 5
Getting Started: Connecting Your DV Camcorder or Deck to Your Computer
Using Spotlight to search Final Cut Pro Help documents in Tiger Mac OS X 10.4
What is Required To Run Final Cut Pro 5?
What Cameras, Decks and I/O Cards are Qualified for Use?
What Kind of Hard Drive(s) Will Best Suit My Needs?
Final Cut Pro 5: A Brief Overview of HDV and Apple Intermediate Codec
Final Cut Pro 5: Upgrade Questions and Answers
Top Support Articles for Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro Late-breaking news
Using Square or Non-Square Pixels When Creating Graphics
Final Cut Pro 5: Computer and Camera show different points in time while capturing HDV


Apple - Support - Compressor

Includes juicy topics like:
Encoding H.264 Assets for use in HD DVD Projects
Qmaster enables distributed processing for Compressor workloads
AC-3 Encoding Added to Compressor
Advanced Image Analysis in Compressor 2
Compressor 2 support for H.264 and HD MPEG-2
Distributed processing in Compressor 2
Compressor 2 now supports high resolution audio


DVD Studio Pro Support Page Topics include:

DVD Studio Pro Late-breaking news
DVD Studio Pro can't import iDVD 5 projects - bummer!
Encoding H.264 Assets for use in HD DVD Projects
DVD Studio Pro 4: Support for Additional DVD Drives
Learn More about DVD Studio Pro
Deciding Which DVD Standard to Use
Using HDV Video in Multi-Angle Projects
Importing Motion projects into DVD Studio Pro
AC-3 Encoding Added to Compressor
Improved Motion Integration in DVD Studio Pro 4
DVD Studio Pro 4 supports additional DTS Audio Formats


Motion 2.0 Support Page Topics:

Motion Late-breaking news
Pro Applications: Some features do not work if drag installed or if copied following an Archive and Install
Issues with StoneSans fonts in Mac OS X 10.4
Compound Blur may make a clip transparent
Motion: Incompatibility with Magic Bullet plug-ins
Images from Final Cut Pro may be a different size
Learn More about Motion
New FIlters in Motion 2
Learn about the replicator
MIDI Controller Support
Motion 2: Supported File Formats
How to Improve real-time performance
Importing Motion projects into Final Cut Pro HD
Importing Motion projects into DVD Studio Pro
Exporting clips or sequences from Final Cut Pro HD to Motion

...and other fun stuff.

Finally got confirmation that HDV will be just another QuickTime codec in FCP 5.

Details on HDV in FCP 5:

-HDV is just a QT codec, so you can use HDV footage in any QT aware application
-quite possible you'll be able to use the QuickTime 7 ability to capture directly in QT Player, then drop that file into another app (like After Effects, Motion, whatever)
-couldn't test HDV capture direct to uncompressed, but I was told at NAB it was possible. Will it be possible to transcode on the fly, such as to DVCPRO HD? Not sure why you'd want to, but I'm interested in the answer
-another CRUCIAL question will be how good is the MPEG-2 encoding BACK to HDV after you color correct, apply transitions, etc. How good will it be and how long will it take? If they are doing realtime effects, that implies pressure to make it a fast encoder. Will there be "draft" and "final/better" options? Doubt it. Will have to wait and see.


-mike

After receiving a reader tip that Sorenson's Squeeze had a better H.264 encoder, I downloaded the 30 day demo and am compressing a 720 and 1080 clip based on their presets.

It also encodes Windows Media 9, so I'm going to mess around with that as well.

Doing a quick comparison between a QT Pro 7 H.264 at 5500 kbits and Squeeze 4.1 5000 kbit files; the Apple looks much better (although it's got a tiny bit more bandwidth). So I'm not optimistic about Squeeze cooking a better H.264 file.

Compressor 2.0, due next week, may offer better quality, unknown

All of this H.264 testing opens an interesting question about high def DVDs - since H.264 is going to be one of the three possible codecs to use, it's very clear not all Macs will be able to play back all high def DVDs via software decoding.

Three codec choices for authoring HD video content:

1.) H.264 - 720p will require a 2 GHz G5 for 720p content. Somebody at the DVD Studio Pro 4 station in the Apple booth at NAB told me that interlace wasn't working totheir satisfaction yet wtih H.264, so high def MPEG-2 would be the 1080i choice (HDV exactly, or HDV like?)

2.) VC-1 -- is based on Microsoft's Windows Media 9 standard, so unlikely Apple's going to go chasing it down. But Flip4Mac makes a WM9 encoder. Is it VC-1 compatible? I don't know, I'm guessing not. If you know, please reply using the Comments below.

3.) MPEG-2 - is the least space efficient of the three options, but what Apple will be recommending for 1080i high def DVD authoring (to start with at least, based on what I've been told at NAB). The bandwidth will be markedly higher than the other choices, so you won't be able to fit as much media on a disc. But since a 1 GHz G4 is the recommended spec for HDV editing, no reason why you can't play it back with that as well. So lower playback requirements from a computer.

Apple - Support - Downloads - DVD Player 4.6

From the page:

About DVD Player 4.6

DVD Player 4.6 delivers added support for DVD Studio Pro 4 authored HD DVDs. It is recommended for all users of DVD Player.

Key Updates include:
-Additional support for playing DSP 4 authored HD DVD folders from DVD discs and hard drives.
-Additional support of discs with both SD and DSP 4 authored HD content.
-Improved Global Player settings.
-Improved usage for last play and disc info dialogs.


Note that it says it plays HD DVDs authored by DVD Studio Pro 4, NOT that it plays HD DVDs in general. Hmm.

I installed it, and here's what I found:

-Under the Video pulldown, there is a Deinterlace option, it defaults to on.

-there are more finely granular controls for scan rates and video clips

-under File, there's an option for "Open DVD Media" - different from prior versions

Again, I take this as further evidence that Final Cut Pro Studio is going to ship soon, such as next week.

No Budget Film School

Seminar in June in LA. For features under $250,000.

Got a reader report that they got hands on with Final Cut Pro 5. Salient details:

-ships the 15th, as in 4 days. All of it - the entire Studio. But that's Sunday, so that's odd. So next week? The release of Apple Intermediate Codec 1.0.1 and Pro Application Support 3.0 today support that concept as well.

-HDV imports with auto scene detection to break it up into shots

-max of 4 streams running on a dual 2.5 GHz G5

-full screen playback of HDV on a 2nd 23" Cinema Display in High Quality - looks good (no DeckLink or Kona2 on that Mac)

-Mackie, Logic, and Behringer external USB/MIDI audio devices are supported, so live faders and motion control on a $200 external unit - useful in Motion, big time

-adjust the size of UI (user interface) fonts, useful for those with very high res screens

Keeping it anonymous until they OK to put their name on it.

-mike

Ran Software Update expecting to see iTunes 4.8, but instead got two things more interesting -

Apple Intermediate Codec 1.0.1

Apple Intermediate Codec 1.0.1 delivers improved compatibility and reliability for Final Cut Express HD and iLife '05 users. It is recommended for all users of Apple Intermediate Codec 1.0 who are using QuickTime 7. Key updates include:

Improved export performance
Improved playback


and also

Pro Application Support 3.0

This update improves general user interface reliability for Apple's professional applications and is recommended for all users of DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Logic Express, Motion and Soundtrack.

This, combined with intel from the Netherlands that Final Cut Pro Studio is expected to ship next week, makes me think that this is groundwork prepping for FCP Studio.

-mike

Been thinking about H.264 some more - my testing with 2 megabit/sec 720p24 H.264 gave really crappy results. Zane, an Austin contributor, pointed out that this is the first rev of a consumer encoder, future professional encoders may do much better. True and fair.

HOWEVER...

1.) It's already a two pass variable bitrate encoder. Most consumer encoders are single pass constant bitrate, and the improvements of 2 pass VBR (variable bitrate) are large. If you're already doing 2 pass VBR, there's certainly room for improvement, but it's somewhat limited. The fact that transitions look APPALLINGLY HORRIBLE at 720p 2 megabit makes me think that ASOT from Slashdot is off base (have I linked to that Slashdot thread yet?).

2.) Playback performance - who knows how optimized their H.264 playback is - just have to wait and see on that one.

-mike

Tools for Television

Photoshop module to automate a lot of functions when prepping graphics for video.

Quantel Announces Pay as you Go HD

Buy the SD system, but it's really the HD system, and you can buy weekly/monthly keys to unlock HD functionality.

The article states:

“Pay as you Go also eliminates the temptation for customers to put up with cheap, low performance HD systems that will ultimately disappoint clients, potentially putting them off HD altogether,” adds Steve Owen, Quantel Marketing Manager.


....but why do this, which isn't cheap for them, unless you feel threatened by those low end systems?

Convergent Design Unveils HDV-Connect

Less useful next month with FCP 5 native HDV editing, but an interesting gadget. HDV in, HD-SDI out. Helpful for some NLE usage.

G5/2.7GHz Power Mac versus others

BareFeats.com doin' their thing again. As expected, the dual 2.7 is a bit faster than a 2.5, which is a bit faster than a 2.3, which is....you get the idea. The spread between the 2.7 and 2.0 is interesting ot note - the dual 2.7 is about 25-30% faster in real world tests, depending on the application. Rob shows results from After Effects, Photoshop, Unreal Tournament, iMovieHD, and others.

-mike

TOSHIBA UNVEILS 45GB HD DVD-ROM DISC AND DOUBLE-SIDED HYBRID DISC

Toshiba now claims to have their own large capacity disk, potentially obviating one of Blu-Ray's main advantages.

Tomorrow's meeting/announcement may be very interesting.

Thanks Luis Caffesse for sending this in!

-mike

Sony, Toshiba to agree on new DVD format -paper - Yahoo! News

Mike's Reaction: Woohoo! Have they kissed and made up? Will they be using the 25 GB Sony discs, which are purportedly more expensive to manufacture, and require a different laser head/lens setup from SD DVDs? May 16th meeting will most likely reveal....

This is GOOD. No platform wars, no dual standards, no Beta vs VHS BS would be GREAT!

-mike

UPDATED:

Perhaps spoke to soon. Toshiba, like an outed lover, issued this today:


"nothing has been decided, and absolutely no decision has been made for
unification on any basis. The indication that a unification agreement
on the basis of a 0.1mm disc system is imminent is unfounded and
erroneous. Given this, Toshiba does not intend to make any proposal on
unification to the members of the HD DVD Promotion Group."


So maybe we aren't as close as we thought.

Here is the link

thanks to Luis Caffesse for pointing this out!

UPDATED: SEE BOTTOM

Do I sleep? Apparently not.

This review of iTunes 4.8 (released without fanfare today) over on Playlistmag.com talks about some new goodies:

Playlist: New in iTunes 4.8 [updated]

There's now a Show Video Full Screen button at the bottom of the iTunes window. What's it for? Not for movie trailers, but for movies associated with albums. Download the new Dave Matthews Band album, Stand Up, and there's a 55 MB MPEG-4 movie associated with it, a making of type thing.

This is all from the Playlist Magazine article, kudos to them for finding it first.

Mike's Conjecture: Columnist Robert Cringely (google the link yourself, I'm lazy) had an article earlier this year about the possibility of Apple skipping disks and going straight to online distribution of HD content. This was predicated on three advancements:

1.) H.264 was going to be so efficient that it would be possible to distribute it online via....

2.) ...new and improved DSL, which was conjectured to be likely to be doubled in performance in order to compete with cable modems, which seem to be roundly kicking their ass wherever the two compete.

3.) The new Mac Mini, or something like it, could be the basis for a low cost Mac media center computer (I won't say Media Center PC, that's Windows branded jargon). Hook up to a TV and stereo, and there you go.


A little time has passed, and now H.264 has shipped. How're we lookin'?

Item 1: H.264 HDTV content:

Since most HDTVs are actually 720p resolution (at best), 720p footage would be fine to deliver. Based on what Apple's using for their online trailers, about 5 megabits/sec for 720p24 is roughly sufficient. If not, somewhere between 3500 and 7000 would be the range to play in - my own tests are proceeding.

Item 2: DSL speed bump

I use a cable modem, I don't know about what's up in DSL Land. I could research this, but it's nearly 3am and I'm just not that interested in it. I downloaded something at 575 KB/sec earlier tonight - a fast server, and low usage in my neighborhood on the cable loop. So not my problem. :D Yes I suck.

Item 3: Mac Mini:

The bad news is that, as of QuickTime 7.0 and OS X 10.4, HD H.264 doesn't play worth a damn on a Mini (see earlier post) Movie aspect ratio files 1280 pixels wide (the typical width for HD sized movies) don't play back smoothly on Minis at 24 frames per second (cinematic movie frame rate). Not at all - more like half speed, 12fps, not acceptable in the least.

The Mini can smoothly play back smaller files, such as 960x540. That's higher resolution than standard definition, but not at even the minimal threshold of what can officially be called "HD." So definitely a marketing issue if Apple wants to call it an HD Movie Store AND have it work on Minis. Totally doesn't work on the Minis.

Anyway, here's the punchline - Apple's now starting to experiment with downloadable video content via their existing online store application - the iTunes Music Store. The good thing is that they already have means in place to show possible content, bill for it, and download it. They probably don't have the bandwidth in place (yet) to handle movie sized downloads - but this is certainly a step in the right direction to testing systems in place and scaling up to it.

The bad parts (or at least two of them):

H.264 is pretty efficient, but the files are still quite large. At 5 megabits, a 90 minute movie is about 3.4 GB. At 300 KB/sec download speed (that's 2.4 megabits/sec), that's a bit over three hours. So roughly twice as long to download it as to watch it. And if it is a progressive download, you could start watching it after....woops, about an hour and half. Not great, but better than 3 hours.

Hmm...so what about standard definition (SD) content? Using H.264, broadcast quality should be somewhere in the 2000 - 3500 kilobit range (more testing to be done, and aesthetic judgements to be made). Let's call it 2500 for the moment - the same 90 minute movie would just about stream in realtime at 300 KB/sec. With a progressive download, you could start watching in minutes, and the last frame of the credits would arrive just as you were watching them.

Anyway, this is all fun conjecture. I don't have any proof/evidence of the Apple Movie Store, just bits and pieces picked up in the press.

