HD For Indies

AnandTech: Intel Yonah Performance Preview - Part I: The Exclusive First Look at Yonah

So this is a review of a PC chipset. Why, on God's Green Earth, should I care? Because this is the likely dual core chipset to be used in Intel based PowerBooks next year. It's pretty fast, runs fairly cool, power draw isn't too bad.

Excellent.

-mike

Artbeats - Total Training Promo

Want to see some HD clips? Sign up and you can download some for free from Artbeats...thanks to reader for sending this in.

-mike

Macworld: Review: LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface, 300GB

Favorable review of 300 GB FireWire drive with USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. I have several LaCie drives and they've been good to me so far.

-mike

Think Secret - Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room

Apple's Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.


Well, it ain't as if I didn't predict this one months ago - that it would be Viiv, that it would be living room friendly, and it would be a serious new thing.

The bit about the iPod dock? Definitely, I've read about the hardware bits that were compatible with that in the past.

I hadn't heard the DVR bit suggested before, but that makes entire sense if we're talking Viiv video friendly platform.

Apple's media center intentions have become startlingly clear in the past year since Apple first delivered the Mac mini and customers first started connecting the system to home theaters


Well, duh, I've been saying that since the Intel switch was announced. And yes, I'm too lazy to go back and find the posts, but trust me, they are there.

These guys tend to predict anything and everything, and if it doesn't happen, they imply Apple backed off of the coolness that coulda/shoulda been.

For me, I'd be delighted if this happens, it would be faster than I originally expected. I think Apple is really taking to heart the lessons learned from the iPod group - get out ahead, get WAY out ahead, and nobody can touch you. Marginal benefits do NOT a market crusher make.

Then, stand by for a summer iTunes Movie Store, as soon as Apple can get the studios on board...

PS-all of this may be a part of why Apple's stock is on an amazing run of late, above and beyond the iPod madness. I predict a phenomenal Christmas of iPods - I know of two being bought just within my immediate family as gifts (don't worry, Mason my seven year old nephew doesn't read the blog!) I also put my money where my mouth is and bought several hundred more shares of Apple well before it hit 70 the other day, and I plan on keeping them for years, after the Move To Video has paid off and gone totally mainstream. I noticed a Bose iPod speaker base ad on the side of a bus the other day - in AUSTIN, not in San Francisco where I'd expect to see such things. When your third party accessories are being mass advertised on buses, you got yerself a MARKET.

-Mike

UPDATE - I DIDN'T READ IT CAREFULLY ENOUGH - THIS GUY'S ON A G4 - TOTALLY DIFFERENT STORY THAN A G5, SO DISREGARD See the comments for input from Luke at BlackMagic tech support.


This is an updated article from the other day. The original was:

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/21/05

Ewwwwwwwwww. More reasons I'm not enamored with the Highpoint product - now looks like it conflicts with the BlackMagic drivers. Whose fault? I almost don't care, they don't like each other, and until it is fixed, I STILL don't recommend these cards.

...then I got a bunch of emails saying it works fine. My thoughts are that either:

1.) This user is fubared somewhere else he doesn't realize, or

2.) This user is using RAID 5 not RAID 0 which has apparently worked for other users with the 1820/1820a boards, or

3.) This user has otherwise misconfigured something in a way different from other 1820 and BMD product users who say it has been fine for them.

-mike

AppleInsider | iTunes cracks top 10 US music retailer list

This is from last week, just been meaning to catch up to it. Everything that Apple has done for audio? They're getting ready to do for video. Apple has already cracked the top ten of music retailers with the iTunes Store. And stand by for similar results from the video side in 2-3 years.

Read the other article today about the DVR equipped Mini rumored to be coming in January (already!) by AppleInsider, article on this page.

-mike

MacNN | Addonics ships 5x1 eSATA Port Multiplier

I don't think this is quite ready for Mac stuff yet (dearth of SATA cards that support Port Multiplication - LaCie's does, but does the Highpoint 2320 PCIe? This type of thing could be quite handy in the future for DIY SATA RAID. Why 5 drives? It is a bit of a magic number. If you want to do any HD 4:2:2 format up to 10 bit 1080i60 4:2:2, you need 200 MB/sec of throughput. The nicer drives these days deliver nearly 40 MB/sec even when nearly full, so 5x40=200 MB/sec, the magic number. If the ports on the host card supported that, then an 8 port card could support 8 five drive pods, each pod capable of being a 5 drive RAID 0 (or two pods for RAID 10 redundancy), so 40 drives in all, and each pod fully capable of uncompressed HD. Nice!

It is late and I need to read up some more on port multiplication supported cards for Mac (just one for sure I know of, and PCI-X not PCIe), but a very interesting bit o'tech.

-mike

UPDATE: I misread/overreacted in my first skim-in-a-hurry -- this is Sony Pictures talking about how they'll compress their movies, not Sony Electronics altering the spec for Blu Ray, which has always required all three codecs - MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264. So disregard my paranoid format war ramblings below. Sony is just picking a stable, known tech to deliver their first stuff with. I'm just surprised to hear them say "for the foreseeable future" about MPEG-2. H.264 and VC-1 offer a lot of advantages. This is a signal to me that Sony Pictures is looking for their first Blu Ray discs to be just like regular DVDs, but with more resolution is all.

New high-definition DVDs to use old video technology? | Tech News on ZDNet

Sony is talking about using high bitrate MPEG-2 for Blu Ray, and NOT H.264 or VC-1.

I AM SHOCKED.

I had heard about issues doing interlaced footage with H.264 from Apple folks in the booth at NAB this year, but I figured that was an Apple only thing. I figured they'd do 1080p24 with 3:2 pattern added to make it 1080i60 in hardware during playback.

From the article:

Last week, studio giant Sony Pictures quietly voted for "none of the above," and took a swipe at the new codec formats. The new advanced codecs aren't immediately necessary for discs released in Sony's high-capacity Blu-ray format, Sony Pictures executives said in an interview with CNET News.com, and the studio would instead use the 11-year-old MPEG-2 video codec used on today's DVDs.
"Advanced (formats) don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Don Eklund, Sony Pictures' senior vice president of advanced technology. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2."


I found this very, very surprising. I had started to write "patently, demonstrably false" but I'm backing off of that. Let's break this down piece by piece -

"Advanced formats don't necessarily improve picture quality" - well, from a broad, blunt perspective, it could be argued this is true. However, at a GIVEN bitrate, this is false. If you have plenty of room, you can get good quality at a higher bitrate of MPEG-2. But that means you can't fit as much stuff on the discs.

I'm just very surprised that Sony is stating that H.264 can't deliver equal quality as MPEG-2 at a bitrate that fits onto the 25GB of a single layer Blu Ray Disc.

Hmm..why? Ostensibly, high bitrate MPEG-2 might be better quality - (and there is a lot of wiggle room to improve a codec within a format, and MPEG-2 is a mature technology that is well optimized)

The cynic in me, after having seen some really good looking H.264 (look at the downloadable HD trailers on Apple's movie trailers site), wonders if there is some other reason for this sudden move - why this late play? Is this a threat to divorce Microsoft from the game, so they have a chip that MS has to "buy back" in negotiations as they push for Mandatory Managed Copy? Or to keep away from the Microsoft/Intel Viiv initiative, keeping Sony in a role to sell more players and not have computers be as friendly a playback device? Is it because they don't want to pay the licensing fees for the other formats to include them in the Blu Ray spec?

Woops, after having written that, I realize that this is Sony Pictures, not the Blu Ray spec Sony electronics group. So disregard all that format war stuff with Microsoft (although that is an interesting thought, too).

Or is it an anti-piracy move, hoping to keep high quality, lower bitrate media out of the hands of the online pirates, making the movies bigger and harder to copy? Or too big to copy onto a 9 GB DVD-R?

The article states that the existing companies involved in DVD production are familiar with MPEG-2 and not with the others - I'd say fine then, leave MPEG-2 is as an option, and oh, I dunno, maybe PLAN FOR THE FUTURE by having support, REQURED, in all the players sold, for the other formats.


"For the first year or so, inertia and familiarity may count more than being more efficient," said Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty. "The professionals that do this for a living at Technicolor, Disney, Fox, Warner and so on are much more comfortable with MPEG-2."


Warners wants to make a 9GB disc with high def content - ONLY possible with VC-1 or H.264, NOT possible with MPEG-2. It would be produced with existing red laser disc technology, thus cheaper to crank out. H.264 and VC-1 are making entirely suitable HD movies at SD movie bitrates.

This article is really stating that Sony PICTURES likes MPEG-2 - their recent test of Charlie's Angels Full Throttle as a Blu Ray disc was compressed using MPEG-2, and maybe that is what they are happy with.

I'm just hoping this doesn't lead to a threat to the format is all. (Woops, hope I'm not misleading about that).

OK, pardon my misread on all that situation - in a hurry here to get to next meeting - been SWAMPED.

Variety.com - H'wood belt tightening

Variety writes about how studios are thinking that cost cutting is the answer to their financial woes. Or staying leery of "mid priced" movies that cost $30 to $70 million dollars to make. Or shifting advertising from TV and print to the web.

Each studio has its own mandate, its own needs to fulfill, but they are all talking about cutting back the number and/or cost of their movies in order to react to the dwindling market, chiefly due to the ever improving home alternatives - DVDs, HDTV, cable, sattelite, Amazon, Netflix, etc. The theory is that fewer movies produced will allow staffs to spend more time and focus on putting out better quality movies. Budget cutting is just being, well, cheap. My opinion: entrenched power structures and players don't scale back well. In much the same way that you'll never get a 30% raise but will have to quit and find a new job that pays 30% more, the nature of business is to NOT change internally very much. Cultural inertia in large companies, where there are egos and entrenched players with positions and budgets to defend, is an amazingly powerful force for...not much to happen.

I haven't made fun of it in a while so here goes - the writing style of Variety is hilarious - it is so self important with all of its contractions and shorthand - auds, prexy, perfs, etc. I misuse its vs it's with reckless abandon and have more craggy, consonant laden acronyms than an Eastern European governmental committee, but I don't call audiences auds.

CinemaTech, as usual, has excellent coverage/commentary on all of this, summed up by the headline Wrong Answer: Make Fewer Movies, which is how I found this article. His closing line posits the question well:

Studios already know how to make and market expensive, big-budget projects. But what about the $10 million feature film - or the $100,000 video series for cell phones?


If Wedding Crashers can be made for $30 to $40 million (plus a huuuuuuuge long running advertising budget - it feels like I must have been seeing those first ads in high school) - why can't entirely entertaining movies be made with those kinds of budgets consistently? They had some decent name brand actors in there, plenty of locations, some good gags, no need for tons of VFX work. It was simple, it was FUNNY AS HELL as was The 40 Year Old Virgin. For each demographic, what is to stop more movies from being made in that budget range - comedy is clearly doable, how about drama? Action obviously demands a higher budget, as do period pieces, but come on - how hard does it HAVE to be? I keep hearing stories about poor planning and rushed prepro (woops, see, I'm doing shorthand, I mean pre-production) costing TONS more later. The focus of the movie matters, too - Wedding Crashers/40 Yr Old Virgin obviously aren't winning any awards for set design, costume design, lighting, cinematography, etc., which all take time/skill/money more than a competent/professional/non-outstanding job, but look at the high dollar, total busts that the article points out - Stealth and The Island. Stealth was dumb and stillborn from the get-go, but The Island COULD have been good - good cast, good concept, but just stuuuuupid execution.

Perhaps the industry as a whole needs to just change its ways? I don't know, I'm not privvy to enough inside action on all of that to say with any certitude. It just seems ridiculous at times, but then again, I'm not making big feature movies....

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/25/05 has coverage of the issue that out of the box, CP 4.5 won't run on a PCIe Mac. There are hacks out there to make it run, however.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND THESE FOR SSERIOUS WORK, and here's why: if it suddenly doesn't do something you need it to do, you are STUCK on that system - tech support will not help you, there is no "for real" workaround. You're down to begging for help from strangers on user boards (then again, that's where most indies seem to be, sooooo.....).

But this is to let you know that:

1.) FCP 4.5 won't run on PCIe Macs without...
2.) altering some text in the Info.plist concerning AGP to let it run, but that
3.) if you run into trouble, you might be in Big Trouble, since Apple will flatly deny to help you

This is NOT an Evil Scheme to make you upgrade, simply indicative of the fact that when they wrote the spec for FCP 4.5 two to three years ago, they had no idea that there were going to be PCIe Macs, and it certainly didn't make sense to write code to plan for them that far ahead.

Just upgrade to the new version. If you're really a starving indie, you're a student, or close to being one, right? Academic version discounts.

Plus, there are numerous reasons to upgrade:
-more flexible realtime architecture
-support for HDV
-more bug fixes
-runs on latest OS stuff
-oh yeah - it's officially supported so if there is a problem, you can get Apple to help you (somewhat)

-mike

MaxUpgrades.com: MaxConnect Internal hard disk drive mounting solution for G5 Power Macs (PCI Express)

....and I don't like it.

YES, this kind of systems can be made to work.

BUT - I don't like the massively larger power draw - sometimes these systems will fail to boot due to too much power draw. Yes, you can run them off an external power supply, but then WHY? It definitely will tax the cooling system more - fans run louder. You also can't move that array somewhere else, such as to another machine or to a vendor. The full 9 drive kit (allowing the addition of 7 more drive locations in the G5) costs $599. For that amount of money, you can get a couple of MacGurus Burly Box 4 bay enclosures and have an external, properly powered, portable solution with no weirdness involved. The only difference then is how much space it takes up. Or look at the miniG enclosures I'll be posting a review of as soon as I can plug it in and play with it, or other options as well.

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/28/05 has some quickie text (below) and some pics of the cooling stuff in a Quad G5. Reminds me of the line from early on in The Professional over the phone: "There's a guy here." "What's he look like?" "Serious."

It shows that the new quad cooling system has 2 pumps vs the 1 on the dual 2.5 and 2.7 models. There is also a new sealant applied to the hose connections to ensure there are no leaks, and what looks like an absorbent padding on the bottom of the assembly. It is marked with a Cooligy part # but still has some componenents from bankrupt (ch. 11) Delphi onboard.