Postscript before posting:

Woops - I went to go find a link to the Cringely article and find that he wrote more last week about Apple and HD and iPods. Cringely suggests Apple will eventually license iPods to other manufacturers. He suggests the the online store is where the real money lies. Hmm. From what I've heard, Apple makes a pittance on the iTunes music store after the music licenses have been paid, such that the Store is the engine that drives iPod sales, and the hardware is where the profit lies. Could Apple drive down the fees they pay to the music industry? Only if the industry agreed, and they'd do that only if they felt they had to. I think the days of the $12-$15 CD are very, very numbered. Or at least, I hope so.

UPDATE:

Swapped emails with Robert Cringely this morning, I had this to say back to him about limitations of H.264 on Minis:

If they had to, they could cheat and and use 960x544 if they didn't have any better optimized code. The spin could be that since DVCPRO HD uses 960 pixels wide for 720p (displayed at 1280x720, but internally it is only 960x720). 'Scope aspect movies at 1280 pixel width are 544 tall instead of 720 due to aspect ratio differences - so stretching 960 horizontally to 1280 width, and 544 pixels tall should play back 'scope movies on a Mini. (I forget whether 'scope short for Techniscope, Cinemascope, or whatever.)

That's BS marketing spin, but they could try it and it would work with existing technology, and still be "more than twice the resolution of current DVDs." and be using "the latest imaging techniques in top end professional HD formats" by scaling the image horizontally. If you spend less than $90,000 on a tape deck or camcorder, all the HD decks & camcorders are scaling the image down horizontally on tape. HDCAM is 1440 not 1920 wide for 1080i footage, and DVCPRO HD is an appalling 1280 pixels wide instead of the expected 1920 for 1080i footage. So they could get away with it.

Maybe that'll be the plan?

As for improvements to H.264, it's not like somebody else is going to run in and do an online store based on it. Unless they want to reserve this optimized encoding for themselves, and that seems foolish - the creative community would demand it as an authoring option, and it's not as if anybody else has Apple's marketing, deal making heft, and distribution reach that is going to use H.264. MS or affiliated tech would have to go WM9.

Oh, and I wonder how the rollout of QT 7 on Windows would be timed with this? For how long would the service be Mac only, like ITMS was?

-mike

Flipping channels on deep cable, caught a bit of The Witches of Eastwick. It's a fun, well balanced movie, it still holds up. Pfeiffer, Cher, & Sarandon were just about perfect for that film - strong, commanding, achingly beautiful women. If that film were to be made now (not a remake, sick of those, too soon anyway), who would you, could you cast for the three female leads? That are blond, redhead, and raven haired? (Naturally, or course!) Women in their 30s, not just beautiful but having strong presence. That have the casting/acting history to lend credence and weight to the performances.

If anyone suggests anything like Winona Ryder or Bridget Fonda, they will be promptly slapped.

In public.

Preferably on TV.

Live, if possible; network, of arrangeable.

And could anyone besides Jack Nicholson be The Devil? I think he might still be able to pull it off, but what about Peter Stormare? Just a thought after seeing Constantine - he has the evil, but not the smooth. He's good for a short, but not for the long haul. Who else? That's eeeeeeevil but smmmooooooth. But still a clod in his way. Dunno. But it's a fun question.

-mike

So the 15000 kbps version finished encoding and I just watched it play back. And man, it' looks good. It's a bit under 2 MB/sec, still well below what 24p DV would take up (without the duped frames/fields). It's amazing what good compression will do for you.

By staring at the Playing FPS readout in QT Player Pro, it maintained 24 fps playback...most of the time. For about 5 seconds of the over 2 minute movie, it reported 23 fps playback. But then it reported 25 fps playback, which is bogus considering this is a 24fps movie. It should DROP frames if in trouble, not ADD them. Watching the Playing FPS readout is a little like watching the temperature light in a modern car. It's either "Okey Dokey" or "Thar She Blows!" - no middle ground, no indication of mild imperfections. But it's a sufficient blunt tool for the coarsest analysis.

I decided to try to encode a high quality compressed master of this for someone else to try some encoding tests with. I chose JPEG 2000 as the codec. While both processors are running about equal load, I notice QTPlayerHelper (the encoding stuff viewable in Activity Monitor) doesn't peak over 100% (out of 200% possible, dual CPUs), so it's not the most processor efficient encoder. I'll see how big it comes out - my current source testing file is 12 GB. Unassailable from a "was your source clean" perspective, but hardly convenient to tote around without a FireWire drive (and I still haven't upgraded my laptop's hard drive, giving me an excuse to have a tiny 60GB portable)

Interestingly, I don't recall H.264 giving me an estimated time at the end of the last couple of encodes, but JPEG2000 (perhaps because it is single pass?) gives me a time estimate: 45 minutes to go. So JPEG2000 is about twice as fast as H.264 to encode.

One thing I did note in QT 7 that I see as a real problem - in the Quality slider settings, there is no numerical readout or text entry field - it's just a slider with no stated numbers or values whatsoever. THIS IS BAD. Hopefully 7.0.1 will include at least numeric readout (as v6.x did) if not a text entry field (which would be better and more Apple-like in terms of "give them choices, let them choose").

I also need to do a timed encoding for a better idea of H.264 encoding time, this time without Spotlight gnawing away in the background. Ideally one for 1080p24, another for 720p24. 1080i60 and 720p60 would be good too, but gravy for my moviemaking purposes.

-mike

UPDATED: Tested my 12" 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4, added to the list below

Went to the my local Apple Store to mess with H.264 playback on a variety of Macs. Results follow:

tried to test H.264 playback up at the Apple Store, but plans were nearly foiled - while I thought ahead enough to bring the 1080 res HD trailers with me (the Batman one isn't online anymore), the internet connection was down in the store, so I got hobbled on that effort. But I found the smaller sizes conveniently labelled already on the machines. A-ha!

The interesting thing about this is that I'm using files you can mess with yourself by downloading from the Apple site, or going into an Apple Store. In the Movies folder they had the HD trailers at a variety of sizes. If they don't have them installed on one Mac, look around, you'll probably find them elsewhere. I used my iPod Mini to copy them around; a Shuffle would have worked as well. The biggest is about 150 MB.

Dual 2.7 GHz G5 w/3GB RAM

The dual 2.7 (nice!) with 3GB of RAM and a 9600 card played back 1080 trailers fine - the more interesting test was to copy the three sizes of HD trailer.

Mac Mini 1.42 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive

BBC 960X540 trailer: AT 100% On a 256MB RAM, 1.42 GHz G4, 80 GB drive appeared to be fine - no visually dropped frames, playback never dropped below 24 fps on the readout.

playing it back full screen (1650x1000whatever) - did not appear to drop frames, but might have

Fantastic Four 960x408 - worked. Reported 24fps @ 100% on a 1680x1050 screen OK. And yes, Movie Info was NON-overlapping at all times in all tests.

960x540 verdict: pass

BBC 1280x544 trailer (ostensibly 720p res, but not really - 544 pixels tall, not 720) - clearly dropping frames from the get-go, 12fps playback. Bummer. That's clearly the breaking point.

fullscreen mode no better, whether 100% or fullscreen

Fantastic Four 1280x544 on Mini - 16-22 fps, then settled into 12 fps, 24 only on the easiest (text screen) stuff

1280x544 verdict: FAIL

2 GHz iMac G5, 512 MB RAM

BBC 960x540 - playback was a steady 24fps most of the time, saw it drop to 23 for a coupla seconds, but in general seemed to play back OK. I'm betting that was a fluke - if a 1.42GHz G4 can do it OK, shouldn't be a problem for 2.0 GHz G5. PASS.

BBC 1280x544 - looked good, reported 24fps the whole time. PASS.

Didn't test 1920 wide playback on that box. WOOPS.

Supposedly it can't do it, and I'd believe it based on looking at the CPU usage meters on my dual G5 as it plays back.

NEW: 12" PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz, 1.25 GHz RAM - tried the BBC 960x540 trailer, played back fine, even with half a dozen other applications running. Incidentally, that was playing back from iPod Mini being used as an FireWire drive. Tiny data rate, not a problem (but I'd wear out the drive in a hurry using it this way, not designed/rated for long term use in this fashion).

960x540: PASS

1280x544 BBC: FAIL (12fps)

Analysis & (Eventual) Conclusion

So it's not as glum as many first thought. Keep in mind that since you're watching on a computer, the "official" HD sizes really don't matter. From this perspective, anything higher than 720 pixels wide and 480 pixels tall is "high def". All the movie trailers are not "full" size - they are the proper and standard 1920 or 1280 pixels wide, but less than the standard number of pixels tall, since they are 'scope (2.4:1 film aspect ratio) in aspect rather than 16:9 (HDTV aspect ratio). Batman Begins "should" be 1080 pixels tall to be "official" exact HD size & aspect, but it's a film aspect ratio so they cropped the HD letterboxing off to be more efficient at 1920x816.

Eek, I distract myself - the point I was trying to get at is that H.264 doesn't HAVE to strictly be for the G5 tower crowd - there are better than standard definition viewing experiences to be had by those with G4's as well, as my 960x540 playback testing revealed.

960x540 is a bit over half a million pixels; 1280x544 is just under 700,000 pixels, and 1920x816 is a bit over a million and a half. So the scaling playback performance across the Mac line makes some sense - the G4 boxes can handle 500K pixels 24fps but not 700K; and certainly not 1.5M. The iMac G5 can handle 700,000 but not 1,500,000 pixels 24 times a second. To display 24fps 1920x816 is about 38 million pixels decompressed per second. Yowza. That certainly puts things in perspective.

So if you have a Mac in the 1.42 GHz G4 class, 960x540 should work.

If you have a 2.0 GHz G5 iMac, and maybe a 1.8 GHz iMac G5, you can look at the "720p" sized trailers (even though they aren't 720 pixels tall, nor 16:9 aspect ratio).

And if you have a dual G5, you should be able to watch anything.

They didn't have a single or dual 1.8 GHz G5 on the floor for me to test, unfortunately.

As I discussed here, if Apple is going to launch an online movie store with H.264, 960x540 is the size they'll need to go with to make it work with Mac Mini etc., probably stretched to 1280 wide to do that.

-mike

...but it finished minutes after I posted this - at 6:01 it had already finished, and glancing at the disk activity graph in Activity Monitor, it probably finished right around 6:00pm exactly. So the second half (the encoding pass, after the analysis pass in a multi-pass encoding scenario) is faster than the first half it would appear. So for 2 min 9 secs, taking about an hour 50 min to encode, the encoding ratio is about 80:1 for 1080p24 content. OUCH! That means 1 hour of content would take 80 hours to compress using QuickTime Player Pro on a dual G5. But that was with Spotlight chugging away on the 1TB FireWire drive I had attached, so hopefully encoding will be faster than 80:1.

Studying footage in motion:

I played the footage (1080p24, 1 MB/sec H.264) back on my 23" CRT (the 23" LCD looks better, I'll hook it up soon) and it looks really, really good. Watching it in motion, I didn't see any problems, even with high motion scenes with lots of fine detail. I'll do some butterly tests (A/B side by side tests mirrored on a centerline) to see what else I can tell. It did play back smoothly, however.

Studying footage paused (looking at stills)

In stills, I could see some compression artifacts - motion blurred colored edges would have some pixelated chunky edges; some flesh tones would lose fine detail and seem to be smoothed out. But higher contrast fine details - like a white lace veil - hold up quite well.

I copied the source file off of the FireWire drive and onto my temp RAID (4 x 400 GB Seagate drives) to try again. Compressing to 5000 kilobits/sec, I started it at 6:40:00 pm, I'll see how long it takes without Spotlight hogging CPU cycles.

QT 7 is not incredibly CPU efficient - with no other apps running besides the Finder, QTPlayerHelper (the encoding part, I would presume) is using between 130 and 140% CPU utilization (this is a on a 200% scale, two processors), leaving about 1/3 of the computing power of the machine idle.

Drive speed doesn't appear to be a limiting factor - my good friend Activity Monitor is telling me that no more than 12 MB/sec are being read into the system, far far below the capabilities of the RAID the source file resides on. So it would appear to me that the encoding could be more efficient. It'll be interesting to see how efficient Compressor is...but since it relies so heavily on exisiting underlying QuickTime capabilities, is Compressor any more than a batching front end to QuickTime's underlying capabilities? And more importantly, will Compressor 2.0 be that in Tiger? I'm woefully underinformed on these topics - I'm just an end user, not a programmer.

I'll do some more detailed analysis of H.264 quality and encoding speeds later. I'm curious to see how much of a difference there is between this 5000 kbps file compressing now and the 8000 kbps version I finished earlier.

I'm guessing 8000 kilobits per second will be the sweet spot - that's what Apple encoded the 1080 res version of Batman Begins with. But they get to cheat a bit - since the Batman Begins footage is a wider aspect ratio, so it's only 816 pixels tall, instead of 1080 - about a 25% reduction in pixel dimensions. Interestingly, Apple has pulled the 1080 resolution Batman Begins trailer - only the 1280x544 version remains at the moment. But I'd already downloaded it to my local drive, so I've got it to play with. Anyway, my point was that Apple had chosen roughly 1 MB/sec to show off their new technology. They'd want to keep the file size low both to show off how efficient it is, as well as to minimize their bandwidth usage (they've got bills to pay, too). So I tried that for my footage as well, even though I've got an extra 30% or so more pixels to be compressed into the same bandwidth. So 1300 or so should be on my testing list. As with any encoder, the least amount of bandwidth that's good enough quality is always the goal, so it makes more sense to start low and work up until the quality gets acceptable. Identifying the point of diminishing returns beyond "good enough" is also important.

While this one chugs, I'm going to try some other tests on the other box, and go up to the Apple Store for some hands on testing of H.264 playback (next post).

I got back and this didn't post due to an HTML error, so here's more info:

5000 kbps 1080p24 test finished by the time I got home. Reported data rate about 6800 kbps, and the audio doesn't properly account for the difference. I'll not include audio in future tests to keep things clear. During playback, definite blocking noticeable in faces - this is too low to use for good looking 1080p24 results. But still overall better than HD, and what I'd consider "acceptable" for an online trailer. Except for the fact that users would need a 2000 pixel wide display to see it...

-mike

-mike

Some notes on H.264 compression with Tiger:

So now that I've got Tiger and QuickTime 7 installed, but I don't have Final Cut Studio (including next gen versions of Final Cut Pro, Compressor, and DVD Studio Pro yet) I decided to do some preliminary testing with the H.264 codec.

For now, all I have to work with is QuickTime Player Pro 7.0 and Compressor 1.2.1.

H.264 in Tiger without Final Cut Studio: Good News/Bad News

Good News: You CAN specify the H.264 codec in Compressor 1.2.1...

Bad News: ...BUT you do not get as many options as QT Player Pro. This makes sense, since QT Player Pro v7 has been written to be H.264 aware, and an H.264 aware version of Compressor has yet to ship.

For the moment, in Compressor, all you can do is specify a frame rate, key frame rate, and data rate limitation. Which is not bad, but QT Pro gives you deeper/better options. You can:

-generate keyframes on an automatic, user defined, or every frame basis
-set data rate to automatic or numerical value limitation
-optimize for streaming, progressive, or CD/DVD (I'm sure that's hard drive optimized as well) basis.
-and most importantly, you can specify multi-pass encoding.

I started my testing by setting up a Compressor batch, but since I have no way of knowing whether it is doing single or dual pass encoding (that's another conversation as to the difference, suffice it so say dual pass is mo bettah but takes longer). I'm going to stop the Compressor batch shortly and just export files one at a time using QT Player Pro.

I'm impressed with the H.264 output options with QuickTime 7 - some people are bitching about having to pay $30 for a new key after buying a key for QT 6 not so long ago. But there are new technologies involved, and the depth of features in the H.264 export module makes it worth $30....to me, at least.

One good thing to note is that processor utilization is very high - CPU utilization is about 90-95% on average while my dual 2.5 GHz G5 crunches away (prior to noting mdimport's load - more on this below).

It's also clear this process is pretty slow - it's 10% done with an hour and a half estimated remaining.

Oh, and what am I compressing? It's full frame 1920x1080 uncompressed HD source - this is from the DCI StEM (Standard Evaluation Material) footage that came from scanned film saved out as 16 bit TIFF sequences. I converted it to an uncompressed 8 bit HD file using After Effects. This footage was designed be be as clean as possible, with every difficult to compress scenario they could think of thrown in there. Confetti thrown in front of a clear blue sky, shooting through wrought iron fence bars during a panning/tracking shot, vastly different skin color people in frame at the same time, fine details in highlight and shadow in frame simultaneously, etc. So it is, by definition and intent, the ideal footage to test for compression quality.

Interesting note - quitting both Compressor and Batch Monitor does NOT stop the compression process - it's still rolling as a background process, with no foreground applications indicated. This'll bite somebody I'm sure when they think it's not processing anymore...it's necessary to Delete the batch in the Batch Monitor to stop the process. (backtracked note - is this true, or was I just seeing mdimport doing it's thing?)

So I go back to QT Player Pro and select Export as an option from the File Menu. Interestingly enough, the default export is H.264. Nice! Clearly Apple wants to hype this to the moon.

I use the following settings under each bold choice:

Motion

Frame Rate: Custom: 23.976 (I could have used Current, but I want to rule out any funny business)

Key Frames: Automatic - I want to see what it does for this - I'll probably get very few keyframes

Compressor
Quality: is set to High but is greyed out - see Data Rate below for further explanation

Encoding: This is a biggie, I can select Best quality (Multi-pass). Multipass encoding looks at the file twice - once to make a "map" of the data rate needs of the file, and another to compress efficiently according to that map. See below for more on multi-pass encoding.

Data Rate

Data Rate: two choices: Automatic, which enables the Compressor Quality slider, or Restrict To:, which disables the Quality slider but lets you type in a number of your choosing to limit to so many kbits/sec.

Optimized For: allows for optimizing for streaming (more consistent data rate desirable, progressive (spikes not as important) or CD/DVD-ROM (data rate spikes even less important here)

Audio: Also worth noting are changes to the Sound Settings - they've renamed/rephrased some of the settings to be less consumer oriented, more professionally oriented. Good for power users, confusing for noobs. For instance, instead of "Uncompressed" as an audio option, they are calling it "Linear PCM" - technically accurate, but confusing if you don't know what that means. And even get stuck - there's a checkbox for "Little Endian." I kinda know what Big vs. Little is about, but which do I need here? I'll go with the default.

Based on these name changes, I'm wondering if any Compressor 1.2.1 Presets are going to have trouble working under Tiger, since some attribute names have changed? Or if people who upgraded to QT 7 but are still running 10.3.x will have the same problems?


an aside on multi-pass encoding: What's this do for you? Imagine the typical movie trailer - starts with the green "This has been approved for all audiences blah blah blah" screen. Then it cuts to the Paramount animated logo with the stars flying out of the clouds to line up around the mountain. The first (green cue card) scene requires extremely little bandwidth to represent - after you've "done" the type on green, frame by frame there are (in theory) zero changes - it needs very little bandwidth. The next scene, with the clouds, the star shapes, the mountain, etc. - has a LOT of changes frame by frame and needs more data rate. In single pass encoding, the same data rate is used for both scenes. Very inefficient - you didn't need nearly that much for the first scene, and you could've used a lot more for the second scene. This is what multi-pass encoding allows you to do - you can set an OVERALL desired average data rate, and the encoder figures out where you need more bandwidth (busy scenes, lots of motion/action/panning) and where you need less bandwidth (the green cue card is the minimal example, but locked off shots with people standing still are a more realistic movie low data rate example). It does this by "stealing" bandwidth it would've used for the "easy" scenes and giving it to the scenes where there's a lot of motion that needs more bandwidth to represent it well.


Back to my encoding efforts - even after a reboot, there is still a process called "mdimport" using 90% of one CPU running - what is it? Why is it running? I'm tempted to Force Quit it and see what happens. But not yet - a little Googling reveals that this is Spotlight doing it's thing. Hmm...but do I want itto be doing it's thing right now? Especially after copying over a terabyte of files onto a non-boot volume?

started encoding 4:11:35pm on 1920x1080 24p file, 2 min 9 sec long (but Spotlight is still crunching hard in background, stealing cycles from this effort!)

2 min is far longer than necessary to get a compression results test - I just wanted a good long first stab at it to show up. Encoding at 8000 kbits/sec (1MB/sec roughly, same data rate as used on Batman footage, but more pixels in frame, since Batman is wider aspect than this one, fewer pixels tall)

I was thinking that Spotlights mdimport process would give itself a lower priority once it saw that there was a foreground encoding process going on....not true. It maintained 90+% (almost one CPU's worth, full load is 200%) for awhile, then I checked to see QTPlayerHelper is using 113% of CPU, while mdimport is still using 50-60% (about half of one CPU on this dual CPU system).

This will take a while to chug, so I'll update this later when this one gets done. The encoding time will be somewhat meaningless, since Spotlight is stealing a lot of cycles to do it's thing, even though I wish it weren't. Can I turn it off? I can turn off "Movies" as a category in which search results will appear, but does that keep movies from being searched? Dunno.

I'll update this when it gets done compressing the movie...at 5:45pm, after about an hour and a half, it's not quite halfway done...

-mike

I updated the HD FAQ today - here's what's changed:

UPDATED 5/9/05 - rearranged a few sections, tidied up the Table of Contents, inserted long bitching section on why high def H.264 won't play on your crappy old Mac, revised AJA vs Blackmagic section, started rough outline on tape formats section

The tape format section is just a very rough outline - don't depend on it yet - I'm just being lazy and including work in progress there to stay organized. I'll work on it as I go forward, and it'll be important over time for those looking to understand and differentiate the HD formats. In my Grand Vision, there should be a huge grid with columns and checkmarks indicating sizes & frame rates handled, color space, full raster or not, prices, etc.

Resolution and bit depth aren't the final arbiters of quality. Glass, optics, features, light sensitivity, etc. all matter.

I had to restrain myself from using much a greater quantity and intensityof foul language lambasting those who complain about the lack of 1080p H.264 HD trailer playback. If you don't have a screen nearly 2000 pixels wide, it doesn't matter, people...

Timecode Calculator 2.0.2 - VersionTracker:


Useful gadget (can't say widget, cuz it's not an Apple Widget type application, but it would be useful if it were). Converts timecodes to feet/frames of film, different timebases to different timebases (What is this 30fps nondrop frame in 24fps?) etc.

ed baskerville | software | XgridLite

This could be fun/interesting - Apple's Xgrid software is for distributed rendering/processing - this'll be important with DVD Studio Pro 4 and Compressor 2.0 to use a network to compress a movie to MPEG-2 or H.264.

This utility removes the requirement for a Server to run the whole shebang. Thanks to Martijn Schroevers for pointing this out to me.

I don't know much about Xgrid, but I should read up on it in the next month so I'll be ready for the New Toyz....

I was looking for a detail about something or other on the BMD site and got distracted and found some new stuff in their redesigned tech support section:

Blackmagic Design: Support Detail

-FCP 5 will be supported with Decklink driver version 5 which should ship promptly once FCP 5 does (later this month we hope, no pings on the radar yet about when)

-FCP 5 is really, REALLY recommended to run under Tiger. FCP 5 under 10.3.x is not supported or recommended by Blackmagic.

-as always, don't change ships mid-course -- if you're in the middle of a big project, don't upgrade/change.

Broadcasters May Seek Congress's Help in HDTV Anti-Piracy Effort - New York Times
Mike's rambling thoughts on the issue:

As happy as I was that the broadcast flag was struck down by the courts, all the courts said was that the FCC overstepped it's bounds, not that the flag was illegal or unconstitutional. The more I think about this, the more I think:

a.) the broadcast flag will get passed into law by Congress, and

b.) it won't matter much, since most of us get our programming over cable anyway, and since that all goes through a cable box of some sort (for now, until cable card kicks in) the cable providers have a place to put whatever kind of limitations they want into the device to limit it, since it is a private company and not public airwaves.

The NYTimes article states it would take about 24 hours to download a one hour HDTV show across broadband....but that's if it isn't recompressed. VC-1 and H.264 are said to be about twice or more as efficient as broadcast MPEG-2 for the same quality...and who says the same quality has to be achieved to be desirable as a download? Look to all the feature film DiVX downloads from crappy DV cameras that are done...or DVDs sold on the street from the same sources.

The real question is that everything manufactured gets stolen, but what is an acceptable level of loss? Two arguments here: one that it seems the studios are SO uptight they don't want ANY holes in the system, which will only make life tougher for consumers trying to connect their gear and make legitimate choices. The second is that ANY holes in the system mean that only ONE copy has to be extracted and posted on the internet before it spreads rapidly.

I'd be very curious to know how many copies of movies are downloaded - it's illegal and I don't think it's a good thing but I also don't think it takes nearly the amount of money out of the studio's pockets as they think. In much the same way that people download thousands of MP3 files, and derive pleasure from them, that has very little to do with whether they would have spent their own money on the CDs in the first place. It's a fallacious argument to claim 100 downloaded MP3s (or a dozen movies) represents hundreds of dollars of loss to the studios. It's vapor money - money they never would have seen in the first place.

On another note, I'm also ticked off that studios are claiming they need the broadcast flag to protect their income streams - hey wait a minute - if the Betamax case proved it is legal to record broadcasts for personal use, such as an episode of Alias, then why is it "robbing the till" if I DON'T buy the DVD later? They are trying to take back something we've had for years. They are claiming that "perfect digital copies" will disincentivize consumers from buying DVDs. Well...maybe. Have you LOOKED at digital broadcast TV? It's FULL of compression artifacts, and doesn't look anywhere near as good as a DVD would. I don't have HDTV at home (yet), and nobody's seen actual shipping quality HD-DVDs for the most part, but I bet the high def DVDs will look better than broadcast. Plus, DVDs are well organized and have all the extras, etc. So there is a market differentiation there. The broadcasters and movie studios are trying to say it's different because VHS sucked so bad that a bought VHS or DVD looked better than over the air recorded stuff, but now with digital, perfect copies are possible. Perfect copies of digital broadcast is possible, but that won't be nearly as good as high def DVDs from what I've been led to believe.

Grr. Makes me mad about all this, wish I could testify before Congress or something.

-mike

QuickTime 7 Update Guide: Changes to QuickTime Player and QuickTime Pro

Nice list of all the new features and menus - including direct recording of video in QT Player, new controls, etc.

Gannon & Moore Translations | QuickTime 7 Review Nice little rundown on this guy's experiences with QT7 - his detailed notes, along the lines that I would have done if I hadn't had food poisoning over the weekend....

Sorenson 3 vs. H.264 H.264 at 200-800 kbps in 100 kbps increments, plus a Sorenson 3 for comparison. This is useful to look at if you are familiar with web quality video done with Sorenson 3 (the previous best choice for QuickTime web video encoding).

(all found via Macintouch)

-mike

Xsanity - Sanity for Apple's Xsan.

Site all about Xsan. Cool - Xsan calls into play so many disparate technologies it's hard to keep up with them all. Here's a site covering issues of interest.

-mike

Final Cut Pro 5: Upgrade Frequently Asked Questions

(found via PhilaFCPUG.org

Review: Flip4Mac WMV Studio Pro 1.05

Flip4Mac has shipped their products to let you play back WM9 (or 7 or 8) files, transcodes Windows Media files to QuickTime, and more importantly, encode Windows Media files (including 9 and 9 Advanced) from the Mac. Hooray! Aww, geek out!

Updated - see bottom

Federal appeals court strikes down Broadcast Flag - Engadget - www.engadget.com /

Picture that photon torpedo tucking (spermlike) into the Death Star's heat exhaust port, to shatter and destroy it seconds later.

Picture Sauron getting his piddies sliced off by the crushed sword.

Picture that Scary King Dude in the Return of The Kind getting stabbed through the face by the Hot Warrioress and sucking in on himself like a black hole in armor.

Picture me remembering fewer and fewer film character's names...

That's how I feel about the Death of the Broadcast Flag - the US Court of Appeals declared that the FCC o'erstepped its bounds (excuse me, exceeded it's mission scope) by mandating that TV manufacturers include the technology in their TV sets.

HOORAY!!!!

-happy mike

UPDATED - Wired coverage with more details on the industry's anticipated response. Also, keep in mind this is only for OTA (over the air) transmission, there are/will be similar limitations in place already for cable/sattelite programming.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray camps attempt to compromise on a single standard.