Final Cut Pro 5 and iMac G5 (iSight): Video from built-in camera is seen in Edit to Tape window


Had a reader run into this problem - they saw themselves in front of their computer on screen when trying to edit to tape! Read for how to un-snargle the FireWire stuff so that you're not seeing iSight output.

-mike

Avid Liquid 7 -- a review by broadcast designer Mark Harvey on Creative Cow. See what Avid is starting to do with Liquid, a popular Windows based NLE system.

-mike

Quad Core G5/2.5 versus Single Core Dual G5/2.5

Testing results from the ever dilligent Rob-ART at barefeats.com, running a new Quad G5 vs the older single core dual G5.

Tests included Photoshop CS2 (impressive), After Effects rendering (quite impressive), Cinebench rendering (pretty good), QT 7 HD to iPod Video encoding (not so impressive), and Motion (no real benefit).

-mike

Quick Takes on Real World Macintosh Performance:

Rob-Art from Barefeats.com does some very nice commentary and analysis of the Quad G5 based on some first hand testing he's done. Some early recipients are complaining that the Quad G5 isn't living up to their expectations. In response, he's taken a step by step approach to explaining what's reasonable to expect, including this useful nugget:

Not all MP aware apps fully use the four processors.When we ran Apple's own applications (including iMovie render and QuickTime Player export, and Motion RAM Preview render) we didn't see more than 160% usage. Some readers reported as much as 230% usage when they did Final Cut Pro renders and DVD encoding. However, when we ran Adobe Photoshop CS (certain filters), Adobe After Effects (render), Maxon's Cinema 4D (render), and Deep Shredder (Chess game analysis) we saw usage of over 390%.

Read the full article for all the details.

Best Boot Drive for the Quad-Core G5 Power Mac

Rob-ART at barefeats.com goes through a bunch of different boot drives for a Quad G5. No clear leader, but read on for details.

Yes, I'm back, and all kinds of awesome stuff happened over the weekend, but all I can say is that I saw some exotic game (blackbuck from Asia) up in the hill country.

Just Click Me.

Thanks, robogeek.com, for sharin' the luv.

-mike

I'll be completely off the grid over the holiday weekend - I'm goin' up to the Texas Hill Country and won't be blogging Friday and Saturday and probably not Sunday either.

I'll be completely off the grid - no cell phone, no Internet, I don't know if I'll go into convulsive twitching withdrawal or what. How old is the place we're going? They have a two parter phone in this old guest house on a ranch - the hand piece you hold up to your ear and the talky part mounted to the box on the wall. I love it.

We'll be overeating, makin' 'smores by firelight, watching deer (and maybe gazelles and pronghorn antelope, too) wander through the giant open field in front of the house.

It is a longtime family friend's place (our families have known each other for five generations now), and I really treasure every chance I get to be out there. My parents, my sister and her husband and kids, me and my girlfriend Melissa will hike, cook, eat, shoot off rockets with the kids, wander around Fredericksburg, and do other fun lazy stuff.

I may or may not blog on Sunday, but I'll definitely be back on Monday.

Until then, count on my fellow Americans to all put on weight, and to everyone else in the other 115 countries that have checked out the site over the last two weeks, just know we're overindulding, American Style, over the weekend.

The dogs unfortunately aren't coming, the neighbor is feeding them, and all they have are a couple of howling G5s to keep them company as some new fonky math algorithms get tested uprezzing a feature length piece whilst I am away...making money while you sleep, drink and overeat - the American Dream!

Signing off, and thankful for all the good stuff I've found, friends I've made, and kudos I've received from doing this thing,

-mike

Turner Entertainment turns to holographic storage - Computerworld

In an interview to be published today (see link in other article), I was asked how/where we'll be backing up the video from all of these P2 cards and hard drive based recording systems where the capture media is too expensive to use for archiving. I was suggesting data tape or optical disks, but both have their inconveniences. I've been reading about holographic storage for a year or more, but didn't realize how close it was to commercialization. Well, Turner Networks does, they just tested holographic storage and like. They like it a lot:

The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each. That's pretty inexpensive," said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment. "Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That's burning. Then combine it with random access, and it's the best of all worlds."


Groovage.

DV Guru

Part Two of Ajit Anthony Prem's interview of me (Mike Curtis) is up on DVGuru.com.

I talk about prepping and preparing for shooting indie projects, discuss some common pitfalls, talk about the Adobe and Apple integrated suites and when to use'em and when to go "outside the box" for software solutions beyond the bundled apps, what I'd like to see Apple do for indie filmmaking (including my guesses as to what I THINK Apple should do for FCP 6), I talk about Final Touch HD and how I'm starting a business around it, my picks for most interesting hardware and software out right now, future of HD, HD DVD vs Blu Ray, and the future of HD For Indies itself.

Check it out - he's edited my usual rambly self down to something readable.

: )

Here's a link to Part One if you missed it yesterday.

-mike

It's here! Now on sale in Japan. - The Digital Video Information Network

DVInfo.net reader on the scene in Japan. A picture, too.

DV Guru has posted part one of me being interviewed (that's a switch) by Ajit Anthony Prem. We had a loooooooong iChat text a few weeks ago that he's edited down and posted the first half of online at the above link.

He prefaces the interview with the following description:

HD for Indies has quickly become one of the most important websites for digital filmmaking. Whether it be HD, DV, Apple or Adobe, the man behind the blog/site, Mike Curtis provides an experienced, thoughtful, unbiased, truly independent point of view, all the while learning and teaching with his readers. Mr. Curtis has been in digital media production for over 15 years producing content for everything from cell phones to Hollywood movies. He has recently partnered to create [omitted], a HD post-production house (based in Austin, TX) with Indie Filmmakers in mind. My chat with him covered topics such as the future of HD; the positives and negatives of HD; how filmmaker can better plan their post-production workflows; archiving in the age of tapeless acquisition; Apple's Final Cut studio; Adobe; upcoming technologies whether be camera's, codecs or software; and the list goes on. Because of the length of the interview, the conversation will span over two installments.

Aww, shucks, man, thanks!

I'll publish on here when Part 2 goes up as well.

One note - the coloring website is NOT up yet, and not likely to be for weeks, so if you have any questions about that service please just email me directly at mike@hdforindies.com.

Got this from Cynthia over at VSA:

I would like to invite you all to visit the VSA Indie Film Maker's HDV
Show, Novemember 28th - 29th 10:00am - 6:00pm hosted by Austin
Studios. Stop by for hands-on demos of Sony's hottest camera ever, the
HVR Z1U. We'll have Cinema packages on site including matteboxes with
follow focus and rail system, Glidecam camera stabilization systems
and HD field monitors. If you need an edit system, we will also have
information on site for Final Cut Pro, Avid Liquid, Sony Vegas and
much more. If you need more information please feel free to contact me
by email or phone (512-563-0844).

Hope to see you there!

Cynthia Stein
VSA


So if you're in Austin or surrounding area and want to see a Z1U in action, check it out...

Dialogue: George Lucas

Groovy interview with Lucas about the future of moviemaking. Includes comments about movies needing to move to iTunes model, etc. More later, must scoot.

-mike

I'd previously covered a rumor site's supposition that the first Intel Macs on were track for January, but I tend to take those guys with a grain of salt, since they fling out a million rumors and when one of them happens to stick, they say "See! We knew all along!"

But I recently got a report from a friend who said someone they knew who worked for Apple wasn't around to hang out with because they were spending a loooooooooooot of time in Cork, Ireland, where there is an Apple production line. Some brief Googling didn't reveal what models they've been building there recently - anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

-mike

Macworld UK - Sony, NEC to combine optical drive businesses

...and yes, this will extend to Blu Ray drives as well.

Even more interesting, NEC has been an HD DVD backer, and the new company (that Sony will be a majority holder of) will ostensibly make BOTH Blu Ray and HD DVD players and drives.

Is this Sony just hedging it's bets that Blu Ray will win?

Or is Sony being shrewd yet again, as they were in the DVD+R vs DVD-R war, and they are going to produce "combo" players capable of reading (or writing?) both HD DVD and Blu Ray, akin to their DVD+/-R combo burners? A combo HD DVD/Blu Ray player is a more difficult tech merge than the DVD+/-R thing, but it is possible to do, just potentially pricey...but a combo player solves the whole "which do I buy?" conundrum entirely (except for the likely higher price of that box, supporting both HD DVD and Blu Ray disc reading firmware, as well as two different laser pickups with different spot sizes and different focal planes).

-mike

OK, file this as unconfirmed gossip, I only have one source on this so far, but it boils down to this:

-I had mentioned the possibility the other day that it was proposed to go into the spec, but now it looks like it IS going into the spec

-as I'd hoped, it would appear now that the official Blu Ray spec will support, meaning all Blu Ray players should be able to play, a "properly" formatted DVD-R with MPEG-2 HD content on it. As in a red laser disc, be it DVD-5 or DVD-9, with HD content on it, would play in a Blu Ray player

-you'd have to use Blu Ray style authoring tools - your traditional DVD authoring software would not suffice, because Blu Ray discs are a different file/data/disk format than regular DVDs

-H.264 may be having trouble with interlaced content, so MPEG-2 may have to be used. Apple folks also told me of similar H.264 difficulties at NAB this year, I thought it was just because some Apple engineers were being laggards in their implementation, but it might be an issue with the core H.264 spec itself. Which I don't understand, since I'd think they'd have two independent fields to be processed as two separate progressive images, and could just process them to display as fields...blah blah blah but the intraframe (or interframe? Late/tired, whichever is frame to frame) compression is probably the hold up there.

-In any case, using a tool like an updated DVD Studio Pro, you'd author your HD content and burn it on a DVD-R, and it would play in ANY Blu Ray player that properly and fully supported the Blu Ray spec

-this is hot, since that may well mean that pretty much raw HDV footage could be piped over onto a Blu Ray disc, although Sony specifically said that wouldn't work or wasn't planned to work as of MWSF almost a year ago (back in Jan '05). HDV is long GOP MPEG-2 with a GOP of 15, which sounds to my mind similar to what Blu Ray would need for HD content. Maybe Blu Ray is full raster 1920x1080 instead of HDV's 1440x1080, I dunno. But something software could fix during an encode, certainly.

-this'd be HUGE for the home market - FINALLY a way to watch your own high def content on your own HDTV without having to plug the camera into the HDTV (so 1980s a solution!). The ability to author to a convenient, nonlinear access shiny disc is a world of difference from mastering to tape.

-I don't know/don't recall/don't remember reading that HD DVD would offer a similar capability

In a losing race with the zeitgeist is the LA Times' smackdown on Hollywood, in effect saying "You're too old, too slow, too out of touch, and too in love with your own way of doing things. You're about to die, Mr. Dinosaur."

Some delicious pullquotes:

The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close, eroded by many of the same forces that have eviscerated the music industry, decimated network TV and, yes, are clobbering the newspaper business. Put simply, an explosion of new technology — the Internet, DVDs, video games, downloading, cellphones and iPods — now offers more compelling diversion than 90% of the movies in theaters

Anywhere you look, the news has been grim. Disney just reported a $313-million loss for films and DVDs in its fiscal fourth quarter. Sony has had a disastrous year, with only one $100-million hit ("Hitch") among a string of costly flops. DreamWorks not only has had theatrical duds but also saw its stock plummet when its "Shrek 2" DVD sales fell 5 million short of expectations. Even Warners, the industry's best-run studio, laid off 400 staffers earlier this month.

Although the media have focused on the economic issues behind this slump, the problem is cultural too. ...... Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much — the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall. When MPAA chief Dan Glickman goes to colleges, preaching his anti-piracy gospel, kids hiss, telling him his efforts don't help the public, only a few rich media giants. Say what you will about their logic, but, as anyone in the music business can attest, those sneers are the deadly sign of a truly disgruntled consumer.

There are still optimists who say the sky isn't falling.....

To them, I say — go ye to Costco or Best Buy and watch the giant HDTVs zooming out the door, the TVs that used to cost $7500 that now go for $1995 and allow middle-class people to have a marvelous moviegoing experience right at home without $10.50 tickets, $4 popcorn, 20 minutes of annoying commercials and some guy in the next row yakking away on his cellphone.


That is the bulk of it - that the studio system is too slow in this age of rapid cultural development, when the cultural half-life of a Cool New Thing is shorter than that of some rare hypothetical radioactive isotopes, capturable only perhaps by a shot on DV, web posted short movie made in a day and widecast worldwide within the next, that the studios are too old, slow, disconnected, and just plain hoserated to possibly reel it in, suck it up, and get their shiznat together in time to rescue their threatened industry.

Too little/too late/not enough efforts like 3D-ized movies are a stab in the right direction, but I just read that IBM thinks it can add passive (not red/blue and not flicker glasses) 3D to DLP TVs for about $20 manufacturing cost per set doesn't sound like it'll be long before 3D will be easily possible at home.

Hollywood in part did it to itself - in their rush to monetize their backlibrary via DVDs, they created a market to watch movies on big HDTVs at home such that it just isn't worth going to a theater for $75 (drive, park, $10 tix apiece, $4 sodas and $6 popcorn all around, etc.) with the family to see something they can stay at home and watch for $4 a pop via Netflix.

All of this is good news for indies I think - movie theaters with film prints and ad budgets are driven by the urge to make blockbusters, swingin' for the fences with each shot. With the multi-channel, multi-avenue home viewing experience, indies have more inroads. Cable, internet downloads, PPV, Amazon, Netflix, etc., are all viable avenues for indies.


I very much liked the quote about how many films in theaters today SHOULDN'T be released theatrically:

...most of the movies in theaters don't deserve a theatrical release, at least not by the rules of today's game. Until the DVD and pay TV money kicks in, they're money losers. Yet the studios are forced to spend more marketing money every year to chase after increasingly resistant moviegoers, then go dark for months before spending another big chunk to remind people the DVD has arrived.

OK, enough ranting for today.

I wrote some more, but I'm going to break it off into another posting.

I'm writing this after writing about the LA Times article about Hollywood being in a losing race with the zeitgeist. In fact, this was written at the end of that blog entry, and I decided it didn't really belong there, so I started a new entry. Here goes - consider this from where the other entry left off:

Today, there are 60 movies listed as showing (or about to show) in Austin, Texas, my hometown. So probably about 45ish showing today, what with all the one night only custom gigs at the Alamo, and unreleased movies like King Kong that are already selling tickets in advance, etc. So about 45 movies to chose from. Kind of a lot, but not a huge number. How many if I were looking at my choices for home? Hmm. I've got 6 HBO's and I ain't even TRYIN'. Plus all the other cable movie channels, and the Discovery Channel, A&E, and other viable avenues for indie content. I've got two DVD rental places within a 3 minute drive of my house (and doesn't my grocery store HEB sell'em, too?). I've got pay per view, I've got Amazon.com at my fingertips, I've got Netflix too if I got off my lazy butt and used'em (I'm afraid to sign up, I already have too little free time...). Or just 45 movies showing theatrically in town. Wake up, folks - theatrical is a romantically attractive thing - who WOULDN'T want their movie up on the big screen across the country, where hundreds of people travelled across town to sit in the dark and laugh and cry and be scared together? There are plenty of movies being made these days, more than can fit in the theaters. Are there enough good ones showing? TAWOB. (I'm dubbing that a new acronym right now - That's A Whole Other Blog.) But there are tons of niche movies available through all the other avenues, and frankly, that's where most of you, dear readers, should be focusing. Like I said the other day - Sundance Film Festival had 2600 submissions. Probably a good half or more of them sucked balls outright and shouldn't have even been sent in. Because there were only 120 selected for viewing. Even there - one hundred and twenty movies! That is a LOT of movies to show during one event. And of those? Something like 10 or 15 got picked up for any meaningful theatrical distribution (and somebody bust me on that figure, I don't have hard numbers). Most films that get completed will not get theatrical distribution. THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD.

Don't read this as "I hate movies and yours suxors," that is not my intent at all.

DO go out and make a movie. Just plan for where it might be seen realistically.

My favorite approach of late:

-shoot HD (or film if you can afford it and want the look)
-shoot the best looking format you can afford that fits the look you want your story to have, keeping the budget in balance - don't shoot on an F950 to an s.Two if it makes you use cardboard boxes for sets, bums for actors and your old gym clothes for wardrobe. Come on folks, balance in all things.
-whether you shoot 24p, or shoot 50i and make it 24p, or whatever, plan on being able to make a good looking 24p master if it makes sense for your project and content
-do your own post, or at least your own offline edit
-do your own online if it makes financial sense and somebody ACTUALLY knows what they are doing. That said, there's lots to be learned when you get in over your head. Just do you want to know that much about it?
-submit it to the festivals, so you can get good press, this will help sell your movie. I specifically heard an exec at Paramount Classics suggest this instead of a limited LA or NYC release
-master to HD, or if broke wait until you get in at festivals, and THEN master to HD for your screener
-(of course, consider having my company, color correct, color enhance, and master your project!) : )
-run the festival circuit and see if you get any traction
-if you DO get picked up for any kind of distribution, you can either:
a.) hand over your HD master for standard and high def deliverables. With a 24p master, you can get to every format worldwide with minimal fuss. Congrats, you did it right
b.) if they want to distribute theatrically, pop the champagne cork and celebrate. Depending on the funds involved, either hand over the HD master and supervise a filmout from there (possible color tweaks), or go back and remaster at 4:4:4 RGB or 2K if you shot film (if you were smart, your post house can use their color correction settings from the prior pass. Ahem. We can do this.)

In any case, it is good to be prepared to deliver for any medium - broadcast TV/cable, SD or HD DVD, broadcast/cable HD, filmout, PAL markets, all of it.

Be smart with your efforts, to, and realize you can sell the same thing more than once.

There's a guy I know that produces a show. Kinda cheesy, a bikini babes travel the world kind of a show. Set aside your Art and put on your Commerce hat for a sec and ride this one out with me.

First off, he shoots 16:9, but frames for 4:3 safe. This means that if they need to crop the SIDES of their HD stuff off to fit in full frame 4:3, he's not cutting somebody out of frame or cutting something in half. He shoots so that the middle 4:3 of the 16:9 looks good on it's own, and the extra stuff in frame looks good too - no mike booms in the shot, just more usable scenery etc.

Then he sells the HD domestic rights to one company.

Then he sells the domestic standard def rights to somebody else (SpikeTV I think)

Then he sells the international HD & SD rights to somebody else

And since he travelled to all these gorgeous exotic locations to shoot his project, he also shot tons of HD b roll too, and he sells THAT to stock footage agencies.

That's an example of an extremely well leveraged piece.

If you're on a super tight budget, consider HDV or the HVX200 that records to DVCPRO HD on P2 cards or hard drives eventually.

If you have a better than that budget, consider Varicam. Moderately expensive but nice image quality camera, super easy and inexpensive post route (you can edit native HD content on a laptop, such as the 12" model I'm writing this on. How's that for cool!). I've written about the post workflow before, search for Varicam or 1200A on the blog.

If you have some more money, consider HDCAM, and then F950, or Viper, or D-20, or Genesis, blah de blah on up to film. Ugh. A whole other world of speeches, conversations, lectures, etc. in there, so don't take the above as flat gospel, just some general advice, as each project has it's own needs, etc.

And if you shoot film, do a DI. Traditional color timing just isn't cost effective in comparison to what can be done digitally today (the Paramount Classics guy said that too). 2K DI is pretty expensive still, consider an, um, intermediate level digital intermediate, such as we're advocating at our shop (and yes, I am shilling for my company, but the general advice still holds as valid I firmly and honestly believe) of a 10 bit RGB 4:4:4 1920x1080 losslessly processed digital intermediate. For the money, it's a helluva bang for the buck, and most audiences will never notice the difference between that and a 2K DI unless you're doing some fairly unusual stuff.

OK, argh, it is after midnight now and I'm still at the office.

To home, to bed, and to all, good moviemaking.

-mike

UPDATED SIGNIFICANTLY TUESDAY NIGHT - SEE BOTTOM

This is a long one, so I'll boil it down this way: not all decks are created equal. Not all decks, even for the same format, will kick an identical signal out of the SDI or HD-SDI taps. FireWire capture doesn't give the same quality as SDI or HD-SDI capture. Read on for details...

This morning I had a conversation with the rep from a video production rental house and we were talking about renting HDCAM decks. I was asking to see if they had a half day rate for their high end HDCAM deck that has all the boards and goodies in it (the HDW-F500).

He was wanting to know why we wanted it for just a half day, I said we were just doing layback to tape after color correction (so just mastering really). We chatted about rates, and then I asked him if they had a JH-3, the inexpensive playback only deck. He asked what I wanted that for, and I said to capture in. What kind of capture he asked - I said for uncompressed online.

Then he said I wouldn't want to do that.

I knew that the JH-3 was the inexpensive playback only deck, but I didn't know that the playback quality was NOT the same as on the bigger decks. Earlier this year I got tipped that DV was better captured over SDI than over FireWire thanks to Graeme Nattress (or use plugins, such as ones he makes, to help improve the FireWired footage), and I'd heard that the SDI (or HD-SDI) outputs were better on studio decks than the regular decks, but I'd always kind of doubted that, that it was some kind of juju that wasn't the same, that these old school post house guys weren't getting the whole native code stuff.

Woops - they were, I wasn't getting the difference between hardware and software decoding (or rather, decompressing) of the compressed data on tape.

The rep was telling me about a project being shot on HDCAM that was trying to use a JH-3 to clone HDCAM tapes for safeties, and what a BAD idea that was. At that point, they were making DUBS, not clones, and even worse, the JH-3 doesn't fully decompress, or doesn't compress the same way/as well, as the higher end studio decks such as the 500. The rep was saying it has always been this way - that there is the plastic deck and the studio deck, and the studio deck actually plays back tapes (and records them as well I would presume) a little bit better. So in the case of this production, which was for a feature film (OK movie since HD), this was a disastrously bad idea - JH-3 inferior playback into an HDCAM studio deck via HD-SDI, which itself recompresses any incoming signal (YES even though it is over the uncompressed HD-SDI pipe). Why so disastrously bad? Because they are shooting greenscreen! The most persnickety, sensitive, picky type of footage that can look fine to the naked eye and be a nightmare to get a good key out of. The correct path? CLONING, not DUBBING, via HD-SDTI. What is that "T" doing in there? It is Sony's proprietary interface to move just the compressed bits of HDCAM around without recompresssing them or changing them. The "T" stands for "transfer", as in high def (or is it data rate?) serial digital TRANSFER interface. Think of HD-SDTI as Sony's version of FireWire for HDCAM. Oh, so can you connect that to your Mac or PC and edit it natively, as we do for DV, DVCPRO, DVCAM, DVCPRO 50, HDV, and DVCPRO HD? No, dammit, because Sony wants to keep it to itself, and is only available on their own Xpri editing system, which I see as pointless for the indie filmmaker market (expensive and non-differentiating except for that one feature). I'd VERY much like to see Sony open up that so that companies like AJA, Avid, and BlackMagic could incorporate it into their boards for Avid, FCP, Premiere Pro, Vegas, etc.

So my current understanding and feeling is that the JH-3 is a good deck for OFFLINE capture, but it is NOT the correct, nor ideal, nor best deck to capture finals on. I've posted otherwise in the past, and hey, I apologize for not knowing then the best route. So when you get down to finishing your project, whatever your workflow, the recommended workflow would be to offline with JH-3, and online with the HDW-F500 deck. If you could pull it off and had time, run the math and see if it is feasible to capture online/uncompressed quality footage, render your final color corrected footage, and lay back to tape with a single rental. It is common to have a "3 day week" on deck rentals, meaning the cost of a week is the same as 3 times the daily rate. If you can pick up/drop off the deck locally, two one day rentals is ideal. If you have to ship it or drive it, consider the week option that would give you plenty of time.

I spent a lot of time last year, early on with this blog, saying that there was no difference to capture via FireWire or SDI/HD-SDI. That the data on the tape was the same either way. Not quite right. The data on the tape IS the same either way, but you are relying on either software or hardware to decompress that data. In software, it comes in (using FCP as a model) as a QuickTime file, and QuickTime decompresses it. Not always very well, such as in the case of DV. But you can enhance the software methodology with plugins (I'm liking the ones from nattres.com at the moment) for better/smoother chroma results. Some formats do better than others - I did some extensive testing with DVCPRO HD footage, capturing with FireWire vs capturing over HD-SDI with both BlackMagic DeckLink HD Pro and AJA Kona2 cards. The FireWire footage was a tiny, tiny bit different, mostly due to the software vs. hardware scaling from the natively FireWired 960x720 Varicam footage as compared to the HD-SDI captured footage. Doing a mathematical comparison on them using a differnce filter in After Effects, and cranking up the contrast on the results to magnify the differences, the differences were extremely slight, and mostly had to do with every forth column of pixels and the scaling math to get from 960 to 1280 pixels wide. I didn't do a chroma comparison, but overall it looked very good. Now, would I see a difference between the two in real world footage? I'm inclined to think not, but I'd want to do some greenscreen tests to see. Woops, but that was with the 1200A deck, not the higher end studio deck - need to test that to really know.

Anyway, it boils down to this: if you want the best possible quality out of your workflow, examine every piece very carefully to make sure there isn't a weak link in the chain.

Here's a quickie link to B&H's page on the JH-3. I'm not endorsing them as a vendor, they were just the first Google hit for stats on that model.

UPDATE TUESDAY NIGHT - So apparently, I touched off a lot of debate about this one. It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that there is a difference when using DV to use the SDI vs FireWire for ingest, to the point that a documentary with 372 source tapes is going to the trouble of recapturing their source tape selects via SDI, with the additional caveat that it is shot on a mix of 24p, 24pA (Advanced Pulldown) and 60i and it needs to all be 23.976 when its done. Oh, and none of the tapes are labelled as to which format they were shot with. A shout out, my brethren, to our poor sistah Rita who must tackle all this on her own, and resolve the issues of incorrect (24.0 not 23.976) Cinema Tools menu usage in FCP, cranky batch behavior with Cinema Tools, and the fact that Remove Advanced Pulldown ONLY works on DVCPRO/DVCPRO50 media. Light a candle, drink a beer, say a prayer, send some stout hair care product (she is so punk rock born too late), do something for one of our own in the line of fire.

But I digress (as you do), since itsa-blog, so back on track:

I have one reader who claims to have captured uncompressed over HD-SDI from an F500 and a JH-3 and done the white count test (tests for any mismatch) and he says it is a dead-on match, there is no difference whatsoever.

This may well be true - but I haven't done or seen the test myself, and I haven't talked to him about his testing methodology, and since I haven't (no offense to the guy!) I won't vouch for it Until I Know For Sure.

Another possibility - perhaps the inferred quality inferiority of the JH-3 was in comparison to the cloning (vs dubbing) of the footage. If Option One was HD-SDI into the F500 studio deck produced a dub, not a clone, and Option Two was two F900 decks connected via HD-SDTI not HD-SDI, was the signal from JH-3 assumed inferior due to that? Were any tests done comparing JH-3 to F900 over HD-SDI vs F900 to F900 vs HD-SDI?

I dunno, just some thoughts to try to explain all this.

IF ANYBODY HAS ACCESS TO A JH-3 AND AN F500 DECK, AND HAS A KONA2/KONA LH/BLACKMAGIC DECKLINK HD AND AN ARRAY AND CAN TEST THIS, PLEASE EMAIL ME!

Or to the guy who tested it, please email me directly so we can chat about testing methodology and put this to rest.

-mike

Microsoft and CableLabs Enable HD Programming on Windows PCs

HD Cable ready Media Center Pcs for holiday 2006 (NOT 2005) using Cable Card, the groovy way to handle secure cable content access.

Yet another example of more ways to get digital content into the home. Two years of testing and evaluation and tech reviews to get to this point.

Convergence, baby. A few years after they said it would happen, but itsa comin'.


-mike

AppleInsider | TiVo: Mac TiVoToGo support coming in 2006

TiVo representatives this week reiterated a company pledge to release a Mac-compatible version of its popular TiVoToGo software, according to an online report.