Yeah yeah yeah, we've been hearing they've been talking for some time, but this article divulges a lot of new info:

Two proposed compromises:

1.) Use Blu-Ray for recording and HD DVD for ROM. In other words, Blu-Ray to record your own video (or data), and HD DVD for delivering movies (or games or whatever).

2.) Have a common high level protocol for both discs, making authoring easier. But they'd still have different physical formats

(I think option 2 sucks, because it doesn't resolve any of the REAL problems of needing two players, or a combo player, for the marketplace, and "consumer balk" would still be a problem. -mike)

-the DVD Forum had suggested option 1 originally before Blu-Ray splintered off

It's more complicated than the DVD-R vs DVD+R thing, because the two formats would require physically different laser pickups. A combo unit would REQUIRE two heads. (and do they use different laser wavelengths as well?). It's not quite as bad as the VHS/Beta thing, because both formats are the same physical size (CD/DVD sized, and same thickness overall externally) so could at least FIT inside a player.

Two other big issues:

1.) Intellectual property - who gets the patent income? There is looooooooots of money at stake here, and everybody wants that passive income from licensed player technology. (As an aside, the Japanese patent holders were furious over cheap Chinese/Taiwanese DVD players; there was some slight-of-hand involved in cheap chipsets and reference designs sold by a manufacturer to player producers, with both saying they shouldn't be paying the royalties. The IP holders want a fresh start on IP income, and to avoid those problems and keep player prices in the several hundred dollar range indefinitely -mike).

2.) Interactive capabilities - there's MHP in one camp (Blu-Ray), and a Microsoft based option in the other (HD DVD). This is the first I've heard of this issue. I'd been assuming that HD DVD would win this battle, because it was cheaper, and that's all the studios would care about, never mind the long term benefits of more capacity. With Microsoft's MSTV attached to that decision, I'd hate to see MS line itself up again in another monopolistic position. The studios have made it clear that interactive and Internet enabled capabilities need to be a part of whatever spec comes next, and I don't want to see MS lock that in.

-mike

Sony's new 1080p capable cameras - can shoot 720p or 1080i OR 1080p. Saw these at NAB, been too busy (Busy playing Doom 3? Lazy, perhaps?) to post the rest of my NAB notes. I think my camera lost a bunch of Sony booth pics, too, including those of these cameras.

-HDC-1000 is the studio model, and HDC-1500 is the portable one
-$100K for the 1000, $90K for the 1500
-both due August
-both shoot 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, or 60 fps at 720 or 1080 sizes.
-the camera can shoot an oversampled 720p, which should be quite nice.
-the camera can actually shoot 1080p60 - but only an HDCAM SR deck can record this output - actually ONLY the SRW-1 field recording unit - the SRW5000, and just announced SRW5500 CANNOT. For capture into NLE or direct field capture, uncompressed at 10 bits, that's be 320 MB/sec if I'm doing my math right. Yowza. But this is a GREAT improvement for getting better slomo out of HD cameras - for a long time the only way to get 60 progressive fps was to shoot Varicam, and if using DVCPRO HD that would only generate 960x720 pixel images - only double that of SD - eewwww.
-of course, it'll do downconversion with or without pulldown, etc.

Quickie article outlines the advantages of 3 perf (perforation) film. Is it sacriledge to discuss on HD Fo Indies? Nah, just another way to cut costs. Shooting 16mm or 35mm and doing a digital intermediate (or digital master, depending on the final deliverable) is an interesting way to go.

If you aren't doing an all HD workflow, the idea of shooting 16mm/3perf 35mm and telecine to 10 bit RGB HD is an interesting idea.

-mike

Hands on review of a Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camera - more from a shooters perspective, which I don't have.

Noah Kadner reviews Magic Bullet Suite 2.0 - goes over all the components involved with it, and how it can be useful for indie filmmakers

Los Angeles Times: Which way to watch? Choose More info on the Soderbergh/2929 deal, where Soderbergh will make several small films ($2m budget fo the first). Also commentary on the movie industry's traditional attitude of theatrical/DVD/premium cable/over the air timed release strategy. I think this is GREAT!

Guardian Unlimited | Arts Friday Review | 'Cinema is over' Godard says "Cinema is over." (Woah, sayeth Keanu). " "There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed." That's the best quote in the whole thing, though. Mostly, he laments and bitches.

InPhase announces 300GB holographic discs - Engadget - www.engadget.com / I literally could not find their booth at NAB - I walked around the seemingly randomly labelled booths for 5 minutes - but here's a link to the holographic storage stuff. Would LOVE to have these as a backup device. How fast? One pass secure writing?
Press release for the above technology
Article on same.

Cinema Minima: Personal Digital Cinema. News service for movie makers � The Internet Filmmaker%u2019s Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ) Another resource to go to. Their tech stuff on cameras and editing makes me cringe, but hey, that stuff changes every nine seconds.

Snippet from an email from Mark of SoftRAID:
SoftRAID LLC, announced today that its SoftRAID 3 driver is included with
Apple's new operating System, Tiger (Mac OS 10.4). This includes all
retail DVD's and CPUs which come pre-installed with 10.4.

The SoftRAID 3 driver allows the OS X system to recognize SoftRAID volumes
created with the SoftRAID 3 application. This means that a user can take
their SoftRAID volumes to any machine with Tiger installed and the volumes
will appear on the desktop and function normally, with or without the
presence of the SoftRAID application. The SoftRAID application is necessary
for the user to create and manage the volumes.

Nice article over on CG Channel about a 20 minute action short made with digital sets, compositing, 3D software, etc. Check out the trailer (at top of linked page) - pretty impressive! Not studio feature film quality, but certainly several notches better than your SciFi Channel Creature Feature Saturday night flick in terms of visual flair. Nicely edited trailer with some clever bits. There are also some excellently informative before & after shots. I'm telling you, Sky Captain and Sin City are just the first of a new wave of stuff...the traditionalists have lots to bitch about - that the acting in these types of films isn't as good as traditional stuff, etc....but hey - it's a new form. If they had the time & budget to build huge elaborate sets, they wouldn't NEED to be trying to make them this way, so fight fair. These kinds of films wouldn't get made if it weren't for all this new technology. And for the dissenters who say they shouldn't have been made in the first place...aww, hell, get stuffed. It's a new medium, and we're all learning, and low budget filmmaking is always a risk. As for acting complaints against digital films - how many traditionally celluloid made films have great acting every year? Get over yourselves. Am I talking about this film and this acting? Nope, I reacting to some guy on CML I'm still ticked off at. In any case, go read this, and see some hope for Coolness To Come.

The intro to the article makes it sound like a few actors and greenscreens are all you need to make a great little action film - this is specious. You also need good story, compelling performances, characters we care about...and oh yeah, a few zillion hours of skilled and patient digital artisans to make your action scenes. Having been one of those pixel monkeys, all I can say is we/they never get paid our worth, always end up putting in way more time than was ever originally planned, and don't get enough sleep on deadline, ever.

Bitter, who, me? And what was I talking about in the first place? Time to go out for a run....

-mike

AtomFilms' new venue -- the PSP / Online site to host mobile movies sponsored by Sony

Along the lines of my last long post about mobile media and PSP, Sony has a partnership going with AtomFilms.com to download stuff for FREE to watch on the PSP. Looks like they are trying to prime the pump for demand for downloadable video. I'd love to see this distribution model work - not TV, not theaters, and not locked to a computer, either.

-mike

I started this post by reading this:

The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > Advertising: Latest Promotion Vehicle Is a Hand-Held Media Device. Will Anyone Watch? Movies on PSP - OK it's cool, but is it really a device you're going to watch a movie on? I think shorts would be the best bet...but if you're downloading them off the internet, why bother loading them onto PSP? Unless it's suuuuuuuper easy. I think you'd have to have ubiquitous high speed wireless internet for this to be an appealing viewing device. That'll be 5 or more years away. Plus, it'd have to be cheap. And even then, video isn't like audio - iPods are so popular in part because you can listen to audio and KEEP DOING OTHER THINGS. Audio is background, video is foreground. It feels to me that the technologists advocating portable video just see it as a natural progression from portable audio - but the context of usage is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Portable gaming devices work because gaming is such a dip-in, dip-out kind of a thing - you can pop in and out of a game. Can you do the same with a video? Sorta...but the advantage of a game is that you drop your $20-$50 and you get many dozens of hours of gameplay out of it. I spent $50 on Doom III last week, and I've played it for...more hours that I'd like to admit since last week. But it's value is ongoing. If I finish it (I'm literally stuck in Hell in the game), I might play the whole thing through at a harder level. What's it take to finish a game - 30 hours? So about $2/hr. Now movies...my nephew might watch Toy Story 20 times, but that's a different market. For the 18 to 24 male demographic that is PSP's milieu, how many times will a PSP owner watch a movie? And watch it ON THE PSP, since the "Universal Media Disk" that it comes on is so universal it only plays in this....one...device. Ugh. As the article said about a PSP owner, he'd bought House of Flying Daggers on UMD, but hadn't watched it. I think the likely viewership for PSP movies would be big city train commuters - Boston/New York/Chicago/etc.. Note I don't say bus, because the PSP is too expensive for the bus crowd. Honestly, I think these will have to drop to the sub $100 price point. I picture my sister, and her son who just turned seven. When he's ten, and if these are $75 by then, and movies are $10-12, then she'll start buying them for him on that format. Especially if it could plug into the back of seat player in her car. THEN it would be valid portable media to my thinking. And they NEED to be cheaper than DVDs - if it's smaller, and lower res, and used on something "lesser" than a DVD player with surround sound, that is it's natural place. The fact that PSP's are as expensive as a cheap DVD player and a 20-25 inch TV is the cost of miniaturization and the ability to take it with you and run it off of batteries.

So the take-away - watching full length movies on PSP - don't see it happening for the 18-24 crowd, unless they are commuters and have that kind of spare time on their hands. Watching shorts is more like it, or some kind of Tivo-to-PSP path to watch stuff later. And it had better be VERY easy to do, one button "just do it for me" type of ease, or it's not going to happen. When you could surf the web and download a short at will, the way we surf to a QuickTime movie trailer, then it would have a usage - a validating means to exist. But hey, can't it already do that? But portable video is NOT the logical follow-on to portable music, as the two are used in vastly different ways. Music can be woven into your daily movements, video implies that you are holding still and doing nothing else. The NYTimes article implies that since the device is portable and interactive in it's other uses that watching movies on it is somehow more interactive - I completely disagree. Watching movies on the go is not more interactive than watching at home, other than the fact that you're distracted by your surroundings and stopping and starting it more often. It's STILL PASSIVE ENTERTAINMENT, with no interaction, no thought, no user involvement as compared to a game on the thing. And any game worth it's salt is much more engaging than a movie.

So I stop to think about it - let's free our minds of the constraints of the huge corporations that develop mass content. Let's think about personal content - if you had a PSP, what would you watch on it? Maybe the commercial stripped version of Alias or The Daily Show or whatever you love, or better yet, stuff off of the internet that doesn't have broad acceptance, but is directly up your niche. Maybe a video podcast (vlogcast? Such a mangled word!). Maybe your own videos of stuff. If you're action adventure 18-24 year old, edited highlight clips of your ski trip? What would you want on your personal video playback doohickey? Or is that just an extended version of pictures of your kids in your wallet - do you really think everyone around wants to see them?

But we have portable video now, on a broad enough platform that it pokes it's head above the ultrageek threshold. Better yet, it does more - plays interesting games (not the complete suck-meister stuff on cellphones) and can surf the web over WiFi. But somebody has to be first, and this is a good place to start. But as I write this, I'm thinking mobile media will be of more interest to the under 15 crowd than the over 18 crowd. But the 18-24 year olds are the only ones with the means to afford it on a large scale, so it's House of Flying Daggers time, not Bug's Life.

-mike

JVC Clarifies ProHD Announcement

1.) ProHD is NOT a format

2.) the cameras use HDV

3.) 24p has been part of the spec all along, others just didn't use that part of the spec

Analog Way Unveils ULTRA VIO with HD SDI In & Out Analog, digital, HD, SD, anything connected gadget. Sounds interesting - along the lines of a Blackmagic Multibridge. Need to learn more.

Since over time the FAQ I just posted will fall off the bottom of the HD For Indies page and into the Archives, I've added a permanent link to it in the sidebar at the top right. Where I used to have the "Great HD Links" section, it now presumptuously starts off with the HD For Indies FAQ.

It'll be there, and hopefully grow, over time. So you if you have a question, check there first please.

-mike

MIKE CURTIS' HD FOR INDIES EDITING FAQ, version 0.61

OK, so here's my FAQ. If it isn't in here, I may not have caught up enough to the recent stuff. But this is a good place to start. If you don't find the answer to what you're looking for, and you can't find it using the search function, or if you just want me to walk you through it, I am available for consulting by emailing me at mike@hdforindies.com. I charge $150/hr, one hour minimum, additional time billed at fractions of an hour. Typically, you give me a call at a pre-arranged time, we chat on the phone to answer your questions, and then you drop a check in the mail to me and we're done until you might want some more assistance.

UPDATED AUGUST 20, 2005 - I've added links to BUNCH more articles I've written/linked to having to do with workflow, why HD, Digital Intermediates, etc. I've also added links to the tape formats section that offer much greater detail on the cameras/formats/resolution issues involved, especially the "what's missing here?" article.

UPDATED JUNE 13, 2005 - scroll to bottom, I've added links to some of my "Why DIY HD?" from when I started this blog.

UPDATED 5/9/05 - rearranged a few sections, tidied up the Table of Contents, inserted long bitching section on why high def H.264 won't play on your crappy old Mac, revised AJA vs Blackmagic section, started rough outline on tape formats section

UPDATED TWICE, LAST TIME 10/16/05 - added a bunch more articles of interest, including a 10/15/05 article comparing the currently interesting sub $10,000 US) HD camcorders either on the market or announced and shipping supposedly this year

-------

OK, this started as a simple note about four plus hours ago, and I'm still typing. So this is now a major posting to HD For Indies, and will probably be a reference point for months to come. This article covers what systems can edit what video formats, mostly centering on recent era machines, mostly centering on HD video formats (but DV is included).

This is a rough draft, I'll keep honing on it (I hope). it ain't purty, but there's lots of good info in here.

This covers the specs on the new Macs, and what models will and won't be able to edit which formats of video including DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD, and compressed and uncompressed HD video via HD-SDI. Also, playback of H.264 high definition content is addressed.