On Monday, the digital video recorder maker announced that it will be extending the feature to allow subscribers to transfer content to Apple's iPod digital music players and Sony's PlayStation portable devices.

File this under "more things leading to more digital distribution."

-mike

I've been crazy busy as we prepare to color correct FOUR feature films between now and mid January, a pretty daunting task as I stare down that particular gun barrel at the moment, and I prepare to whip out all my logistical project management skills. Tomorow, I prepare to Gantt chart that mutha into shape. A huge, gnarly, multi-threaded conditional events shape, but into some kind of shape nonetheless.

As I've been crazy mad busy, I'd been stacking up articles of interest to read and potentially blog about, and I had a pretty deep stack - about 30 or 40 "I should scan some more and see if it is blog worthy" articles - and the other day I shut my notebook and when I opened it back up it was OFF - I lost everything not saved, which was a loooooooong article, dammit, that'll probably never get written now, and all my open Safari windows. Battery hadn't run down, just my trusty little pitted handrest 12" PowerBook was OFF, a state it pretty much never sees.

So I missed things like Tivo coming to Mac, something about Tivo content for iPod Video, Disney stuff, some new hardware, bunch of New York Times Sunday magazine coolness, all went poof-gone-bye-bye-now. I look at hundreds of web pages a day and I don't have time to go find it all from the maze of my History menu.

A ton of useful links were sent in that I had stacked up too, going back to last Wednesday or Thursday. With over a hundred emails a day, it is too much to go back and find it all.

So it boils down to this:

1.) I missed some significant news, or at least I didn't cover it here. Sue me, it's a free site. :D

2.) If you sent me a link of interest since last Wednesday and I didn't blog it, I didn't blow you off, just lost it. Send it again if you still think it relevant.

-mike

Quad Core G5/2.5 versus Single Core Dual G5/2.5

barefeats gets hands on

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/21/05

discussion as to whether SSC drives are fully supported on G5s, and whether Deep Sleep vs. Spin Down Drives When Not Active constitutues sleep, or is even advisable (on my editing systems, I might sleep the systems, but I keep the drives spinning when "alive" although I am sure to sleep the screens).

really only pertinent for owners, not potential purchasers as there is a perfectly acceptable workaround for editors.

UPDATED SUNDAY NIGHT AD THEN AGAIN MONDAY MORNING- SEE BOTTOM


Camcorderinfo.com Message Board - Latest Info on the HVX200, although DVInfo.net had it about two days before here, or really even here on the 15th, I just didn't find it that way first (thanks to sharp readers for pointing out the timeline for who should get the original credit).

The above text chart was snaggged from the Panasonic Japan page on HVX200, and is not of my own creation - it is theirs. Credit where credit due, etc.

Worth noting is that it will definitely do regular 3:2 pulldown as well as Advanced Pulldown mode for a variety of formats.

According to the Panasonic Japan website on the HVX200:

-1080 line, progressive CCDs - this is different from what I assumed by a longshot, I've been assuming they'd use 720p imager and uprez so as not to numerically upstage their much more expensive Varicam $65,000 720p camera (even though Varicam has beeter glass, pro outputs, etc.).

-720 and 480 res footage will be downsampled from this larger imager - Graeme, thoughts on contrast and detail in that context?

-Analog to Digital signal processor (A/D DSP) is 14 bits with an internal precision of 19 bit

-variable frame rates (for fast/slow motion through over/under cranking) is only available in 720p (but could you use built in downconversion to copy over FireWire as DV downconvert or somesuch?) adjustable in 11 steps from 12 to 60 fps (drat, hoping for slower, but can do that in post I suppose)

-Variable frame rate has to be recorded to P2 or external disk

-Yeah, HD can be downsampled from P2 to internal DV cassette (nice!)

-variable slow shutter down to 1/12th second

-Cinegamma - 8 gamma modes (choice is good), including news

-link to Babelfish translated version of Japanese page

Bear in mind this is all someone's interpretation of the Japanese site's translation, so could be wrong. I'm just reporting what Camcorderinfo.com reported with some commentary thrown in.

I'll believe it when it is clearly stated, in English (not badly mistranslated Engrish) what the true native resolution of the CCDs is.

Thanks to Matthwe Jeppsen from FresHDV for sending me the link!

-mike

I emailed Graeme Nattress of Nattress Plugins, and he responded:


Hi Mike,

Ah, but Jan on the cow (CreativeCow.net - mike)said it uses both horizontal and vertical pixel shift. This would make it a not 1080p imager. I'm guessing:

960x720 chips, approx with h and v pixelshift

pixelshift gives about a 1.4 factor rez so...

that gives you your 1280x1080 progressive.

Now that is now sampled down to 720p which is 960x720, or to 1080i or etc....

-Graeme


the saga continues,
-mike

UPDATE
From this forum on Creative Cow from Jan, The Woman Herself from Panasonic:

The camera starts with a progressive chip, a 1080/60P chip. In its 24P or 30P modes, or its variable frame modes, it will change to that time base for capture, but it starts as a progressive chip capture and then makes the conversion, cross conversion or down conversion from there. It is a true progressive chip set and will make progressive pictures, not marketing, but rather, engineering.

Hope this helps,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

...however, this still doesn't answer the "true resolution" question.

But she previously said:


But then you do nothave to be disappointed because it does use horizontal and vertical spatial offset.
here, so to me that reinforces the circa 960x720ish resolution, and the pixelshift/spatial offset will generate the 1280x1080 for 1080 res DVCPRO HD.

A big THANK YOU to readers for pointing out links to all these tidbits in the comments section, I wouldn't have found'em without you. Working together, we can get some good answers, so I VERY much appreciate your time and contribution.

Somebody in one of the forums claims the native res will be 1280x720 which is DVCPRO HD so therefore I am wrong...but the PLAYBACK res is 1280x720, internally it is only 960x720, literally just twice DV res.

Bottom line - I'm still thinking 960x720 "true" native, with pixel shift it'll give a nice 4:2:2 1080p res. Larger pixels on the sensor are actually a good thing, since it gives better contrast and better signal/noise to my understanding. The Z1U uses 960x1080 as a 1080i camera, Jan has stated that there will be both horizontal and vertical spatial offset, so that might support 960x720.

But of course, this is all my own speculation, and IANAE (I Am Not An Engineer).

The REAL issue is how good does the footage look when the camera is in YOUR hands (or your DoP's) on your set shooting your movie/project.

Graeme posted this in the comments, I thought it worthy of inclusion:

Pixelshift is not upsampling. It's real rez you get, and you get lower noise / better dynamic range benefits too. Indeed, you'll end up with a better, contrastier picture this way.

Other affordable HD cameras might have "resolution" but they don't have "definition", and certainly not "high definition" in the way that say, a varicam or HDCAM image just pops off the screen (and that's before post production).

Panasonic really seem to be doing the engineering right on this one, from all we've heard. But the proof is in the pudding, and that's just about baked.

-mike

Join a Revolution. Make Movies. Go Broke. - New York Times

...is a brutally honest Telling of The Tale.

Most movies lose money.

Most movies don't even recoup their original investment to even break even.

A LOT of good, interesting, artistically interesting movies that do well on the festival circuit don't make a dime.

This is the story of Arin Crumley (24) and Susan Buice (27), who sank more than $75,000 of their own money, credit card debt, and their parents' money into making and showing "Four Eyed Monster" at a bunch of festivals.

I met these two people, the actors and stars one and the same, and talked to them at SXSW.

I saw this movie, I like this movie, I was blown away by the audacity of this movie, flaws and all.

But it isn't going to make them a dime it looks like.

Read this article, my friends, if are thinking you want to make a movie.

If you still do, God bless you and protect, because you'll need it.

I'll support you, I'll help you, I'll give a lot of free advice on the blog, but for a lot of folks if you call or email me asking for help I'll ask for money, because I too wish to keep a roof over my head. I've said it before and I'll say it again -

for projects that offer me a learning opportunity, or a chance to try something I've been meaning to get around to (aka use your project as a guinnea pig), or I think is Just Cool, I'll get involved and help out for free. But if I've already done one like that, or it doesn't float my boat, I'll ask to be compensated for my time. Because I'm in this for fun, but I'm in this first as a business to support myself. I had a producer dance the line with me the other week saying "We're in the film business. For the 20 year olds saying they should be getting paid more on a film, I say you're getting paid, and that's better than most at your age. You're in the film business, be happy about it." That attitude scares the hell out of me, because frankly, I'M NOT IN THAT BUSINESS. Or at least, I certainly don't want to be in any business that says I should be happy and lucky to get paid baloney sandwich wages to take part in. And the producer was perhaps (not sure) implying that I should be in that boat too, and I refuse.

I want to see more cool movies get made, most assuredly. I think digital is a great way to do that. If you are reading this, you've probably been here before and seen my earliest posts about WHY to go digital, and seen the reviews, tests, FAQs, etc. that I've given to the community because it was fun, interesting, and also a way to get my name out there. I want to help filmmakers achieve their dreams and visions with HD For Indies and the services we'll be rolling into the market - it looks like it is working, we appear to be booked well into January solid at this point, with more services to follow beyond just color correction of SD, HD, and film originated material.

I'm in this to make a living assisting others make movies, and hopefully make art.

I think about Four Eyed Monsters, and how they did something really honest, really brash, really interesting and amazing and Of Our Generation, not some watered down filtered version like You've Got Mail. They tackled real world issues of today's emotional landscape in a way that frankly, most commercial films wouldn't. I thought about this - if they'd removed the section on Topic Y, it would have been a more marketable film. But it would have been less honest, and decisions such as that would swing it away from something with a tentative claim to Art towards something more towards Commerce and Entertainment. And as a filmmaker, you need to be very clear about which you are doing. Do you want to tell your Story, or do you want to make a Good Movie. It is a Great Thing when you can do both, but very very difficult and rare to achieve. For the most part, I'd say pick one, and live with the consequences of that decision, may God (whom I don't believe in) have mercy on your soul, since either path has serious challenges for the soul at hand.

OK, that's harsh, but that's as real as I see it.

Other than that, come on in, we got a special this week on coloring documentaries...

OK, back to the article. Some good pull quotes:

Sydney Pollack, the director - who has served as a creative adviser at the Filmmakers Lab of the Sundance Institute -said a price must be paid for democratizing any art. "The minute everyone is allowed in, something changes in terms of standards of excellence," he said. "I don't know whether that is good or bad."

And Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, warned that tales of overnight success can have a negative effect. "One of the problems with the Cinderella stories is that they create enormous expectation that people come out of the box fully grown," he said. "Filmmakers are not allowed enough time to enjoy a sense of growth."

---
What makes the independent film landscape particularly treacherous, though, is that most independent pictures are either self-financed or backed by individuals who've staked their own cash - and are left holding the bag when, as in the vast majority of cases, the movie turns out to have no commercial future.

Even without a distributor, "Four Eyed Monsters" is hardly an epic failure, if a failure at all, but the situation is dire for its creators. "My parents are really supportive of the creative lifestyle," Ms. Buice said. "But they're not rich people. They are middle class. It's causing problems at home. They like the movie but they are really freaked out by the financial situation. They're constantly on my case. 'Are you eating?' 'Did you pay the rent?' 'Did you pay your taxes?' My mom is very concerned about the credit-card debt."

...and what I consider to be the most astute and realistic quotes in the entire article:

"Media is not completely democratized yet because distribution is not a democratic thing," Mr. Crumley said. "We're looking at other ways to make our movie available in these different formats so that word of mouth can take over where we left off."
....
Ms. Morse, who lives in San Francisco, feels some creative people today are too fixated on using film to tell their stories, particularly in a climate where finding a distributor is so tough. "You need a reality check that a lot of people aren't getting," she said. "There are lots of other ways to get your story out there. Right now the convergence of media is moving so quickly."


Ya gotta be realistic about the odds of distribution. I've been misquoting the Sundance stats, instead of 2000ish submitted and 100ish shown, it was actually 2600 submitted and 120 shown according to this NYTimes article. And of those, what, maybe 10 or 15 got any significant distribution? I hear tell that the hot movies are already known to be snagged going into Sundance etc., the screenings are just further media and verification of critical acceptance at that point.

So get realistic about what future your film has. This is NOT AT ALL to say don't swing for the stars if that's what you think it should be. But also consider the paths of cable, direct to DVD, web download, or even podcasts for some material.

And scale your efforts - personally, I'd rather do something small & simple and do it really well rather than something overblown that I KNOW going in I'm going to have to stretch thin on and do a crappy or even mediocre job. Nobody longs for mediocrity - we want to watch greatness. So do something great, but small, is my advice.

Is this entry an essay, a review, a scolding, a recommendation, a sales pitch, or what?

I dunno, man, it's just a blog, and that's the beauty and the curse. It's just what I'm thinking tonight.

But despair not - there's also this article in the Times as well talking about how entertainment spending is zooming up amongst consumers. There's always new opportunities, and more than one way to present your masterpiece to folks in a way that they pay for it. There's theatrical, sure, but also DVD, cable, sattelite, internet download, PPV, video iPod, PSP, Netflix, Amazon, etc. etc. etc.

-mike

(and Adam and Susan, I hope you find a way to find a market for Four Eyed Monster. I really do, I fervently wish you the best of luck on this that you really did so well on)

UPDATE: I've included some stats from prior generation G5s for comparison, and the link that generated them.

Macworld: News: Benchmarks: Quad G5 on top

Notables:

Compressor 2.0 MPEG-2 encode on new PCIe G5s:
Dual 2.0: 6:20
Dual 2.3: 5:35
Quad 2.5: 3:23

For comparison:

Dual 2.7: 3:52 (not far behind the Quad AT ALL, so perhaps Compressor 2.0 needs an update? Or to use 2.0.3 for testing?)
Dual 2.5: 4:19
Dual 2.0 (2004, PCI-X): 4:59

iMovie HD Render: no speed difference, obviously the function was either single processor or hard drive constrained.

Updated: see this page to see how your box holds up in comparison (Macs only). Presumably their testing methodology was consistent so that this should be, pardon the pun, an Apples to Apples comparison.

In the comments somebody said the Quad G5 might be slower at some things, I'm not so sure - with the dual cores communicating faster on the same chip, and the faster memory bus, I'd expect that wouldn't often be the case. Then I checked - the dual 2.7 IS faster at some things, such as the iMovie HD render. Then again, these tests were conducted on 10.4.2, not 10.4.3, which speeds some drive related things up considerably (like the 500MB Finder folder dupe test).

-mike

CinemaTech: Technicolor vs. Christie/AIX

The two leading vendors in the digital projector space duke it out. Technicolor is pushing 4K, in an effort to have a theatrical experience above and beyond what can possible be done in the home (the 2K digital standard is barely higher pixel resolution than regular HD video, 2048x1080 rather than 1920x1080).

Read the article for details on that, and the push to get digital into all 36,000 US theaters by 2010. Below is my own commentary on the whole 4K vs 2K thing.

I had previously heard/read somewhere that 4K is a false economy that has little value beyond the marketing value of "we got more." The comment was something to the effect of "with 4K, only the first X frontmost rows can see the difference, for the other Y amount (the majority) of the theater patrons will not be able to perceive the advantage of 4K." As in, even if their vision was good and they saw the two side by side, if you were sitting so-and-so far back from the screen, you couldn't tell the difference between 2K and 4K.

I could believe that argument even though I haven't sat down with protractor to figure out the arc degrees of perceptual difference between 2K and 4K at a given distance.

But I do recall another quote about 4K, that it may not be advantageous or useful given the age and skin condition of our leading actors. In current cinematography, a LOT of filtering is used on the lense during close-ups of actors to hide skin imperfections in "beauty" characters. I noticed a lot of poorly done skin smoothing for Scarlett Johansen in The Island, for example. 4K would be GREAT for wide shots of luscious scenery or battles, but wouldn't be utilized in close-ups. Again, it all boils down to the the science of what people can see, but of course, that gets over-ridden by what people believe, and we can all see how marketing driven our culture is these days. Can you really believe that one any pair of mall blue jeans is "better" than another when we know they are all cranked out in China/Taiwan/wherever by the same underpaid, underage workers? But that's another blog, entirely.

Will digital sell, in the end? In my own experience, it has failed to make ME visit the only digital projection theater in town for 6 months. I'd read that as a big goose egg. Digital 3D, however, got me in there twice in the opening week (once for me once again for me w/neice & nephew, ages 4 & 7).

If 4K projectors can in 10 years be cost competitive in the end financial results compared to traditional film projectors, with ALL costs included - mailing film prints, print costs, digital duplication/DRM costs, the flexibility to run multiple copies of a single file during the opening weeks, etc., then it will prove itself long term. Or does the industry take a bath up front, and recover/recoup the expenses long term? Wait and see, wait and see...

-mike

Ciprico Huge MediaVault 4110

Reviewed by Charlie White, who gave it 8 out of 10 stars for this over $4000 fiber channel array with 1.6TB capacity as RAID 0, 1.2 TB capacity as RAID 3.

PROS: fault tolerant, even on the fly recovery in the event of data failure. Fiber channel means it can be cabled at a distance, or possibly integrated into a SAN. Very small form factor - 1RU by 19 by 25 inches.

CONS: It better be far away, such as in a closet, because it is LOUD. It is pricey, too - over $4000 for 1.2 TB of fault tolerant storage? Ouch!

If you have a generous budget and need some uncompressed HD storage capacity with fualt tolerance, it'll work, but it isn't my first choice.

-mike

Sony Completes First Full-Length Blu-ray Disc - Aviran's Place

-first movie to be mastered to a Blu Ray
-Charlie Angels: Full Throttle
-compressed with MPEG-2 according to this article
-1920x1080
-being sent to player manufacturer's for compatibility testing
-interestingly, NOT H.264 or VC-1. It is already known that with the prosumer tool DVD Studio Pro that H.264 "has problems" with fields, so that is really only intended for progressive stuff, aka 720p resolution. I don't know, off the top of my head, whether the Blu Ray spec allows for 1080p24 H.264 content (as opposed to 1080i60 3:2 pulldowned footage) which would be a more efficient way to encode the info on the disk. MPEG-2 for a given quality level takes more space than H.264, aka MPEG-4 AVC.

Thanks to Mike from B-Scene films for sending this link in!

-mike

Exhausted pull quotes for the day:

"Where's the Porn Cops?"

(In a grocery store, instead of Corn Pops)

followed by

"I want to have a New Year's Eve Party in the Lex Luthor Lounge at the top of the Eye of Sauron Building."

must get some sleep..."sooner or later...your head gives way and hits the ground" (saw English Beat in concert tonight...)

Posted by: Mike Curtis / 11/18/2005 11:39:00 PM (1) comments links to this post

CinemaTech: Another Disney 3-D flick on the way; ILM retrospective

"I AM SCOTT'S REPOSTING ENGINE. SEE ME POST ARTICLE LINKS."

I am Jack's prostate. See me get cancer. See me kill Jack.

I am Mike's Sleep Deprivation. See Mike type nonsense.

Mike is barely here, so he's posting this nifty link to Scott's summary of a bunch of cool things, like Disney working on a 3D movie they expect to have 750 to 1000 3D screens around the country to show on (3D versions bringing in twice as much as 2D versions) for "Meet the Robinsons" next year.

-ILM is 30, lots of coverage of that
-mikey

Just saw the XL H1 today...here's my report! - The Digital Video Information Network

OK, this is just chock full of good info. Kudos to Chris Hurd for the site and especially to Jae Staats for taking the time to document all this for our behalf.

Read the whole thing to get the big picture, but some highlights:

-Canon was a little dodgy about answering some questions, with a lot of "I can't answer that now" or the more telling "I can't reveal that now."

-lens is all new and HD and lovely

-still images captured w/2 megapixel imager, BUT more importantly, text metadata file that includes all the camera settings! - Somebody at Canon Gets It.

-viewfinder has all kinds of guidelines, including 2.35:1. NICE

-I didn't clean a clear enough answer out of what was said about help with focusing in HD beyond a 2X mode...which isn't enough

-FU 2000 remote gadget includes an LCD. Perfect for boom/crane stuff

-16 bit four channel audio. Woo Hoo!

-DV Expo LA - Footage Will Be Shown. On A Big Screen.

24p/24f - no new stats, but glowing report on footage shown

-$9500 street price

-starts shipping in two weeks

Read on for lots more details, then there's tons of comments from the readers and the original author's responses to those

FresHDV has a nice little synopsis of what's coming up with HDFEST LA.

I'm lazy today, so go read it there.

-mike

Think Secret - EXCLUSIVE: Apple Planning Intel-Ready iBook Debut for January

The rumor boys are at it again. Read on for questionably reliable rumors.

-mike

The Power Mac G5 Quad: Seat belt not included! - Computerworld

this is really an overview of the machine and not so much a review (hate non-reviews!). The only really salient bit for folks like us:

My After Effects projects ran more than 60% faster compared with the Power Mac G5 with dual 2.5-GHz processors, and Apple says that X-Code compiling is nearly 80% faster than on earlier models. Final Cut Pro standard-definition rendering yielded results that were 50% faster for me compared to the dual 2.5-GHz machine.


The article states that PCIe cards for video are shipping from AJA and BlackMagic Designs. Sorta - BMD has one standard def card shipping, AJA has their Kona LHe card for HD out. So some cards, not all cards.

-mike

Official lux ratings now on Canon site - The Digital Video Information Network sounds good and happy enough, but if you scroll down a bit to Steve Mullen's post, he says this in part:

The HDV@Work story has been revised to reflect Canon’s decision that all information on the process by which “24F, 25F, and 30F” video are generated is proprietary information. This has several ramifications. First, Canon takes the position that any information imparted by Canon employees, distributors, or dealers on the “process” by which these formats are generated cannot be considered valid by the press or potential customers. They claim the actual details are known only by a small number of Canon employees. Second, unless this—in my view highly unwise decision—is reversed, no information on the process will be forthcoming from Canon.

I found out Canon's "position" when they objected to 24F information in my first version.


....to which some posters are starting to assume that perhaps 24F is akin to CineFrame on the Sony cameras.

Steve responds (again, just an excerpt, read the article for all the details):

I think they are using Sony's next gen CCD -- because they need a far smaller volume that does Sony -- and Sony's DSP chip. These new CCDs likely can be produced only low volume and are very expensive.

When I asked Canon to confirm a "constant sampling interval" they declined to confirm this. Which, seems strange if they are really clocking at 48Hz. You would think they would want to trumpet this advantage over Sony.

Which makes me think Canon's sudden desire to confirm nothing -- which came a week after I published our preview of the H1 -- was due to pressure by Someone who is making parts for Canon.


I'm thinking, based on total tea leaf reading/guessing, that 24F is a bit different and a bit better than the Sony CineFrame, but not the same thing as 24p in theory. In practice, we'll just have to see how the footage looks.

As for Canon backing off any details, it may just be all political if they've bought their electronics package from Sony and don't want to slam Sony product. (This is suggested by some of Steve's unquoted comments in the article).

-mike

PS - Thanks to Luis for pointing out this thread! If anybody finds and interesting thread on a board that they think would be of interest to the readership, PLEASE send it in! I'm always happy to publish a web link for your own site or film or whatnot.

Microsoft, cable companies team up on high-def TV - Yahoo! News

Microsoft and CableLabs will develop PCs that can easily accept digital cable cards -- devices that perform the same functions as set-top boxes, but are small enough to plug into slots built in TVs, computers and other home electronics devices.
...
Besides being able to watch cable TV shows over a PC monitor, users will also be able to view programing through devices such as the Xbox 360 that are networked to the cable-ready PCs, Microsoft and CableLabs said.

Sony BMG recalls copy-protected CDs - Yahoo! News

Sony has not only issued a patch, Microsoft has declared it spyware, and finally Sony is recalling the CDs with the rootkit DRM.

If it hadn't been for the Internet and somebody with too much time on their hands, this would have gone on for who knows how long.

Another way of looking at this: who knows how much more stuff like this is out there and what is already quietly running on your system....

-mike

Macworld: News: Autodesk Cleaner 6.5 announced

ZombieWare!

OK, I'm stunned by this one, I had heard that the entire Cleaner team had been let go way over a year ago and assumed that Cleaner was EOL (End Of Life). But here is a new version with support for some newer formats (DivX 6.0, Flix exporter for .FLV & .SWF, Konoma v3, H.264 & Real 10).

If I had to guess, longstanding issues with gamma shifts, lack of support for greater than 8 bit formats are not addressed by this minor update.

But it is a good media conversion tool for batch operations, it does a great job at scaling, and I've used it for seeming decades to do batch conversions to every possible format (cell phone, CDs, Internet, DVD, computer playback, whatevah).

But before buying it, however, I'd check carefully to see if Compressor could fulfill my needs (comes with DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro), as well as check out Compression Master, a newer/groovier tool.

-mike

Macworld: News: MPEG LA moves forward on Blu-ray licensing

MPEG LA LLC, a company that offers licenses for bundles of patents related to key audio-visual technologies, has taken its first step towards the creation of a license for the Blu-ray Disc format.
...
MPEG LA is already licensing groups of patents associated with MPEG2, MPEG4, AVC/H.264, IEEE1394 and DVB-T.

MacNN | Apple resolves single-processor G5 issues

firmware fixes some longstanding bugs

MacNN | Apple releases Xsan 1.2 updates

Update to xSAN. Fixes include:

Xsan Filesystem 1.2 for Tiger includes fixes for:

improving AFP performance when resharing Xsan volumes
more accurate file permissions when sharing Xsan volumes via AFP
accessing Xsan volumes larger than 16 terabyte in size
greater server stability when resharing Xsan volumes via NFS
handling quotas with no associated user or group name
maintaining access to Xsan volumes when metadata controller failovers occur
providing metadata controller services to 10.3.9 and 10.4 systems running Xsan 1.2
operating Xsan in environments with a mix of 10.3.9 and 10.4 systems

The Panther version of the update includes fixes for:

greater server stability when resharing Xsan volumes via NFS
handling quotas with no associated user or group name
maintaining access to Xsan volumes when metadata controller failovers occur
operating Xsan in environments with a mix of 10.3.9 and 10.4 systems

HDV@Work

I'm not sure I agree with all his math and explanations, but Steve takes a shot at explaining how the 24F mode works on the Canon XL H1.

Some highlights:

-even smart de-interlacing doesn't provide the same resolution as progressive scanning of a subject ONCE IT IS IN MOTION. Static resolution tests might indicate a match, but video usually moves, so you get reduce vertical resolution

-Canon would not comment/confirm/deny whether the XL H1 captured with a "constant timebase", meaning snagging an image of the world consistently every 1/24th of a second.

-Steve rags on (deservedly) the CineFrame 24 mode of the Sony FX1 and Z1U, but doesn't mention the possibility of shooting 50i and doing a smart deinterlace in post and reconforming to 24p. Definitely more work, but definitely worth considering (it is what Frederic Haubrich, developer of LumiereHD, is doing on his own feature)

-read the article for all the details and maths involved

-mike

Microsoft reaffirms support for Toshiba's HD DVD format - Yahoo! News

Microsoft is still firmly backing HD DVD over Blu Ray, saying they are very happy with how it works, especially in regards to hwo well it can integrate with PCs. Well, no wonder, since the interactivity layer is built on stuff they developed. I wonder if this is for real, or as a bluff to get Blu Ray to adopt Mandatory Managed Copy.

I mentioned yesterday that HP is suggesting that Blu Ray adopt iHD, Microsoft's XML based interactivity layer (from HD DVD I believe) for Blu Ray. I wonder if that is entirely as a pro Windows PC move, or an anti-Apple move (as Apple is looking to get into home theater PC business next year I believe) to cut Apple off if the Blu Ray disc interactive layer is so Microsoft centric?

Culture and Technology / Has Apple switched sides?

Scott's written a good piece in the San Francisco Gate about Apple's relationship to independent content producers. Apple's relationship to indie content producers has traditionally been:

Much of Apple's business relies on selling hardware and software that empowers free agents to design Web sites, produce music, manipulate photographs or edit films at a quality level that can rival large corporations with much greater resources.