...and then more stuff is addressed, to the point I'm adding a Table of Contents, which must mean I'm getting serious about this stuff.


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

Frequently Asked Questions

Apple Announces New Macs (spring 2005)

Editing HD Content - What's Required?
(this is a whole section, broken down below)

Q: What if I want to edit my HD masterpiece at a standard definition offline resolution? Such as if you don't have the money/equipment for the full-on HD online thang

EDITING DVCPRO HD-What's required?

EDITING HDV-What's required? - includes discussions of iMovieHD, Final Cut Pro 4.5 (using LumiereHD or HDVxDV), Final Cut Pro 5

EDITING P2 based DVCPRO HD - What's required?

EDITING HDCAM, D-5, HDCAM SR or other HD-SDI based HD-What's required?

Editing Uncompressed HD - What's required?

SUMMARY OF WHICH MACS WILL EDIT WHAT KIND OF HD FOOTAGE - this is a whole section, with models below, for each below I answer:

What can I edit/play back on my:

iBook
PowerBook
eMac
iMac
PowerMac G4
PowerMac G5

APPLE'S PUBLISHED REQUIREMENTS SPECS FOR H.264, Final Cut Pro 5 AND Final Cut Express HD

High Definition H.264 Playback Requirements-updated 5/9/05


Apple's Final Cut Pro 5 System Requirements

Apple's Final Cut Express HD System Requirements

Tape Formats Defined in rough order of quality (this is a rough work in progress)
VHS
Digital8
DV
DVCPRO/DVCAM
DVCPRO50
IMX
BetaSP
Digibeta (Digital Betacam)
HDV
P2
DVCPRO HD
HDCAM
D-5
HDCAM SR 4:2:2
HDCAM SR 4:4:4
uncompressed to disk

Links to Articles, Editorials, Workflow Discussions, Etc. of Interest - there's LOTS of good stuff in here, dig around. I keep coming back and adding to it, I'm not even up to this year on catching up on good articles.

COMPROMISES AND WORKAROUNDS FOR THE POOR AND (financially) STARVING INDIE - this is another section, really the FAQ part.

Q: I've shot my opus on HDV, but Final Cut Pro 5 isn't out yet. What do I do?

Q: I've got this HD footage to edit, it's on a hard drive...now how do I edit & monitor it on my non-PCI-X computer?

Q: Ingest: "I've got footage from the following tape formats, how to I get it into my computer?"
This section includes HD-SDI ingest based formats (HDCAM, HDCAM SR, D-5), as well as the FireWire (aka IEEE 1394a, also called iLink by Sony) based ingest formats: HDV, DVCPRO HD, ProHD, and DV

Q: OK, I've shot on Format So & So which I now understand I can't edit on my current machine. What can I do?

Q: What are my HD monitoring options? How do I see my HD stuff on a video, not computer screen?

Q: DAMN! Those HD-SDI professional monitors are expensive! How can I save money and NOT buy one of those?

Q: What's better? AJA Kona2 or Blackmagic DeckLink HD Pro?

FireWire 800 - don't I need that for HD?

Q: OK then, what about storage for uncompressed HD?

end table of contents

NEW MACS ANNOUNCED

Apple announced more new computers today, new iMacs and eMacs. So it's time to go over what you can do with all of these new machines for HD purposes. If you just want the "yes/no" list for your computer, scroll to end of article.

New iMacs:

1.8 or 2.0 GHz G5, 600 or 667 MHz bus.
17 or 20 inch screen
512 MB RAM
ATI 9600 graphics w/128 MB VRAM
Combo or dual layer SuperDrive (SD on 20" model only)
-ships with Tiger and iLife 05
-Bluetooth 2.0+EDR & Airport Extreme
17" 1440-by-900 screen with 1.8 GHz Combo drive ($1299) or 20" 1650x1080 inch screen with 2.0 GHz SuperDrive (($1799)
intermediate model with 2.0 GHz, 17" screen, SuperDrive is $1499

New eMacs: $799 & $999
($799 model)
17-inch flat CRT display
1.42GHz PowerPC G4
256MB DDR333 SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA drive
Combo drive
ATI Radeon 9600
64MB video memory
56k internal modem

An extra $200 gets you 512MB memory, a 160 GB drive, and a dual layer capable SuperDrive

OK, so here's the good stuff:

We'll start with the basics:

EDITING HD CONTENT-What's Required?

Let's start with the easy stuff and work our way up:
Q: What if I want to edit my HD masterpiece at a standard definition offline resolution since I don't have the money or a hoss enough system? Can I do that on my G3/G4 based system?

A: Maybe. Apple's stated specs for Final Cut Pro 5 (due in about a month) is an 867 MHz G4 or faster, or any G5. You can run it on slower hardware, but it may not do what you need it to do.

Final Cut Express HD's specs for DV require 500 MHz G4 desktop of 550 MHz G4 laptop.
EDITING DVCPRO HD-What's required?

Q: OK, let's start looking at real HD. What about that DVCPRO HD stuff Apple was crowing about last year? I heard there's a new camera coming out from Panasonic for $6000 that shoots this format later this year?

Panasonic's $65,000 Varicam shoots 720p at any frame rate from 4 to 60 fps. As for cheaper options, pep - the HVX200 from Panasonic will record 720p or 1080p or 1080i DVCPRO HD, and should be very impressive. Records onto P2 cards, but that's another topic.

As for editing it: a 1 GHz G4 or better is required (this includes any G5), single or dual processor. So no, your old dual 500 doesn't count, and I don't know about dual 867's, Apple is saying they aren't fast enough. And minimal specs are usually MINIMAL specs, so 1 GHz is the threshold that matters. Laptops count in this category though - I can edit Varicam footage on my 12" PowerBook (even if I can't see all the pixels in the video, even in full screen mode).

If you have a G3, you are apparently SOL in the modern world. Time to upgrade, big time.


EDITING HDV-What's required?

Q: OK, but that's either too expensive or not out yet. What about HDV? I hear it's Sliced Bread 2.0 combined with The Second Coming.

A: I consider HDV to be the Second Coming of DV. More pixels, still not full-on pro quality, but a helluva deal for the money.

HDV has two flavors at the moment, and will have a third later this year (sometime summertime, ProHD). There are two sizes/types of HDV - 720p and 1080i. At present, JVC makes a 720p camera, and it sucks rocks, so skip it. Then there's Sony's 1080i HDV cameras, the HDR-FX1 and the HVR-Z1U. They pretty much rock the house, especially for the money (about $3500 and $5000 each online). Get the Z1U if you can afford it.

There's a variant called ProHD coming out from JVC, first camera expected in July, it's 720p but can do 24fps. You'll need a third party tool like LumiereHD to assist in the 24p part, Final Cut Pro 5 can't handle it natively.

To edit HDV, you will need one of the following:

iMovieHD, part of iLife '05, $99, and a 1 GHz G4 (or faster) and 512MB RAM installed.

Pros: cheep.
Cons: transcodes to AIC (implies a quality loss), VERY limited editing/export capabilities. That article I wrote about using iMovieHD to get AIC into FCP? There are problems with it, doesn't quite work.

Final Cut Express HD with a 1GHz G4 (or any G5) or faster with 1 GB RAM installed.

Pros: light hardware requirements, low cost ($300)
Cons: transcodes to AIC, not native editing (implies a quality loss), reduced feature set as compared to Final Cut Pro HD

Final Cut Pro 4.5 - requires third party software to get HDV into it, such as LumiereHD or HDVxDV. iMovieHD trick doesn't quite work, so never you mind.

Pros: Hey, it works, and works now, and you can pick your editing codec of choice depending on desired workflow, amount of storage you have available, and capabilities of your Mac.
Cons: much more complex workflow. System requirements vary depending on working codec chosen. Search HDV, LumiereHD, or HDVxDV with the Google bar at top of webpage for lots more info.

Final Cut Pro 5: Ahhhh......now it's easy...in about a month. Native HDV editing, but more of a processor hit than DVCPRO HD or any standard definition format. Expect to see more progress bars, expect to wait for rendering if you're on the minimally spec'd machine, which is a 1 GHz processor (G4 or G5, single or dual will do) with 1GB of RAM installed (2GB recommended). So you'll be able to edit native HDV on a laptop if you wish. Rockin!

EDITING P2 based DVCPRO HD - What's required?

Q: What about this new P2 based, $6000 HD camera from Panasonic coming out (AG-HVX200, due Q4)?

A: There are three issues with it:
1.) Can your machine edit it?
2.) How can you get the footage in there in the first place?
3.) Can you see all of the resolution of the footage on your monitor, all at the same time?

Answer 1: It's DVCPRO HD codec, same as Varicam, so 1 GHz G4 or faster. No, sorry, your dual 500 G4 doesn't cut it.

Answer 2: If you have a laptop with a PC Card slot, you can pop it in there. Or an external one connected to a Mac. Drivers aren't perfect yet for that, but you can drag the files over. For direct integration into Final Cut Pro 5, you need the little P2 reader. The only one on the market is either $2000 or $2500, can't recall off the top of my head. Ouch. But it'll pull the footage into FCP with timecode etc. I expect a better driver and cheaper reading options by the time the camera ships.

Answer 3: For 720p work, you'll need a screen of at LEAST 1280x720 to see all of the image, full size, pixel for pixel, at the same time. For 1080 res work, 1920x1080 or bigger. As a practical matter, more pixels is better so you can have the image full size AND a menu bar and other stuff on screen. 15" PowerBook (no iBooks), 17" G5 iMac, minimum for 720p work to see it all at once. There are also broader issues of monitoring involved - if you don't have the AJ-1200A deck available whenever you want to do color critical work (like color correct), you'll HAVE to be on a dual 2.0 (older not newer), dual 2.3, dual 2.5, or dual 2.7 GHz G5 with an AJA Kona2 or Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD card (several variants), and some kind of video monitor (not computer monitor). More on this later.

EDITING HDCAM, D-5, or other HD-SDI based HD-What's required?

Q: OK, I'm ready to step up to the big leagues now - I want to edit HDCAM material, or work with 720p footage NOT coming over FireWire. This also includes D-5 and HDCAM SR. What do I do?

A: OK, now we're stepping up the requirements substantially. To edit HDCAM in ANY fashion, WHATSOEVER requires an AJA Kona2 or a card from the Blackmagic Design Decklink HD line (there are several). These are the relevant shipping products: there are older cards to be ignored, and CineWave has been cut off at the root by Avid's acquisition of Pinnacle. These two card lines are the two viably available, affordable, supported, smart-to-buy choices. I really wouldn't look at anything else.

To work with an AJA or BMD HD card, you HAVE to have PCI-X slots, and the vendors recommend dual processors. I've seen capture work on single processor G5's, but I don't know how well the other features would work. This is where it gets complicated. Over the past few years, there have been PowerMac G5s with single or dual 1.8 or 2.0 GHz processors. SOME of them have PCI-X, some of them don't. It used to be a safe bet that a dual 2.0 GHz G5 would work for any HD project. That is NOT the case with the new model. The only simple way to be sure is to verify it has PCI-X slots, and is a dual 2.0 GHz G5. The new ones, with dual layer DVD burners? No PCI-X, therefore these cards would only work in standard definition. Bummer. SO: just be sure.

To continue: a PCI-X enabled dual 2.0 GHz or faster G5, AJA Kona2 or BMD DeckLink HD (or HD Plus or HD Pro) card.

If you can only afford a non-RAID hard drive solution, you're stuck working at compressed HD resolutions. DVCPRO HD, PhotoJPEG, and the like.

Editing Uncompressed HD - What's required?

DO YOU WANT TO DO UNCOMPRESED HD? Then you need very fast storage, on the order of 200 MB/sec for 1080i work. If you're just doing 720p24 work, you can get by with under 80 MB/sec under certain circumstances, carefully prepped, etc. etc. disclaimer disclaimer. Read up on SATA RAID (using the Google bar at top of page), I've written tons on this stuff. SATA cards from Sonnet, Firmtek, Highpoint (beware that one for now!) and others coming to market make it possible to do uncompressed HD work, albeit with RAID 0, which means if any one drive fails the whole RAID volume goes down with it. But it's cheap, in the $1-$2/GB range. Fault tolerant storage is out there and works, but is much more expensive - see Apple's XServe RAID, and products from Huge and Medea. These solutions are in the $4-$8/GB range. Again, I've written extensively on the blog before about these issues.

So, finally, the summary, which is what you probably wanted in the first place:

SUMMARY OF WHICH MACS WILL EDIT WHAT KIND OF HD FOOTAGE

iBooks - what can I edit/play back on these?

12"

500 MHz G4 or faster: DV only

1 GHz G4 of faster: DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD
no HD pixel for pixel - screen too small
no P2 card support built in
no high def H.264 playback

14"

500 MHz G4 or faster: DV only

1 GHz G4 of faster: DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD
no HD pixel for pixel - screen too small
no P2 card support built in
no high def H.264 playback

PowerBooks - what can I edit/play back on these?

12" - if 1GHz or faster G4, DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD - but can't see ANY HD pixel for pixel, screen too small. NO P2 card usage built in for upcoming Panasonic camera. no high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM unless working with compressed (DVCPRO HD) or downconverted compressed material.
If less than 1 GHz, DV only.

15" - if 1GHz or faster G4, DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD - CAN see 720p pixel for pixel (screen's big enough), CAN'T for 1080 res. Will be able to read P2 cards in the field (for new Panasonic HD $6000 camera). No high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM unless working with compressed (DVCPRO HD) or downconverted compressed material.
If less than 1 GHz, DV only.


17" - if 1GHz or faster (think they all have been) - DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD - same screen limits as 15" - NOT enough res for 1920x1080 footage (only 1650 pixel wide screen). Will be able to read P2 card, has slot. No high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM unless working with compressed (DVCPRO HD) or downconverted compressed material.
If less than 1 GHz, DV only.

eMacs - what can I edit/play back on these?

500 MHz or faster G4 - you can work with DV downconverts only. No high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM at all, unless working with compressed downconverted material. No built in P2 card support.

1 GHz or faster G4 - you can work with DV, HDV, and DVCPRO HD. You can capture HDV and DVCPRO HD and store it on your internal hard drive, you are likely to have trouble trying to capture these formats and record onto an external hard drive at the same time; is one reason (among many) I don't recommend these machines, especially with their limited internal capacity. No high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM at all, unless working with compressed or downconverted material. No built in P2 card support.

iMacs - what can I edit/play back on these?