Yet with their moves on the iTunes Music Store, and now selling videos, the policy has become one of "the established entities (the big guys) can charge, but you little indies have to give it away."

Or as Scott put it:

Apple has decided, essentially, that major media companies should be allowed to charge for what they produce, but individuals ought to give their work away for free. That's a big deal for solo creative types who want to make a buck: By Apple's account, its storefront controls 70 percent of the market for legally downloaded music, and customers have bought more than half a billion songs from Apple, at 99 cents apiece and more than a million videos for $1.99 each.


This is all EXTREMELY relevant to you folks out there reading this - most of you seem to be indies and students trying to figure out how to leverage technology to get your work out there.


I think it is OK for Apple to be moseying into this realm this way -

the marketplace is too noisy at this point to efficiently allow for putting anybody's stuff in there for now. The studios and the record companies act as a quality filter to screen out both sucky content as well as illegal sampling, etc.

Until there is an efficient screening mechanism, Apple would have a hard time letting anybody throw something on their servers and charging for it. What if it is porn? What if is is copyright protected material used illegally? Etc.

What Apple has done is create a mall rather than a market - established players buy in, customers can (somewhat) safely wander around in there. Versus an open market that anybody can set up a tent.

What they do allow is access for the indies - and that is a step in the right direction. The fact that it is free for now is less than optimal, but I think in time (or at least I HOPE in time) Apple will come up with some kind of submission engine for indie content to be carried and charged for.

I spoke to someone in an interview the other day, and the interviewer said that she'd heard somebody was successfully charging for their podcast, I don't know how. But I do think mechanisms can (and should) evolve to handle that scenario.

I fully agree that there does exist out there indie content that is worthy of being for sale, but right now, there is also a lot that frankly is lame (just as there is also a lot of lame music for sale on Apple Store, too). So what will that mechanism be? Some kind of deal with AtomFilms or iFilm or somesuch? Perhaps they could be the screening/filtering agent, I don't know. Or perhaps a new third party, or a new group within Apple for non-affiliated (not represented) content.

But access is the first step, and charging is the second. The fact that you CAN get your podcast/vodcast listed is a huge boon to folks out there. Perhaps they should have a freebie version or content, and promote their for-pay content within the podcast/vodcast.

And I certainly encourage Apple to move in this direction. That has been the strength of companies like Google or especially eBay - they created a digital infrastructure that allowed the marketplace to build itself within the framework they created. If Apple had a structure that required no human intervention to submit content, but required solid info and verification of who you are and a digitally signed waiver of compliance, that would allow for the market to explode.

In time, in time.

But go read the article - it's a good one.

-mike

Burning Questions: More from the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD Front - Yahoo! News

This is the best update I've seen of late on the whole Blu Ray vs. HD DVD thing in a while, with some very significant new twists involving red laser HD discs, Microsoft based interactivity layers, etc. Below are some notes, and my own comments on the latest news.

Stuff covered:

-Warners' move to Blu Ray (in addition to HD DVD)

Red laser high def Blu Ray disks - it was proposed to support, within the Blu Ray format, for a RED laser HD disk. So in theory, you could author a red laser disc with H.264 (or VC-1 or MPEG-2, such as from your HDV camera or timeline) directly to a 9 GB dual layer DVD that would play back. This would be HUGE for homemade content to be watched on TVs, as this would let the enormous installed base of DVD burners (or at least the smaller installed base of dual layer burners) just get new encoding software to make HD discs of their home content, IF the format allowed for the reading of DVD+/-R disks. Hollywood might get EXTRA paranoid and NOT want homemade discs playable, which HP and other hardware vendors would fight, since that would mean that home content couldn't be readily authored to play back on Blu Ray players. But I think red laser BD-9 (and presumably BD-5 for lesser capacities) is GREAT idea and should be included, and would help bring Blu Ray into more homes if folks could use their HDV cameras to play that stuff back in the living room after editing on iMovie or whatever. This would be EXCELLENT for Apple, since a minor tweak of DVD Studio Pro, and eventually iDVD, would allow for authoring these discs from home.

This would allow for existing movies to fit on a BD-9 using existing production lines, and not require retooling for BD-25 discs. Most existing basic movies would fit on this format in HD, but would not have much room for extras.

HP proposed two changes to the spec for Blu Ray, one of which I would support and the other gives me cause for concern on Apple's behalf.

Item 1: Mandatory Managed Copy on Blu Ray. Mandatory Managed Copy is basically a REQUIREMENT, not an option, within the spec, to support managed, Digital Rights Managed copying of the movie to an approved, appropriate device. The device in question, as far as HP is concerned, is likely to be an HP branded Home Theater PC with the appropriate Windows Media PC software. So their allegiance is obvious - they want to be able to have folks by an HP Home Theater PC and load up a ton of movies that are available on the fly.

I'm in favor of this, there is nothing bad/evil about it from the consumer's point of view (the studios may not like it as a possible bootlegging hole) as it gives them (consumers) more choices for how/when they want to watch stuff. Since Apple, I am 99% sure, is going to be developing Viiv platform, hardware DRM'd home theater Macs, they'll be in favor of this too.

Item 2: HP also advocated using the Microsoft developed iHD interactivity layer, feeling that it would be good to have a common standard between desktops (running Windows Vista) and the hardware platforms. Well, that's great if you're HP or Microsoft, but, pardon my vernacular, sucks balls if you are Apple or a Unix/Linux platform. If Microsoft's iHD interactivity layer is all deeply enmeshed in the Windows Vista interactivity layer, what are the chances that Apple will be able to license, use, adapt, modify, etc. that code to play and develop HD discs? What are the odds that MS will play nice and make the APIs available in a timely, cost effective, and well documented fashion? Software development is littered with the corpses of companies that died while waiting for other companies to deliver well documented APIs for them to develop their competing stuff for. Look at browsers and media players (remember the "we can't unbundle it" line of defense from Microsoft during lawsuits?) for further details.

The only good thing about iHD is that it is XML based, which is a bit more open ended in theory. But in practice, Microsoft has a history of "embrace and extend," which means pretend to adopt but then put so many Microsoft specific hooks and bits in it that it is useless to competitors. They've done this repeatedly.

The analysts feel that Blu Ray is lined up to win, but it may be a Pyrrhic victory (see my Laserdisc 2.0 article for more details), even with Blu Ray's greater capacity and Sony's use of Blu Ray in the PS3 game console. other analysts predict an HD DVD win, due to it's more logical name ("WTF is a Blu Ray?" many consumers will ask - it's too techie a name) and first to market advantage (which may be waning at this point since launch has been delayed).

-mike

Macworld: News: Wafian HR-1 records up to 18 hours of HD video

OK, now things are getting interesting: a new DDR (digital disk recorder) that records to the Cineform codec internally, holds 18 hours of 10 bit HD footage, is $15K. Available January 2006.

Rackmount, built for on set or in studio usage, 10 bit YUV 4:2:2 Cineform Intermediate codec, full raster (no 1440/1280/960 subsampling like the HDV, Varicam and HDCAM camcorders do).

"Can be converted into compatible formats for Avid and Apple's Final Cut Pro" although I'd assume it'd be ready to roll with Premiere Pro (not specified, though).

-two internal drives mirrored (helps prevent data loss)
-LCD touch panel to drive it
-outputs include HD-SDI and DVI, GigE, USB 2.0, FireWire.
-17x17x6

This is very interesting, and would probably be a better field recorder than an HDCAM deck, and has the resolution and bit depth of an HDCAM SR or D-5 HD deck. I can't definitively say how the compression would compare, however.

But this could be a very interesting option for HDV cameras, skipping the inferior HDV compression to get this better result.

Then back up the data, convert, do a data/file based offline/online (relinking) workflow.

-mike

Benchmark Results at OtherWorldComputing.com

OtherWorld computing has done some benchmarking, and you can compare your computer to a bunch of Macs & PowerMacs, including the new PCIe Macs, and especially including the new Quad 2.5GHz G5s.

You can pick from a checkbox list that is not as specific as I'd like for Final Cut Pro benchmarking as I'd like, but there are tasks like After Effects rendering, Photoshop performance, MPEG-4 exports, etc.

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/14/05

Mike,
I have seen the ongoing discussion about SSC and have now seen Sonnet products questioned, so I would like to clarify things. All Sonnet Tempo-X SATA products have always been fully functional with SSC as stated in Sonnet's (eSATA) FAQ. Sonnet has had at least one customer with eight (8) new Seagate
7200.9 500 GB disk drives and he has done extensive benchmark testing with these drives.


Good to be verified.

-mike

CinemaTech: And now, the stat you've been waiting for...

Scott comments on whether 3D movies (not just 3D rendered, but viewed in 3 dimensions) are the Killer App for digital projection, the thing that will tip it over the edge in popularity and make money for the industry.

Wait and see, wait and see. He has some good pro and con excerpts from the linked LA Times article.

As always, a good synopsis, and read the original piece for the full details.

A nice quote:

The film grossed about $11,000 per screen at conventional theaters during its first weekend, but $25,000 per screen at more than 80 locations showing the 3-D version. The difference can't be accounted for by the extra $1 to $1.50 some 3-D theaters tacked onto admission prices, and if it held up this past weekend, the excitement in the digital-cinema community will be palpable. Unconfirmed reports are already swirling that several blockbuster 3-D features are heading our way, including Peter Jackson's remake of "King Kong."


The big question is, is 3D enjoying an edge because of novelty, or long term perceived value? I'd say nobody knows - because even I as a consumer and tech geek/freak don't know if I'll be interested longterm in the 3D vs 2D version of movies. For 3D rendered computer animated movies, it seems like a natural thing - just another render pass, and you can't cheat as many background plates & composites as you used to be able to. It ups the ante, but the 2D version is just one of the two rendered cameras. It would definitely take more work, but not an impossible or incredible amount of work.

For other stuff, I don't know. I think a lot of it would have to do with how honestly good vs. gimmicky the 3D was. I had viewing issues with the 2D to 3D conversion of Chicken Little, so perhaps a true 3D version of Cars or Monster House would be more fun/appropriate/enjoyable/less distracting in high motion scenes.

But will I/would I, and by extension, the aggregate average of moviegoing biomass, get tired of it and not be into it? Would I blow off the 3D version, as not worth the longer drive and/or extra $1.50 to see the movie? I think I'd have to be presented with that choice, and have already seen 2-4 3D movies by that time.

I think about digital projection - you folks obviously know my predilections for that tech - but I have yet to go to the theater in town with digital projection, and they've had it since Episode III, which I meant to, but NEVER DID, go see in digital projection over there. If 3D is "as compelling" as digital projection has been in my experience, 3D won't cost justify the LARGE costs incurred. Or at least, it won't pull me in often enough.

Stepping back, I look at a few trends in the movie showing business right now in terms of Value Add for the customer:

1.) 3D (brand new, costs $1.50 more for tickets)
2.) Digital projection (pretty much same price as standard)
3.) Alamo Drafthouse (FULL food menu & beer/wine, waitstaff brings it to you)

When looking at how effective these three options have been to bring me into particular theaters, I'd rank them like this, worst to best:

Last place: Digital projection - I have yet to go to the Galaxy 10 in town with digital projection, and they had a flippin' STAR WARS movie there. And I fly my geek flag HIGH. (How high? "Sometimes I even amaze myself.")

Second place: 3D projection - I made a point of seeing Chicken Little in 3D, and I would have gone for a second time in four days to take Mason & Chloe (my neice and nephew) if they hadn't had a snot filled meltdown on Sunday before the show (hey, they're 7 and 4, whaddaya expect?). Long term results yet to be seen, since 3D projection is still a novelty

FIRST PLACE: ALAMO GOD DAMNED DRAFTHOUSE, LONG MAY THEY REIGN AND RAWWWWWWWWWWWWWK: ever since they opened their Village location with mainstream movies, and THEN opened one 7 minutes from my house (bless you Tim!), I make a point of going to see movies at the Alamo FIRST. As in, I check to see if it is showing at an Alamo, and THEN I consider other theaters. I've been going there so much I'm starting to get sick of the menu I eat there at movies so often. But that's a pretty good example - that one theater sees me, on average, once a week or 10 days, every week of the year (and that number gets a HUGE boost during SXSW, Fantastic Fest, and other film festivals).

Alamo's formula to the movie viewing value add has withstood the test of time for several years now - food 'n beer during a movie is tough to beat and makes for a markedly better viewing experience.

Only time can tell the big answers, but those are the trends as I see'em now.

-mike

MacNN | Medea video RAID arrays support PCIe-based G5

SCSI (hate it, never want to use it again) and fiber channel (so far so good in my personal experience, and supports fiber SAN setups) options for PCIe Macs (including Quad G5s) capable of handing uncompressed HD. Their FCR2X model is the right one for uncompressed HD of all formats.

Includes Multi-Stream Technology (MST), Medea's branded tech for stream handling to better handle throughputs from multiple streams of video for uninterrupted performance (no frame dropping in theory).

-mike

MacNN | Briefly: Quad G5's arrive; Brea store photos

just a snippet in MacNN about a vendor receiving some Quad G5s. Methinks these might be "allocation" units, which is basically a Preferred Client kind of a thing for prioritization.

-mike

Internet Service to Put Classic TV on Home Computer - New York Times

Old TV series as downloadable files. More Internet content access! I love it. Service to be called In2TV, is FREE, but has ads in it. Starts early next year, over 4800 episodes of TV shows. Warner stuff.

Old shows like Eight is Enough, The Fugitive, Welcome Back, Kotter. Definitely long tail material if ever there was some. But this is their testing of the waters to see if this works. The only downside here is that they might see this not be very successful and contend that the format isn't viable, instead of the content being lame. But free is tough to beat.

-available over AOL's portal

-some newer stuff, like Babylon 5 and La Femme Nikita, will be offered as well

-a rotating selection of shows, rather than everything all the time, so as not to cannibalize DVD sales (Mike Note: HUGE MISTAKE! While it might possibly eat into DVD sales a bit, this is a big, fat bite from the cake of Not Getting It)

-for AOL, this is (finally) getting into the stuff they were supposed to do years ago to justify the Time Warner/AOL merger/acquisition.