G4 iMacs

less than 1 GHz G4: DV only

1GHz G4 or faster: 1 GHz or faster G4 - you can work with DV, HDV, and DVCPRO HD. You can capture HDV and DVCPRO HD and store it on your internal hard drive, you are likely to have trouble trying to capture these formats and record onto an external hard drive at the same time; is one reason (among many) I don't recommend these machines, especially with their limited internal capacity. No high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM at all, unless working with compressed or downconverted material.
No built in P2 card support.

G5 iMacs

slower than 1.8 GHz - DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD native editing. No high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM at all, unless working with compressed or downconverted material. No uncompressed SD, either (same is true for all PowerBooks, iBooks, eMacs, iMacs; all but G4/G5 towers)
No built in P2 card support.

1.8 GHz or faster - DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD native editing. MAYBE high def H.264 playback (needs to be tested). No HDCAM at all, unless working with compressed or downconverted material. No uncompressed SD, either (same is true for all PowerBooks, iBooks, eMacs, iMacs; all but G4/G5 towers)
No built in P2 card support.

PowerMac G4s - what can I edit/play back on these?

500 MHz or faster, single or dual - DV or compressed/uncompressed standard definition video only
No built in P2 card support.

1 GHz or faster, single or dual processor - DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD native editing. No high def H.264 playback. No HDCAM at all, unless working with compressed or downconverted material (I'm intentionally excluding CineWave HD & Kona 1- gets cost prohibitive, gets dumb with other costs involved).
No built in P2 card support.
NO PRACTICAL MEANS OF MONITORING HD other than IF using DVCPRO HD, and IF have Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck plugged into FireWire on Mac and to a video monitor via HD-SDI or analog connections AT ALL TIMES. This is a huge gotcha - means all G4s are useless for color correction unless the deck is sitting next to you the whole time. Two weeks rental would pay for a high end HD card.

PowerMac G5s - what can I edit/play back on these?

Single/dual 1.8 GHz - DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD yes. NO uncompressed HD or monitoring (officially supported). High def H.264 playback YES, but 720p only - this is the entry point for that according to Apple. If you've captured your compressed HD elsewhere, you could edit, but not preview/monitor on this system. (Well, you MIGHT be able to edit with downconverted output, but getting the drive throughput? Maybe.)
No built in P2 card support.

Dual 2.0 (new) - same as the single/dual 1.8 G5 above, with the exception that these will play back 1080 res (1920x1080) HD content compressed with H.264.

Dual 2.0 (old), and Dual 2.3/2.5/2.7 - DV, HDV, DVCPRO HD yes, all via included FireWire. These machines have PCI-X, so can use Kona2 or DeckLink HD line (DeckLink HD, HD Plus, HD Pro single & dual link) and use native SATA arrays fast enough for uncompressed HD, and can connect to SCSI (ugh) or fiber channel (mo bettah) for uncompressed HD. (A used dual 2.5 GHz box might be a sweet deal right now, certainly the OLD dual 2.0. I say this on May 3, 2005). These are the only option to work with D-5, HDCAM, HDCAM SR formatted media, and require a large, multi-disk RAID to handle the enormous file sizes and throughput requirements of these tape formats.
No built in P2 card support, but can add it via USB 2.0 or FireWire.
But these are the only systems that can capture via HD-SDI, the easiest systems to get uncompressed HD disk throughput from, and the only systems that will let you monitor an HD video signal without a $25,000+ deck right there all the time. These are the machines to buy to edit HD seriously. Period. The end. Otherwise you spend more, get less, or can't at all.


High Definition H.264 Playback Requirements

H.264 content:

Apple has clearly state on their QuickTime tech specs web page:

For 1280x720 (720p) video at 24-30 frames per second:
1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
At least 256 MB of RAM
64 MB or greater video card

For 1920x1080 (1080p) video at 24-30 frames per second:
Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
At least 512 MB of RAM
128 MB or greater video card


So that clearly rules out all iMacs and eMacs right off the bat for playing these formats back. You can encode them (more slowly than their faster brethren), but you can't play them back in real time. H.264 is a VERY processor intensive codec - that's one of the reasons the data rate is so small, it requires a LOT of horsepower to do it's thing.

Q: "Well, what about the new iMac? It's 2.0 GHz, and that thing says 1.8 GHz is required!"

A: It SAYS PowerMac G5. There are differences between the two machines above and beyond processor speed, such as bus speed. That said, real world testing (and I'll be doing some) will verify this, but in terms of stated stats, gotta go G5. Maybe the top end iMac will work, maybe it won't...wait and see.

Warning: flaming vitriol from Mike below, beware:

Q: Well dammit, this looks like a conspiracy - my 600 Mhz G3 iBook should run OS X Tiger (after I get install CDs from Apple instead of DVD), so why won't these HD trailers play back smoothly, dammit!

A: Because, nitshit, you have an ancient machine. DEAL WITH IT. This new H.264 stuff is pretty bleeding edge. In a few years, it'll be No Big Deal, but for now it is. Even though Microsoft's Windows Media 9 appears, at first blush, to have lower playback requirements, large HD playback is DIFFICULT, and requires a LOT of computing horsepower.

AND if you don't have a 1920x1080 or higher resolution screen, SHUT UP and quit yer cryin' about it not playing back - YOU COULDN'T SEE IT ALL ANYWAY. YES, Apple should put non-HD H.264 trailers up on the web. If they're going to have 1080 and 720 res stuff, a 480 res option is a reasonable expectation...in time. For the moment, QT 7 is only available on Macs, for those who downloaded new software in the last 10 days (I write this May 9th). So it's a niche market. In time they'll migrate to more H.264 stuff, but the "fullscreen" playback option on most trailers works OK with Sorenson 3, it just takes a larger file to look as good as H264. If you're already on broadband, it's not that big of a deal to wait a bit longer for something that'll play back on software that's been downloaded in the last two or three years.

Somebody complained on Macintouch about the 1080 res Batman trailer not playing back on their 600 Mhz G3 iBook. Was this flamebait, or was the guy really this dumb, excuse me, ill informed? That laptop only has an 800x600 screen, anyway - EVEN IF it were a fast enoug machine, the screen doesn't have enough pixels to show all of the HD signal anyway without scaling it down. And if you scale down, you might as well have downloaded the non-HD version anyway.

IF YOU DON'T HAVE A 23" 1920x1200 LCD or a CRT capable of at least 1920x1080 playback, the 1080 res trailers and content DON'T MATTER, because you couldn't see it all anyway.

Now, the 720p trailers are a different story - if your screen is 1280 pixels wide, and this includes the 15" Powerbooks, you CAN see the full resolution...if your machine is fast enough. Which most aren't - again, a 1.8 GHz G5 or better is recommended. I'm going to check some stuff out myself to see how they run.

Apple's Official Final Cut Pro 5 System Requirements

Here's what Apple has to say on their site:

Final Cut Studio System Requirements
Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) or G5 processor
HD features require 1GHz or faster single or dual processor (my emphasis - mike)
authoring of HD DVDs requires a PowerPC G5 processor (Interesting! Why?
512MB of physical RAM
HD features require 1GB of RAM or more (2GB recommended)
Mac OS X v10.3.9 or Mac OS X v10.4 (or later)
Core Image Units and 16- and 32-bit float rendering in Motion 2 require Mac OS X v10.4 or later
Display with at least 1024 x 768 resolution
QuickTime 7 (or later)

Apple's Official Final Cut Express HD System Requirements

DV

Macintosh computer with a 500MHz or faster PowerPC G4 or G5 processor (550MHz for PowerBook G4 or iBook G4, 450MHz for dual PowerPC G4 or G5) and an AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) graphics card compatible with Quartz Extreme
Mac OS X 10.3.7 or later
QuickTime 6.5.2 or later
384MB of RAM (512MB required for RT Extreme and Soundtrack)

HDV

1GHz or faster PowerPC G4 or G5 processor
1GB of RAM
All above OS, QuickTime and graphics card requirements

Tape Formats Defined

- I'm going to work on this one, this is just notes for now, and I've probably got some details wrong, so don't bank on stuff in here

All digital tape formats "cheat" in that while you MIGHT capture them to uncompressed from tape, they were not captured uncompressed in the field. Besides color space compression (4:4:4 becomes 4:2:2, 4:2:0, or 4:1:1), JPEG like compression is applied to all digital tape formats to squeeze that large amount of raw video data onto that tiny tape. You'll need to understand concepts of 8 vs 10 bit, 4:4:4 vs 4:2:2 vs 4:2:0 vs 4:1:1, subsampling vs full raster to understand this.

VHS - just shoot me, and not in a good way. Analog. Blah. Crap. I'm just including this to be thorough.
Digital8 (ugh) - don't go there - DV compression on timecodeless tapes
DV - 720x480, 8 bits, 4:1:1, 25 megabits/sec aka 3.6 MB/sec w/audio. 2 channel stereo audio uncompressed 16bit 48 KHz, or 4 channels of lesser quality, native FCP editing, 24p supported by some models
DVCAM/DVCPRO - same picture quality as DV, but with "real" timecode (24hr clock), native FCP editing, 24p on some models
DVCPRO50 - like DVCPRO, but with twice the bandwidth - 720x480, 4:2:2, 50 megabits/sec, about 7 MB/sec, native FCP editing, 24p on some models
IMX - MPEG-2 compression, but all I-frames (keyframes). 25 megabit I think, not sure - native FCP editing (in v5), 24p SD on some models, HD XDCAM from Sony in the works
Digibeta aka Digital Betacam - 2:1 compressed, 720x486 (note slight difference), 4:2:2, 8 or 10 bits/channel, but is the tape format 10 bit? Not sure. 24p?
BetaSP (ugh) - analog. just including to be thorough. Nice cameras, but analog so hassle to work with modern systems (is inefficient in many ways)
HDV - three formats:
720p30 at 1280x720, 4:2:0, 8 bits/channel, 19 megabits, how many audio, compressed?
1080i60 at 1440x1080, 4:2:0, 8 bits/channel, 25 megabits, how many audio?
ProHD - 720p24/25/30/60 (60 off of camera but not to tape), 1080i yes, 1080p? Audio?
P2 - lots of options - 720p, 1080p, 1080i, variable framerate from 4 to 60 @ 720p, features not fully defined for HD, HD P2 camera ships end of 2005 aka not relevant to HD until end of year. P2 cards EXPENSIVE, direct to disk options will be interesting and crucial for cost effective deployment
ProHD - does native 720p24, but what about audio?
DVCPRO HD - two flavors supported on tape:
720p - 8 bit, 960x720, 4:2:2, how many audio uncompressed?
1080i - 8 bit, 1280x1080 (eek!), 4:2:2, how many audio uncompressed?
HDCAM - 1080i handled at 1440x1080, 3:1:1, 8 bit, how many audio uncompressed? 4 I think. 720 res details?
D-5: 720p, 1080p, 1080i, 24p yes, 8 or 10 bit, 1920x1080 or 1280x720. First deck that does 10 bit, full raster (not horizontal scaling down)
HDCAM SR 4:2:2: 8 or 10 bit, 720p, 1080p, 1080i, 24p yes, full raster (1920x10080 and 1280x720 internally), 4:2:2. Can do 1080p60 but only with SRW-1 deck. Also only on that deck, stereoscopic imaging.
HDCAM SR 4:4:4 - with an extra board, can do 4:4:4 @ 440 megabits. Only on SRW-1, can do double data rate- 880 megabit. SRW-1 has features so different, I'm almost inclined to call it a different format than HDCAM SR, or at least a superset of HDCAM SR, since it'll do things the SRW-5000 and SRW-5500 decks won't.
HD uncompressed to disk - full raster, 8 or 10 bit, lossless

there's also this old blog posting: Format Overview: what the various tape formats really record - my first stab at this last summer, has some additional info not listed elsewhere in the FAQ

then there was Video Cameras vs. Videotape Image Quality: 'What's Missing Here?' Part I which went into more detail as well.

fill in data rates for all above, find old notes

Links to Editorials & Workflow Ideas/discussion

Roundup of Prosumer HD camcorders under $10,000 as of 10/15/05 (and some of these haven't even shipped yet, preliminary/guessing about specs)


How to shoot HD then post it with no HD equipment - this is old, from early 2004, but the general outlines are still valid. Lots of tech has changed since then, such as HDV, Final Cut Pro 4.5 & 5.0, etc.

The case for Do-It-Yourself HD post: total creative contorl, on your schedule and budget-basically, if you have the technical know-how on your staff, you can fiddle with it to your heart's delight without having to go "into session" at hundreds of dollars an hour in an online suite. I've backed off my gung-ho level since I first wrote this over a year ago, but it's worth considering IF you know what you're doing (or your staff does).

Why has HD cost so damn much? - this is over a year old (written in April 2004), so prices and equipment have dropped and changed (respectively), so keep that in mind that this is generally accurate in intent but inaccurate in details and specific examples of gear and prices.

Advantages of creating digital masters or Digital Intermediates as is the trendy term, although working from HD doesn't count as a DI, especially if not going back to film. "Digital Intermediate" started life meaning shoot on film, edit/color correct/ do effects/ tweak digitally, then go back to film. Now it's abused all over the place. Digital Master implies something a little different.

The Business Case for HD: Why it's a better sell than DV for your independent film - this also is over a year old but holds up. HDV is the new DV - not as good as it's professional brethren, but darned good for the money.

the motion picture film industry lives at the behest of the consumer 35mm film industry again more than a year old, but interesting for long term prospects.

Some thoughts on LONG term digital archiving

Big Question Answered: 'Why no 1080p24 in HDV or DVCPRO-HD?

Backup strategies & risk analysis for HD quantities of data - again, this is more than a year old, and there ARE now valid tape backup options for HD quantities of data. So this is a bit obsolete. Want to know new options? Feel free to ask, but answers are on a consulting ($) basis. : ) (hey, gotta eat, too, ya know!)

Quick tidbit - backup blues - another from over a year ago, including comments from some guys that over-relied on a piece of technology that bit them (they had NO backups - dorks!) Keep in mind, technology and my experiences have changed, this is only valid from a general point of view.

Thoughts on mobile editing with FCP HD -- go lite or go HEAVY - again more than a year old, but some thoughts on the matter.