-AOL will offer a version of the service meant to be watched on a TV set connected to a Windows Media PC, and is exploring similar setups for TiVO recorders

-OPTIONAL technology will offer a purportedly DVD quality picture. This AOL Hi-Q will require downloading special software once, and will buffer a cache of the program to handle the streaming requirements

-to use the tech (not sure whether standard or Hi-Q), you have to agree in a P2P network for the fat files. So they are using P2P and part of YOUR bandwidth to deliver this service. Claims that since they control the network, it'll protect from spyware and viruses and stuff. Hmmm....scary.

-Kontiki file sharing tech

-"This is great goofy stuff that fans are going to love," Mr. Storck of the Points North Group said. -- which says to me that is is non-prime content

-implies, since they mention Windows Media PCs, that it is Windows Media technology, so may be PC only. Mac support? Maybe. Linux? No way.

Smartmoney.com: Mossberg Report: Tempted by the Apple?

Walt Mossberg, personal technology writer for the Wall Street Journal, writes about why Macs are preferable to Windows PCs.

Fold on top of that the Apple video editing tools, and you'll understand why I like Macs so much.

-mike

MacNN | Red Giant ships Key Correct Pro

Red Giant announced Key Correct Pro, a set of After Effects plugins to get better composites:

Features include accurate matte feather tools, color matching plug-in with automatic matching and color balance adjustment, alpha cleaner plug-in for fixing noise and filing holes in mattes in one pass, and complete support for 8- and 16-bit operations. Key Correct Pro is available for $400

MacNN | Sony halts production of XCP-DRM music discs

Sony BMG has temporarily suspended the manufacturers of products that contain its copy-protection technology, following the public release of a virus that affects Windows computers with the XCP content protection software and public outcry over the use of 'rootkit' technology to install copy-protection on computers.


Woops - after all of Sony's "don't worry about it, no big deal, you're over-reacting", they've ceased production of disks with that DRM, and are reconsidering their DRM options.

Hopefully, they'll see how much ire this type of behavior draws and quit it before implementing similar schemes with similar issues on Blu Ray or other future media.

-mike

Pieces Fall into Place for Intel-Apple

Article on how all the pieces are lining up for Apple to switch to Intel. Latest tea leaf reading indicates Apple could announce Intel based Macs as soon as MWSF in early January.

The article supposes that consumer Macs (Minis & iBooks) would be first to switch since those users are least likely to need professional apps ported to native Intel based OS X code, and would mostly be using Apple's native tools - Mail, iLife, Safari, etc. This makes sense.

What that theory doesn't address is the performance gap that situation would create - what if there are Intel based iBooks out there that outperform G4 based PowerBooks? How does Apple marketing justify that discrepancy? Does that hurt PowerBook sales significantly or not? What if Intel based iMacs are (temporarily) faster than some PowerMacs and cost less? Etc.

Wait and see, wait and see. Some rumor sites have hypothesized that whole classes of systems will flip over - all notebooks moving to Intel at once, etc. That seems to make a bit more sense to me, since the laptops are all based on similar architectures.

The one thing I am somewhat sure of is that the pro systems (PowerMacs and servers) are likely to be the last to switch over sometime in 2007.

-mike

FresHDV | What is LANC?

Looks like it is going to be a slow news day, so here's a little interesting backfill - FresHDV has an article & link describing what LANC is and does for camcorders....

The New York Times Magazine this Sunday is dedicated to movies. Or more specifically, to war movies as well as a "state of the industry" bit. Once again, the bare economics are broken down about how a movie's success is determined in the first few hours, as well as a DVDs.

Scott over at CinemaTech has a nice little review of all the stuff covered if you want a quickie synopsis.

Read the NYTimes stuff soon, they pull the free content after a bit.

-mike

I had to be literally physically restrained from using my first intended headline:

OT: This R Teh Kool-EST EVER!

Sony BRAVIA - The Advert

This is an ad for the Sony Bravia LCD TVs. Yeah yeah whatever, who cares. YOU DO. Why?

Because they release 250,000 bouncy Super Balls down a steep street in San Francisco.

And they did it for real, no CG.

All in glorious slow motion shot on film. What does this have to do with HD For Indies? Uh.....nothing much really. Oh, wait!

Yes, ahem:

It is an excellent example of large format H.264 distributed over the web.

Yes. That's it. That's why I'm linking to it...

...nah. It's just bitchin'. Be sure to check out all the other stuff - the behind the scenes, the extended version, etc.

Best minute of video I've watched in weeks. More fun because I used to live in SF and this looks like my friend's old neighborhood.

-mike

Friday afternoon I had a conversation with Frank Reynolds, a longtime film editor and friend of mine, about his first DI (digital intermediate) experience. He recently finished editing a film called Things That Hang From Trees. The film was shot on Super 16, and they are just finishing up their DI (digital intermediate) process at PostWorks in New York.

This was the first DI session Frank has sat in on after doing traditional lab color timing on many previous films. In general, the DI session seemed much more like an audio mix session than the color timing process he's been through before. They sat in a room and watched the image on a large projection screen, such as one might have at a small theater (he mentioned the Dobie Theaters in Austin, TX for reference, I'd guess those are in the 10-12 foot wide range). Since it is all based on a digital nonlinear system, they could start, pause, rewind, and jump around randomly in the timeline to change things they needed to.

PostWorks was working with an iQ system with Pandora control surfaces. The Super16 original was scanned in at 2K (2048x1556 pixels) and loaded into the Quantel iQ system for color correction. It looks like they will probably spend 5-7 8 hour sessions to color correct the entire film.

In the traditional model, you watch a film print of your movie, in real time, and give notes to the colorist. The film is usually not stopped or backed up, you just have to give notes on the fly. Afterwards, the colorist dissapears and however many days later you come back in to watch a new work print. You pay for each round, regardless of whether the colorist manages to fulfill your expectations. The traditional analog controls are pretty much limited to more or less of the three color primaries red/green/blue (or would that be cyan/magenta/yellow in this case? I'm not an analog film guy). You can't isolate a region of the frame, you can't change the contrast (that is determined during developing unless you want to do an optical), you can't make it more saturated in one color range or anything like that. Essentially, three knobs for the printer lights for more or less of the three primaries.

Now, imagine what you can do with a tool more like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, or After Effects. THAT is what the DI process gets you. You can make fine adjustments to specific color ranges and/or to specific parts of the image.

But this flexibility has a cost - since you can stop, pause, rewind, refer back, etc., at any time, and make very fine changes, are you ever DONE with something? Time management becomes crucial. In the old model, costs, while still fairly high (several thousand dollars per answer print), you at least GOT something tangible each round that was finished and DONE, even if it wasn't to your liking. Now, you might find that you've gone through your DI budget, and you're only 10 minutes into reel two. So be careful with your time allocation since you could very easily spend more time fine tweaking than you have budget for.

Other issues that were concerns when editing for film are moot now as well - such as the inability to use the same shot twice without additional optical print costs, or having to keep track of the fact that you couldn't ever reuse the first frame after an edit are no longer concerns - just scan it all in and it is all digital assets to be copied or reused as you see fit.

One nice thing about this indie project - the DP was skilled and the source footage was well shot and well exposed - so the vast majority of the time spent in the DI suite was for color enhancement, not for color correction of errors, mistakes, mismatches, or misjudgements. But for projects unfortunate enough to have such problems, a DI can help correct a lot of those technical issues.

================================

Below are my raw notes I took during my phone conversation with Frank:

color correction on iQ, Pandora control surface,

sitting in like a mix studio - a guy, a board, an HD projector

-like a Dobie sized screen

-what was interesting about color correction - traditional is to screen the film and the colorist takes notes, because on the Hazeltine it does NOT match the final result

-labs are very protective of that process, nobody allowed in

-in the coloring session, felt like a mix session - live feedback

-because can do so much to the image - was noticing that the amount of shots in the movie was irrelevant - you could spend 2 hours on two shots and they wouldn't be as perfect as you wanted it

-can spend an open ended amount of time - it's the tweaker's nightmare - like when nonlinear editing came out - indecisive people just got more indecisive

-you're NEVER done

-if you feel you have a good handle on what you want, can refer back to the last time you were in that location and copy those settings

-a lot of split screen wiping to compare

-"like most things digital, indecisive people will just find their job worse"

Paul Hirsch talking about some director - if you showed him two toilets he'd pee his pants before he picked one

Frank Reynolds on Things That Hang From Trees, super 16 making a 2K master with the plan to blow up to 35 eventually. Making HD masters for festivals

-first time to work with a DI, worked on it that closely

-it is really gonna be the way to go with Super 16 - 16 to 35 analog blowup was a nightmare

-for 2 years, he thought HD would be better than 16 because of that nightmare - not anymore

-now that he is cutting film, have to worry about certain things, like using same shot twice - in neg cutting the old way, it was glued together, so you couldn't use the frame after your edit because it was required to be part of the glued transition, and be keeping track of that stuff - you couldn't ever use that frame after edit again

-now doesn't have to worry about that because it is digital, replicable assets

-with film, had to worry about that UNTIL NOW

-beause they KNEW they were going to DI, they PLANNED on using shots twice, never had to worry about using the same shot twice, and planned and did use some shots twice

-In The Bedroom (that Frank edited) was Super35 and was a bit of a pain - there is no off-negative print - every print is essentially a two hour long optical - that is the danger of Super35. In the Bedroom looked quite good. With DI, that isn't an issue anymore.

The advantage is that you have more area to play with to recompose the shots (Cameron did this with Abyss and Titanic)

how long did the DI take? between 5 and 7 full days in studio

-created Avid project to their specs, etc. - they like PC Avid best - they'll do Mac stuff, but they like PC Avid best

-in the old color timing way, the operator had R/G/B knobs for more/less each was all you could do. Contrast is locked once the neg is developed. Make an optical to change contrast.

-the screening of prints for the colorist is a pain in the ass - it is all real time - "which shot?" "The shot before, no not that one THAT one!" etc.

-for indies, color timing for indies seemed like the biggest scam - you can't sit in on any session, the most expensive print is your first answer print - whether you like it or not you paid for it, if you wanted to do it again, that second print was almost as much money. For a low budget indie, felt like "why am I paying for this guy to screw up?" Cost of a print was maybe $5000 to $6000 - "definitely several thousand dollars"

-can now sit down and get exactly what you want with ostensibly no worries. You're paying for time now - by the hour. If you are slow and indecisive, then the hours rack up. The advantage of the old way was, you always got a print whether it was what you wanted or not. This way, you could be indecisive forever, spend a ton of money, and realize you're only 1/3 of the way through. THEN what do yo do? Shut down and raise money, or what?

-the phenomenon was very much the same as a sound mix - you could be picky or not, you could say "we'll deal with this later", etc.

-people that knew the old way will probably work with this effectively best - they'll be efficient about it. new tech folks could easily get lost in the choices and options

-a good DP knew how to expose the image pretty close to what they wanted in the first place - the whole "we'll fix it in post" only defers costs until later

-didn't have highlight issues - blown highlights weren't an issue - their DP was excellent and Frank never saw any fixes that had to be made - mostly time spent enhancing not fixing

-all the little digital tricks that used to not apply to film are nice to have here are doable here - things like garbage mattes, cloning patches, etc.

-titles over picture were expensive the old way and were done only when had to be done

-digital titles are a sure why not kind of thing

-scrolling titles was a huge deal in the old day to do a title crawl

-now it is no big deal, a negligible issue

-was in film school in 87-91 at NYU film school

-film looks good, never had any worries about how great it would look, so time spent was just making it look better, not fixing (well shot by DP)

-the ability to stop, and pause, and watch it over and over and over again is great - whereas with a film screening, that is difficult to do

-you find yourself getting caught up in things - making sure things worked exactly right - whereas before you might not catch it or let it go - you tend to watch the movie during CC with the knowledge that you can stop and fix it at any time

-in the digital format where you have control over it, you have much more inclination to fix things since it is so easy and there is so little friction involved

-that part of your brain that wants everything to be perfect in color timing "turns on" now in this process

-who was there during session? Director, DP, colorist always, editor showed up for fun, the first AC showed up to check it out

So Melissa and I went to go see Chicken Little in 3D the other night - one of the screens at the Gateway 16 here in Austin is one of the lucky 89 that have the Disney Digital 3D projection systems.

Some thoughts/notes:

-WOW! This 3D stuff is COOL! I saw Shark Boy & Lava Girl with a projection system using the same technology, I was underwhelmed with that movie. It was just a kid flick Rodriguez punted out. But...

-3D rendered movies projected in normal 2D theaters suddenly feels kind of pointless - 3D animated movies should be shown in 3D henceforth, no doubt about it - this is the New Thing as far as I'm concerned. Pixar should perk up and take notice - this is how they should be making movies in the future.

-Chicken Little but not great movie - while they had a good ($40M) opening weekend, nowhere near Pixar levels. Also, clearly nowhere near Pixar levels of quality and storytelling.

-While I, with my hypersensitive eyes, found rapid motion distracting/confusing on screen for the 3D effect, Melissa had no problem with it. Then again, she doesn't stare intensely at screens all day the same way I typically do.

-3D in 3D is the new golden standard - Pixar will have to do this

-changes the game in the Disney/Pixar thing - will Disney let other 3D movies in? Find out the leasing terms

-digital projection looks great - can reproduce colors film can't (but only for DI'd or CG stuff) - they showed a bunch of trailers for upcoming movies. The ones shot on film looked normal, but the trailers for animated movies had incredibly snap - the sharpness of the image, and especially the vividness of the colors was very impressive. I had kind of forgotten that we were going to see a digital 3D movie during the trailers, and they showed an expanse of blue with a logo and I perked up - it was a kind of vivid blue that just can't be done with film. Clearly, digital projection opens up some new doors in terms of colors and intensities that can be used creatively

-so so movie - wouldn't have been as compelling without 3D

-rapid motion is disconcerting to me but not Melissa (girlfriend)

-tack sharp, vivid colors

-I perceive it to be BETTER than film projection - no gate weave (slight motion frame to frame), text is stable and legible without being fuzzy, etc.