HD monitoring - how to view your HD video as video - again this was written in spring/summer 2004, but the general theme is valid - digital monitoring is sharper than analog. One thing I DON'T mention in there is about color accuracy - Apple 23" has pink issues and other problems etc.....it's NOT a "great" solution after all. Split HD/SD seems a pretty good approach, although that doesn't address standard definition's 601 color space vs HD's 709 color space. What does that mean? SD monitoring can't replicate all the colors an HD monitor can (or should be able to any way).

Some more thoughts on backups - again from mid 2004, so pricing/gear options are different, so take with a grain of salt. Doesn't include modern tape options.

Thoughts on RAID Level 0 - and what it means for data security - read this one with the backup strategy stuff I've mentioned. Again, from May 2004 so keep the "obsolete" factor in mind.

Why Final Cut Pro HD is so important - wrote this in May 2004 about Final Cut Pro v4.5, but it's still generally valid

some non-definitive thoughts on Avid vs. FCP HD - from June 2004, so realize it's out of date, but the general sketch of it kinda holds up, enough that I thought this was worth including in here. What does hold true, I think, is this - that it is ALWAYS the little mammals, not the big dinosaurs, that change the industry. As well as He Who Has The Biggest User Base CAN Always Win (if they're smart) - whoever has the biggest user base can afford the most for R&D and will be able to add new features/do more development than the other guy...and win.

HD For Indies: "DIY HD posting idea: Can't afford to buy? Rent, or buy then sell"

HD Labs Report #1: SATA storage for uncompressed HD - this is from June 2004 (NOT 2005), and I've learned a lot of new things to change my mind about the conclusions presented, and new hardware has come out, but here's some hard #'s to play with. Again, it's more than year old and lots has happened. Duly disclaimered.

Niche Topic: Shooting stop motion? Forget video camera, use digital still camera - from June 2004 (NOT 2005), so some details I'd suggest doing differently. But it's still an entirely valid approach for stop motion AS WELL AS for time lapse.

OneRiver Codec Comparison Site- has a nice set of samples of codec quality. Useful comparisons of RGB to YUV rendered stuff, especially of note is the DVCPRO HD comparisons, so you can see what it does to your images. Includes samples, plus test-it-yourself materials and instructions.

HD CRTs dirty little secret - lo res - good article from Digital Cinema Magazine on why HD CRTs don't show all the detail that is really in an HD signal. Quote: "The dirty little secret of HD is that very few people have ever seen a full-resolution HD picture, and the $30,000 to $40,000-plus broadcast monitors that are currently used every day to critically view finished HD product can barely display half the available resolution of a 1920x1080 HD picture."

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Panasonic Varicam/AJ-HD1200A deck workflow - here are several articles on Varicam workflow:

Mike's (my) raw notes from working with Panasonic AJ-HD1200A DVCPRO HD deck for editing Varicam footage

efficient Varicam/FCP setup - an ongoing email exchange I had with somebody about how to edit Varicam footage using a Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck

Good thread on working with FCP HD and Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck for high quality output

A couple more niche but interesting threads on Varicam/Panasonic AJ-HD1200A DVCPRO HD deck workflow issues

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Notes on Upsampling testing, FCP workflows, Compression Apps, and SheerVideo codec - this is from August 2004, but some of it is still accurate/relevant

First hand HD production advice: "Digital Producer has this article of a bunch of first hand advice on working with HD"

First Impressions: Hands On With HDLink & DeckLink HD Pro - from August 2004, but much has changed since then (new drivers add tons more features)

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Thoughts on Digital Intermediates (or digital masters)

Thoughts and musings on desktop digital intermediate work

Focus on desktop DI: what's possible - I wrote this before Final Touch HD came out, which changed what's possible (if you can afford it). Keep in mind, this was August 2004, much has changed (and I've learned more since then)

HD & Digital Intermediate Storage Requirements - hard numbers and possible applications

Interested in desktop Digital Intermediates? Read this thread
-----------

Why use HDLink instead of Final Cut Pro's Digital Cinema Preview - again from August 2004, and has some inaccuracies, especially items 1 & 2, which are NOT true.

Automatic Duck Rolls Out New Timeline Integration Tools-how they can be used for Digital Intermediate/Mastering Workflow - again, a bit dated, from Aug 2004, but generally still holds true

Thoughts on pure digital filmmaking - prompted by a reader letter. I'm still working on this stuff, FYI.

Email conversation on post realities with Frank Reynolds, indie editor in NYC - long but interesting about the frank realities of indie editing

Good article to understand RAID technology - my article has a nice/quickie synopsis, links to a looooong but very thorough article.

The True Resolution of the Sony HDR-FX1 and HVR-Z1U

HDLabs Report: Hands on with La Cie 1TB Bigger Disk Triple Interface (USB2, FW400, FW800)

Differences between Sony HDV cameras: consumer HDR-FX1 and pro model HZR-Z1

Video Cameras vs. Videotape Image Quality: 'What's Missing Here?' Part I

COMPROMISES AND WORKAROUNDS FOR THE POOR AND STARVING INDIE

Q: I've shot my opus on HDV, but Final Cut Pro 5 isn't out yet. What do I do?


A: Several possible options:

1.) Capture it as DV (all HDV cameras allow this I think) in FCP and edit that. Wait for FCP 5 to ship, recapture as HDV. This works in THEORY, haven't tested it. As with all batch capturing operations, proper logging (fill the the Reel Name field!) is crucial to success.

2.) Use LumiereHD (which drops every 1000th frame, creating audio drift on long clips) or HDVxDV (which may have the same problem, don't know) to transcode to a codec you can edit with. LumiereHD has a workflow to let you link back to the source HDV for final, high quality rendering. Both programs require MUCH more hand-holding and figuring out than

3.) Dub it to another HD format to capture and edit. Zowee, expensive.

4.) Capture the video as uncompressed HD if you have a Kona2 or BlackMagic card installed, using an AJA HD10A converter box (or similar) that converts the HD analog to HD-SDI. How to get audio in? Hmm, tougher...FireWire capture and re-sync? Haven't done it.

5.) Just wait for FCP 5, not that far off.


Q: I've got this HD footage to edit, it's on a hard drive...now how do I edit & monitor it on my non-PCI-X computer?

A: Editing's no biggie, so long as you have the throughput on your disk system, which might be a deal killer (keep reading).

As for monitoring, I think the BlackMagic cards will (and the Kona2 won't) let you play back HD video and it'll downconvert on the fly to SD if it's installed in a PCI slot and properly configured. It'd almost certainly have to be compressed HD, however.

The current PCI-X SATA cards on the market will work in PCI slots, but aren't as fast in those because there isn't as much bandwidth available. Digging around on barefeats.com, I found mention of 132 MB/sec write speed on a HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A card (NOT my top pick), and about 200 MB/sec read speed. I'm not sure if that was 4 or 8 SATA drives. That should be sufficient for PLAYBACK, but not capture. But then, will there be bus contention issues between the SATA card and the HD card, bringing throughput lower, or hodging the whole deal? I don't know. I'm not in the mood to test it all, but if someone does, let me know. You might be able to get away with 720p24 uncompressed. But compressed is probably the way to go if you are stuck with a PCI only system.

I certainly would not, under any circumstances, recommend buying a PCI only desktop Mac to edit HD with. Penny wise, pound foolish in the extreme.

Ingest: "I've got footage from the following tape formats, how to I get it into my computer?"

Q: I've got these HD tapes (HDCAM, D-5, HDCAM SR, DVCPRO HD, HDV, ProHD, etc.), but I don't have the hardware to capture it. What do I do?

HDCAM, D-5, HDCAM SR capture options - these formats all require that you capture the video via HD-SDI. That's a High Definition Serial Digital Interface. There is no analog HD used in production (analog is only used for monitoring). There is also no FireWire type option for these, the data rate is way too high among other reasons. (Sony has a proprietary editor and connector that can edit HDCAM natively called XPRI and HD-SDTI, respectively, but they don't let anybody else play in their backyard so it's moot.) To capture these formats, you (or someone!) need to have a dual G5 with PCI-X slots. This includes the OLDER dual 2.0 GHz models, and the 2.3, 2.5, and 2.7 GHz dual processor models. DOES NOT INCLUDE the new dual 2.0 GHz model. Then you also need an AJA Kona2 or BlackMagic Design DeckLink HD, DeckLink HD Plus, DeckLink HD Pro (single or dual link) card. For the compressed codecs, regular SATA drives will do, FireWire 800 probably, FireWire 400...maybe, depending. For uncompressed video, you need really really fast storage if you're going to do uncompressed HD. FireWire won't do ever, SATA RAID can do it, if carefully set up. Easy off the shelf solutions from Apple, Huge, & Medea work, but are much pricier....but also offer fault tolerance in case one drive fails, as well as redundant power supplies, remote monitoring, fewer cables that can run farther, etc. Bag SCSI - go fiber channel.

Or you could dub it to DVCPRO HD for FireWire ingest, but then you're losing resolution (DVCPRO HD is only 1280x1080, HDCAM is 1440x1080. Both scale up to 1920x1080 for playback).

Or you could pay someone to capture it and send you the files on a drive. Then you're stuck in the position I described above...

DVCPRO HD capture options - 1 GHz or faster G4 or G5, use FireWire and that's it is my preferred method if you can get a Panasonic AJ-HD1200A. You can also capture via HD-SDI if you wish, see above for details. FireWire is a little cranky for some users, but generates tiny files; HD-SDI is more straightforward (with recent drivers anyway) and allows for compressed (offline quality) or uncompressed (online quality) options. FireWire allows for a single source that is both offline datarate and online quality. Confusing? Yes, but true. That's a longer subject. Somebody bug me to link in on this one.

HDV capture options - 1 GHz or faster G4 or G5, use FireWire and that's it once FCP 5 is out. See other link for stop gap alternatives. Supposedly (Apple person said so) can capture from HDV to uncompressed for optimal quality workflow. Can you capture from HDV to DVCPRO HD then I wonder? Or PhotoJPEG, or or or or.....???

ProHD - my understanding is that when the cameras ship in July, that you'll be able to capture the 720p30 output of the camera as native HDV. The 24p stuff will require a third party option, LumiereHD was showing a workflow at the JVC booth at NAB that'll ship in time to work wit the cameras.

DV capture options - any mac with FireWire and a 500 MHz or faster G4 processor (or any G5 processor). They all have built-in FireWire, that's all you need.

Q: OK, I've shot on Format So & So which I now understand I can't edit on my current machine. What can I do?

A: Transfer, downconvert, compress, or some combination. If you shot on a non-FireWire-able source, such as Digibeta or HDCAM, you can capture it on another system and transfer that data to your system. What if your system can't play that footage back, due to reasons like processor speed or datarate limitations? Then downconvert it or compress it. If it's HD, downconvert to SD (making SURE your timecode matches! And if offlining, do letterbox with windowburn out of image area!)

If data rate's too high, capture to something compressed you can work with - DV or DVCPRO50 or DVCPRO HD - all offer native effects for editing. Consider HDV downconverts for HDCAM once FCP 5 ships. Consider it, but don't necessarily choose it. Just a thought.

In general, convert it to something you CAN edit on your system, but that you'll be able to go back and recapture the better quality source material at a later time and still use all your existing editing decisions. Make sure your planned workflow will all work and match and line up and hand off. Capturing DV into Final Cut Pro to recapture from HD masters (with matching timecode!) will work; editing DV downconverts in iMovie hoping to hand it off to Final Cut Pro is asking for trouble or outright failure. Test a little bit of footage and make sure it all works the way you want it to. Make sure the timecode matches; clips starting with timecode of zero do NOT count as "Hey dude! Timecode's working!"

Downconvert to do your own offline, then online it somewhere that does have the right gear. This is a loooooooong conversation to have with your post production supervisor (I do this if you want to hire me, BTW) to make sure all the myriad dangers are missed. There are a LOT of ways to mess this up. Easiest is same software to same software - Final Cut Pro offline to another Final Cut Pro station. Much riskier is jumping software within a company - Final Cut Express HD to to Final Cut Pro HD. Riskiest yet is jumping from one software company to another - Final Cut Pro HD to Avid, for instance. Doable, but only under tightly limiting circumstances - certain things won't carry over, or be done wrong, etc. At gut simplest, you can always bring in an EDL (edit decision list) from your software and have the online facility recapture all the footage and rebuild (automatically) from that EDL, but then all of your titling, color correction, effects, etc....poof! Gone or needs rebuilding. Along those lines, one of the reasons I like offlining in HD (even compressed heavily) is that your FX work can be done "at size" even when they only have the proxy footage, not the final stuff to start working with. Obviously not for greenscreen, but certainly for inserts/additions etc.

Q: What are my HD monitoring options? How do I see my HD stuff on a TV like device?

A: Tricky.

If you have HD video that's shot on HDV or DVCPRO HD, you can get it into your computer via FireWire...but then it's not simple to see it on a video monitor (not a computer monitor, where it will look entirely different due to brightness, contrast, gamma, white point, and other stuff you may not have heard of).

HDV is the only HD format for which there is NO built in means of viewing your video on a video monitor (not a computer monitor) as you edit. So you have to use an AJA Kona2 or BlackMagic Design DeckLink HD card (there are several) in a Mac with PCI-X slots (older dual 2.0 GHz, or 2.3, 2.5, or 2.7 GHz dual G5s) to feed the signal out an HD-SDI interface. THEN the problem is connecting to an HD-SDI interface. Only professional grade studio monitors include this connector type, and it's usually an add-on. A $2000-$3500 add-on. OUCH! Fortunately, the AJA Kona2 ($2500) and BMD DeckLink HD Pro ($2000) models both include SD/HD analog outputs. (This one feature makes the DeckLink HD Pro model definitely with the extra $900 over it's basic DeckLink HD little brother). With HD analog, you can connect to a professional monitor, but also to most consumer HDTVs (more on that next).

DVCPRO HD - if you're FireWiring your footage in with the Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck, then you can connect a video monitor to the HD-SDI or component outputs of the deck. If you DON'T have the deck there full time, then you need a Kona2 or DeckLink HD card.

HDCAM, HDCAM SR, D-5, and sometimes DVCPRO HD - for those that ingest via HD-SDI, you're in luck - the Kona2 and Blackmagic DeckLink HD cards have HD-SDI outputs built in, and the Kona2 and DeckLink HD Pro cards (the high end BMD card) have analog HD connectors.

Q: DAMN! Those professional HD monitors are EXPENSIVE! How can I save money?

Realize that the color, saturation, white point, contrast, etc. are quite different on consumer TVs than professional monitors, and are both are different from computer monitors. With the available options today - plasma, DLP, D-ILA, LCD, CRT, rear projection, front projection, etc., images look different on all these devices. Don't even begin to think that plugging your HDTV into your G5 via one of these cards will look anything it would on another set of another type, or a digital projector, or especially a film print.

That said, for just editing and non-critical evaluation (don't do color correction on it), a consumer HDTV will work. Plus, it's a consumer HDTV you can watch other stuff on. But for editing & color correcting HD, that option kinda blows.

Low cost devices such as the AJA HDP and Blackmagic HD-Link offer an alternative. They both cost around $700-$800. They convert an HD-SDI signal to a DVI signal and RCA stereo pair - so you can connect an inexpensive DVI based computer LCD monitor. For 720p work, a 1280x800 pixel (or 1280x1024, or 1280x960) monitor is a good fit, and for 1080 res work, a 1920x1200 is the appropriate match. 1920x1200 pixel monitors have dropped significantly in price, and are now in the $1000 (Dell) to $1499 (Apple) with HP, Sony, and BenQ in the mix as well. The Apple 30" will exactly pixel double a 720p signal, displaying a 2x2 replication of each source image pixel, but for 1080 res work, it'll simply sit in the middle with a lot of black around the edges.

Of the two, the HDP is 4:2:2 YUV only, but offers TWO additional HD-SDI passthrough outputs - a very handy feature. The HDLink offers 4:4:4 support and the ability to load in lookup tables to calibrate to different devices.

Heavy duty, high end post people I've spoken to say that while AJA is clear about their device as a utility, not critical-grade, adaptor, the HDLink's look up tables and 24p smoothing are not up to snuff for serious, high end film calibrated work. I don't know enough to say definitively. The film calibration folks I've spoken to say 3D LUTs are necessary for film work, and HDLink doesn't offer that.

The Doremi box, at about $2000, handles 24p much more smoothly. Don't know how/what it's doing, but in the demo I saw it looked tons better. Also offered some scaling options that I'd SOMETIMES want to use.

At the highest end, eCinema Systems offers a new 23" LCD monitor and converter/LUT box that will do proper 24p handling, stay extremely well calibrated, and let you load industry standard 3D LUTs (Kodak's) into it. But it's expensive! $6000 for the LCD panel, $6K to $12K for the converter box (depending on LUT capabilities).

This last is in lieu of the $25,000 to $35,000 Sony 24p capable CRT, so it's not as expensive as the alternatives.

What I recommend is to use an HDLink (or HDP) connected to a 23" computer LCD to see all the pixel for pixel detail of your HD image, then use the Kona2/DeckLink HD's ability to do a realtime downconvert to SD on the analog outputs, so that you can connect a standard definition component monitor (hopefully professional grade, otherwise you're inaccurate again) to evaluate critical color/do color correction.

Q: What's better, the AJA Kona2 or BlackMagic Design DeckLink HD Pro Dual Link?

A: AAAAAAAAHH! I get asked this all the time, and it's hard to answer. On paper, the specs are virtually identical, and it's not until you get into the very fine nitty gritty of workflows can you find a practical difference at this point. Especially with both companies about to rev their drivers for Final Cut Pro 5 to include support for native HDV playthrough and other new features, it's pointless to say this week.

My advice to anyone about to buy is to wait and see how they work with FCP 5 in a few weeks.

I've been using both successfully for some period of time in my own studio, I don't have a definitive, for-everyone answer to give, because I don't have one. It gets into the nitty gritty of how you want to work and what you're trying to do before I can give an answer I'd call meaningful rather than "I dunno - they're both nice - pick one."

FireWire 800 - don't I need that for HD?

A: No video format needs to travel over FireWire 800, aka 1394b to capture from the camera or deck. The existing FireWire based formats (DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, DVCAM, DVCPRO HD, HDV, ProHD) CAN be captured via a FireWire 800 port (1394b), it just reverts to a FireWire 400 (1394a) compatible mode. No, it does NOT make the video look any better. At all. Not even a little bit. You're probably better off connecting the camera to a regular FireWire 400 port anyway.

STORAGE, on the other hand, can take advantage of FireWire 800, since it's faster than FireWire 400. For HD purposes, FireWire 800 is useful for compressed HD playback and storage, but not uncompressed. You can store uncompressed HD on a FireWire 800 drive, but no FireWire solution of any sort is fast enough for uncompressed HD (with the exception of 720p24 footage, and then only maybe). FireWire 800 RAID boxes are an attractive option for storage, either for mirroring (RAID 1, but be careful of throughput limitations) or RAID 3 or 5 (for fault tolerant online editing storage). Beware bus contention issues - the FireWire 800 and 400 buses, even on G5's are really all just one bus. There can be issues of trying to capture from a FireWire camera to a FireWire drive. I had trouble last year with a Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck (that's the DVCPRO HD deck with FireWire) until I disconnected ALL other FireWire devices from the G5. Then and only then did it work.

Q: OK then, what about storage for uncompressed HD?

A: I've written tons about this. Use the Google bar at top of page to search.

In general, a few gotchas:

1.) The raw data rate of the video stream is NOT how much throughput you need. You need more. 20-35% more.

2.) Raw throughput isn't the only metric to be concerned about. Can the drive system as a whole (the drives, the RAID controller if there is one, the bus the data travels over, the drivers for the card, the card itself, etc.) SUSTAIN the throughput you need? Some tests showed that stuff that appeared to work would consistently drop frames every 15 to 20 minutes...even if it was just a couple o frames every 15 minutes. For a broadcast shop, this is unacceptable. For starving indies, perhaps something they are willing to work around (so long as FCP is configured to warn them).

3.) Seek speeds matter, too, especially if you want to do multiple streams of video. "But I'm not doing any picture in picture or any of that broadcast crap for my movie!" you say. Ah, yes. But you want to do a cross dissolve I'm sure. That takes dual stream capability from the drive system for realtime performance (if the software/hardware supports it for that codec anyway).

4.) Along the lines of multi-stream editing, you can't just divide the throughput by the bandwidth per stream and assume it'll do that many. Lots of reasons, including seek times and cache sizes, but it doesn't.

5.) Test, test, test. Don't assume a given configuration will work unless you've seen it work, or someone you trust has done the exact same thing. At the very least, if buying an unproven/untested configuration, buy from a vendor that gives you a no quibbling money back guarantee.

SATA RAID is the low cost solution, but it's all RAID 0 at this point so be careful, and have backups, or some kind of strategy. At the moment, I like the Firmtek 1VE4 4 port cards or Sonnet Tempo X eSATA 8 port cards, with the Seagate 7200.8 line of drives. But I need to test before swearing off on those for uncompressed HD usage. To learn more, use the Google bar at top of page and search for SATA RAID, backup strategies, RAID 0, stuff like that. Apple's XServe RAID works for 4:2:2 work (needs two of'em for 4:4:4 work), Huge & Medea also make uncompressed HD capable stuff. As a practical matter, HDCAM and Varicam tape formats only record 8 bits/channel of information, so about 150ish MB/sec is as much as you REQUIRE to capture those formats. However, you might want to capture in 10 bit so you have more lattitude in color correction. Then you need 200ish MB/sec for 10 bit 1080i60 4:2:2. For those with the luxury of 4:4:4 work, 1080p24 10 bit 4:4:4 RGB is 190 MB/sec of raw data throughput, something in the 230-250 MB/sec range is necessary for the required overhead. In theory, 237 MB/sec would be the maximum HD data rate - 1080i60 10 bit 4:4:4 RGB - but nobody's using that realistically. 4:4:4 is pretty much strictly for the film world, and that's 24p.


==============================


End of FAQ. For now. Now must get breakfast, excuse me lunch, it's 1pm and I started this at 9am.

NOT FINDING WHAT YOU WANT? NO LINKS TO ARTICLES RELEVANT? USE THE COMMENTS FIELD BELOW AND LET ME KNOW WHAT'S MISSING OR WHAT SHOULD BE LINKED, AND I'LL TRY TO PUT IT IN THERE. This is intended to be the general purpose FAQ, though.

I finally gave up on the service that was processing my RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed called feedburner, it stopped dead in it's tracks at a given post and never updated. As the cops say when they arrive on the scene of an obviously and especially dead person, it's DRT - Dead Right There.

So please switch your RSS feed to http://www.hdforindies.com/atom-copy.xml, or if you're running Safari in Tiger (aren't we special?), use feed://www.hdforindies.com/atom-copy.xml.

I'll get it all sorted out in the future.

HDV-Connect: HDV to HD-SDI

Missed this at NAB, never made it by their booth but heard a lot of buzz about it - converts HDV coming over FireWire to HD-SDI.

Useful to the high end folks in an editing suite - after shooting, connect the camera or deck to this thing to convert to HD-SDI to capture with your existing high def gear. It's a hardware decompressor, basically. Does it go the other way, from HD-SDI to HDV? That'd be interesting as well - but I don't think it does.

Does do deck control etc. with RS-422/1394 conversion.

-mike

New toyz:

Announced today, online store says ships in 1-3 days, Apple Stores have them or will have them this week.

New iMacs:

1.8 or 2.0 GHz G5, 600 or 667 MHz bus.
17 or 20 inch screen
512 MB RAM
ATI 9600 graphics w/128 MB VRAM
Combo or dual layer SuperDrive (SD on 20" model only)
-ships with Tiger and iLife 05
-Bluetooth 2.0+EDR & Airport Extreme
17" 1440-by-900 screen with 1.8 GHz Combo drive ($1299) or 20" 1650x1080 inch screen with 2.0 GHz SuperDrive (($1799)
intermediate model with 2.0 GHz, 17" screen, SuperDrive is $1499

New eMacs: $799 & $999
($799 model)
17-inch flat CRT display
1.42GHz PowerPC G4
256MB DDR333 SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA drive
Combo drive
ATI Radeon 9600
64MB video memory
56k internal modem

An extra $200 gets you 512MB memory, a 160 GB drive, and a dual layer capable SuperDrive

All of these ship with Tiger and iLife 05, and include iDVD if that model includes a SuperDrive.

See the just posted article - PERHAPS the new iMacs will play back 720p HD H.264, maybe not. I may have to go find out myself today.

-mike

So there's this newfangled QuickTime 7, which is part of OS X 10.4 (Tiger), but can be downloaded separately for 10.3.x. It includes a new codec (a compressor/decompressor - DV is a codec, so are HDV, MPEG-2, DVCPRO HD, etc.). This codec is called H.264, and it's getting lots of press. Why? Because it can put a whole lot of detail into a very small file. And more importantly, it's been chosen as one of the codecs to be used in the next generation of high definition DVD discs - both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have included it in the required specifications for their discs and players. This codec also scales well - meaning it works well on small sized moving images, like you might use for videoconferencing (in iChat A/V 3), or also for large (in pixel size) stuff, like high res movie trailers nearly 2000 pixels wide. A great example of this is that the exact same codec can be used for the dial up speed movie trailers (160x90 or so) as it can for the 1920x1080 sized trailers. This is rare - not all codecs work well both large and small, and are efficient enough to do HD sized movies.

Apple has clearly state the requirements for HD H.264 playback on their QuickTime tech specs web page:

For 1280x720 (720p) video at 24-30 frames per second:
1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
At least 256 MB of RAM
64 MB or greater video card

For 1920x1080 (1080p) video at 24-30 frames per second:
Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
At least 512 MB of RAM
128 MB or greater video card


So that clearly rules out all iBooks, PowerBooks, PowerMac G4s, iMacs and eMacs right off the bat for playing these formats back. They might stutter through them, but they can't play them back in real time, playing all the frames. H.264 is a VERY processor intensive codec - that's one of the reasons the data rate is so small, it requires a LOT of horsepower to make a little bit of data represent a whole lot of detail in an image.

Q: "Well, what about the new iMac? It's 2.0 GHz, and that thing says 1.8 GHz is required!"

A: It SAYS PowerMac G5. There are differences between the two machines above and beyond processor speed, such as bus speed. That said, real world testing (and I'll be doing some) will verify this, but in terms of stated stats, gotta go G5. Maybe the top end iMac will work, maybe it won't...wait and see.

Lots more on new Macs to be posted shortly...

-mike

Andy Ihnatko's Temporary Waste Of Bandwidth

Words well heeded. I started this website by heeding these words, and I'm on the verge of wrecking it based on making it "better."

Site maps, and publishing systems and content management Oh My!

Why do I bring this up? Aspiring filmmakers, remember this: Something Simple Done Well is a Far, Far Better Thing Than Something Fancy Done Badly, or Not At All.

Remember that the next time you contemplate your opus.

I think it was Cameron who said something to the effect of "Give me two guys and a bush and I'll give you an epic saga about the Roman Legion."

(He was also addressing the issue of subterfuge in filmmaking, implying that which is not shown.)

-mike

More Tiger install related stuff

MacInTouch discusses Tiger install so far notes on a few issues

MacSlash | Tiger OS: The First 3 Days - reader reports - LOTS of them. Skim this to see if you're having or vulnerable to the same issues

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Third-Party Updates - list of things that have been updated to work with Tiger (updated from the other day)

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Incompatibilities and Workarounds - yes/no/unknown/workarounds for existing software - good to skim before installing!

Mail.app (Part 13) Discussion of Mail.app 2.0 in Tiger - pros & cons & problems

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (Part 5) Tiger install/working experiences. Again, skim/search for software, hardware, etc. that you use.

MacFixIt - Problems with QuickTime Pro 7 and Mac OS X 10.3.x (Panther) (found via PhilaFCPUG.org)

MacSlash | Tiger OS: Attention To Detail - more Tiger reader reports, from MacSlash this time

News of the dead: Guardian Unlimited Film | News | Soderbergh's revolution

OK, THIS is cool! Soderbergh was up on the DV revolution (I got to mess around with his hand built, better-than-production XL2 a few weeks ago), and now he's going to make six movies on high def video released in theaters, DVD, and TV simultaneously. WOW. This is EXACTLY the kind of progress I've been waiting for.

-mike

Tiger versus Panther (Mac OS X)

Speed tests, Tiger vs Panther.