-look into Disney's future 3D plans - 200 screens? 250? What about regular non-3D showing?

-I need to look into how the polarized thing works - I understand the whole 144 frames per second, alternating eyes per frame - L1R1L1R1L1R1,L2R2L2R2L2R2 is left R is right, 1 is frame one 2 is frame 2 - but how does the polarizing thing happen so that the images are only perceived by one eye? If you looked over the glasses at the image on screen, you saw two images with your naked eye.

-It was a bit o genius to have the 3D glasses match the kid's glasses in the movie - EVERYONE's the little guy now

OK, gotta scoot, doing another podcast interview. Also, did a huuuuuge long text based interview with DVguys, I'll let ya'all know when it is coming out

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/11/05

I've been looking forward to the new Seagate 7200.9 SATA drives, but one thing to watch out for - they have SSC (spread spectrum clocking) enabled on them, so they will NOT work properly with the Firmtek Seritek PCI-X SATA cards. So choose you gear carefully...I'm still advocating the 4+4 or 8 port eSATA Sonnet card as the most trouble free, and pairing them with Seagate 7200.8 drives until I can get some more data in on the 7200.9 series.

The Firmtek cards CAN be a good solution, you just need to be careful which drives you use with them.

-mike

Thomson lands $1.5 billion digital-movie role | CNET News.com

Thomson to put in 15,000 digital projection systems (presumably DCI spec compliant servers & projectors) in the US and Canada over the next 10 years - that's 75% of current screens.

No specs on what they're putting in, but that's a BIG deal they've pulled off. The seven big studios are doing this thing.

This'll be interesting - if it is the seven biggies, can indies project on those systems without paying exhorbitant costs?

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/9/05

Firmtek makes some nice, affordable, feature laden SATA cards, but they do have one hindrance - they don't work with drives that have SSC (spread spectrum clocking) enabled.

This post from Accelerate Your Mac has specifics about what drives to use/not use.

-mike

Highpoint RocketRAID 2224 and X4 with Infiniband port (Mac edition)

Highpoint, which I have been a bit sketchy on in the past, has improved their RAID 5 performance - 280 MB/sec writes (usually the slow part for RAID 5) using 8 Hitachi 7K500 drives. This is impressive! When 90% full, however, write speed dropped to 183 MB/sec - too low for certain uncompressed HD formats, such as 10 bit 4:2:2 1080i60. But partitioning can fix that, at the expense of less space available to store uncompressed HD footage (the slower partition can still be used for other media, however).

This is cool stuff!

My bid concern is reliability and recoverability. I'd love to see/hear proof of someone yanking a drive in mid-capture or mid-use and being able to recover the rest of the data on the RAID WITHOUT putting that drive back in (or putting in a blank spare, point being to simulate drive failure).

This article also points out that the new Highpoint PCIe card CLAIMS to have Mac drivers, even has a LINK to Mac drivers, but does NOT have Mac drivers actually. Those links are for older card drivers. So no Mac drivers yet, provably, as Rob-ART at BareFeats is a beta tester.

-mike

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/10/05

Just a tiny note from just some guy stating that his Quad G5 has shipped, claiming to have a delivery number.

I have no idea if it was a bone stock system or had any BTO (build to order) bits, but this guy is claiming (unconfirmed) that it has shipped.

I've heard from a vendor that is trying to qualify some software on Apple hardware that they are having a hard time getting a fiber channel card - they are being told it is many weeks away.

If a vendor is having that kind of trouble, then that is BAD NEWS for HD users, since right now, Apple's fiber channel card is the ONLY solution that works for PCIe Macs for uncompressed HD.

-mike

Universal Pictures debuts digital cinema specs with Serenity

I mentioned the upcoming screening the other week, and now there is a report from the showing. This is a big deal, because:

The successful completion of the 'Serenity' digital cinema distribution master in compliance with DCI standards marks a major milestone in the move toward all-digital projector for the motion picture industry.

Not everything went smoothly though. While the screening itself went fine, apparently there were issues getting it ready:

The process still has kinks. Doremi's Rizko said it took three days to encode the movie to DCI specifications and deliver the file. That process proved about two days longer than expected because there were minor issues to solve around the JPEG 2000 compression standard. 'Subtitles and additional audio are contained in the same package that shares the visuals,' he said.


I was curious how ambitious they were going to get with this one, but apparently security WAS a part of the process:

As part of the DCI specifications, 'Serenity' was encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard 128-bit compression and JPEG 2000 encoded at an average of 190 megabits per second. The encrypted 186 gigabyte digital file package, which includes audio, subtitles, and more, took 45 minutes for the file to load onto the projector server at ETC-USC theater, and decrypted in real-time as the movie played on the screen.


So not only are they decoding a 2Kx1K 24fps image stream in realtime, they are also decrypting from 128 bit AES at the same time - that is some MAJOR computational horsepower, beyond what a typical desktop system can do with the CPU alone. There is undoubtedly some task specific ASICS (chips) in that Doremi server somewhere to decrypt and then decode that encrypted JPEG2000 stream.

The vendors chosen for this demo/presentation were Doremi (for servers), Fotokem (for scanning? Not sure), and Christie (for projectors).

I'm surprised that Dolby wasn't selected, they must be soiling themselves to not be included at this point. Dolby has built their whole thetrical sound thing around compressed audio - which is NOT part of the specification for digital distribution in the DCI spec. So Dolby was saying at the pre-NAB Digital Cinema Summit that they were banking their long term future on servers like this.

It is also interesting to see what data rate they decided to go with - they chose 190 megabits/sec, which is about 24 MB/sec - roughly the datarate that gets written to HDCAM tape for 1080i footage. HDCAM writes 8 bit 1440x1080 3:1:1 YUV to tape, DCI spec is 4:4:4 12 bit XYZ (a superset of RGB colorspace). I don't know why 190 was chosen - perhaps that was the best the decoder could reliably do in real time? Dunno, as the spec calls for,I think, 250 mbits/sec max for 24p.

Anyway, all good and cool that they showed it. No mention of artifacting or comparison to a film projection, unfortunately.

-mike

(found from a link on CinemaTech, Scott Kirsner's excellent blog on movie making technology

News from PC Magazine: MGM to Support Blu-ray Disc Format

Headline says it all - one more in the Blu Ray camp. Tides are tipping...now, if Blu Ray would only capitulate and allow for Mandatory Managed Copy, I'll be happy.

-mike

MacSlash | CBS, NBC Get It Wrong On TV Show Downloads

$1 for a show that only works if you have a PVR...and why wouldn't you have recorded it FOR FREE on your PVR anyway? This Mac centric dig is pretty on target about the CBS/NBC stuff. Plus, you can only watch it there at home, etc.

Matrox Axio: A Conversation With Alain Legault, Part 3

More on Axio, which is a Premiere Pro based hardware/software Windows XP editing solution for SD & HD. Allows mix 'n match SD & HD on one timeline, I believe, with realtime playback (which Final Cut Pro cannot do at this time)

Accelerate Your Macintosh! News Page - 11/9/05

scamper over and grab stuff for cheep if there is one around you and you're in need.

-mike

OK, marketing BS warning - this is a press release from a company, not a "for real" article from a magazine (even though the two categories are awfully interchangeable these days):

DVD STATION TO PROVIDE HI-DEF AND FEATURE FILMS FOR VIDEO IPOD AT ITS RETAIL KIOSKS
"2005 Video Retailer of the Year" to offer video downloads for the iPod at its stores

San Francisco, CA – October 13, 2005 — Following Steve Jobs' introduction of the video iPod, DVD Station announces that it has encoded and is making available its licensed hi-def and feature film programming for the new iPod. Through its next-generation edge-networked kiosks, customers will be able to download hi-def feature length films directly to their iPod in less than 90 seconds (a process that would take 12+ hours via broadband DSL). DVD Station, recently recognized as Retailer of the Year award by the International Trade Association for the $24 billion home entertainment industry, VSDA, is known for the innovation it has brought to the category . From drive-thru and cafe video stores, to the digital download of films at retail, the company is re-inventing the retail category. "They represent the very best in the home entertainment industry," said VSDA President Bo Andersen.

DVD Station's CEO, Tim Hogan, stated about Job's announcement, "Apple's introduction of the video iPod makes it clear that the traditional distribution channels for filmed entertainment will be dramatically transformed. Widespread adoption of personal media players coupled with on-demand entertainment changes everything."

DVD Station's interactive retail solution allows a retailer to provide the inventory selection of a 6,000 ft. sq. video store in as little as 40 ft. sq. of retail space. Customers browse for product on interactive touch screens with the product inventoried in media cabinets at a service counter. The stores offer a true Bricks & Clicks experience by bringing powerful eCommerce tools to a traditional retail environment and lever aging the internet to offer customers unparalleled service in digital entertainment retail.

In support of the it's download initiative, the company has built a national edge network of multi-terabyte media servers to allow for very fast downloads of high bit-rate hi-def content. Whereas an asynchronous download might take 10 to 20 hours via the web, DVD Station can download the same content to its customers in less than 2 minutes. The company is also utilizing its proprietary merchandising algorithms to allow customers to receive recommendations, watch trailers, use powerful search tools, and read movie reviews on movie and game titles before making a selection. "Since we provide thousands of titles on-demand, it is imperative that we offer our customers sophisticated filtering tools to enable them to find content they are interested in," added company software engineer Charandeep Tatlah.

When asked about why DVD Station was offering hi-def as well as lower definition programming at it's kiosks, company CEO, Hogan, offered, "With the iPod's video-out capability, we believe that they are also bringing downloadable entertainment to the digital living room. This is, by an order of magnitude, a vastly larger market opportunity that will have more profound impacts on the industry supply chain. It's also an arena we are committed to playing in."


Mike comments: sounds very interesting, but limiting to iPods is definitely a market limitation, and a large one. How will the DRM work? How will movies be watched once at home? It is a good model for them to sell, but how good is it for us to buy?

got an interesting email from a reader:


On a related note, I wonder if either the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray camp has thought about giving its players the capability of reading the MPEG2 TS. Basically, this would add two must-have features: 1) You could record an HDTV program off the air (or cable, or satellite), directly to a recordable disc, and play it back on a player without transcoding, and 2) you could dump the data from an HDV tape directly to a recordable disc and play it back on a player without recompressing or disc authoring. Both of these would be HIGHLY, HIGHLY desirable features.


Well, damn, that IS a good idea! The only possible catch might be the datarate - at 25 megabits/sec (about 3.2 megabytes/sec), that might be too high of a data rate to play back in real time. It would also require licensing an MPEG-2 decoder, but that shouldn't be difficult - 1X Blu-Ray spec is 36 mbits/sec, and 2X is expected to be practical minimum for movie playback devices. So no problem there. Then it is just a matter of capacity - single layer Blu Ray holds 25 GB per disk, HD DVD holds 15. So Blu Ray would hold about an hour and ten minutes, HD DVD would hold about 42 minutes of footage per disc.

Actually, I think this is an EXCELLENT idea - long enough for home stuff, not long enough for movie bootlegging.

How about, industry? If we can quickly burn our HDV footage onto a disk and pop it in the living room player, that makes all kinds of groovy sense. Compressing to H.264 and VC1 is still an option, but it just takes a looooooong time. MPEG-2 is already supported in the spec, but TS (transport streams) may not be (haven't double checked the spec, but that makes sense, doesn't it? TS is for delivery, there you go).

The catch is the off-the-air thing - with all the craziness going on with broadcast flags and DRM, would they allow it? I sure hope so.

-mike

Can Hollywood Evade the Death Eaters? - New York Times

Warners is cutting costs and worrying about it's profitability in the midst of a sea change in the industry - preference for home movie viewing, the threat of digital piracy and internet bootlegging, and dropping theatrical grosses. Read on for how they are trying to cope.


"Something is changing in the movie experience," Mr. Robinov said in an interview at his office on the Warner lot last month. "Is it piracy? Is it commercials? Is it the availability of movies? Or are we not creating enough things to drive people out of the home? My biggest fear is having a movie that deserves to be seen, but is not."

-mike

G5 onboard SATA problems w/WD 400GB drives

Looks like Western Digital 400 GB drives have trouble with the built in SATA ports on a G5. Again, I continue to prefer the Seagate 7200.8 line drives for speed and reliable performance.

-mike

Guidelive.com | Arts & Entertainment

The "Truly Indie" program I mentioned in my Austin Film Festival coverage is going live - Mark Cuban's 2929 films will essentially offer their infrastructure to deserving films. A DVD arm is likely down the road as well.

Read on for details - but in short -

Indies! Start your engines! (I mean cameras!)

-mike

OK, this is sooooo not relevant to bidness, but it makes me feel good so I want to brag, I mean, ahem, to share.

A little background:

-I started this site on March 2004, and have been too lazy, I mean busy, to run any real log analysis tools on it.

-On Thursday, September 9th, 2004, I started using Google AdSense, which tracks pageviews. As of today, since that day last fall, I've had over

(Everybody now, put pinky to corner of mouth and say like Dr. Evil):

"One meeellllllleeeeon pageviews!"

Yeah - over 1,000,000 pages loaded by you most excellent HD interested folk in a bit over a year.

Wow! And that's not even including the first 6 or so months of operation.

And then on September 8th of this year, I set up a little doohickey that counts unique visitors every day. So every day at midnight the counter resets. So if you look at 24 pages today, one tomorrow, and none the day after, you get counted as two visitors - uniques per day. Using that statistic, I've had about 200,000 daily visitors in the last three months - roughly 2200 a day, 7 days a week, 3 months in a row.

And on a lesser note, I noticed I crossed the 1500 post mark sometime last month, so there are now over 1600 individual articles, workflows, editorials, analyses, rants, etc. for you to peruse, search, and use for the (hopeful) benefit of your projects (this is post #1629).

I also enjoy noting where everybody comes from - just skimming the last 100 IP addresses that came over the transom, I see in addition to all the usual .com, .org, .net addresses, stuff like .au (Australia), .pl (Poland? Dunno), .br (??), .uk (England), .nl (Netherlands? No idea), .nz (New Zealand?), .ca (Canada), .cz (Czech Republic?), .ch (maybe China?), .de (Germany), .hu (no clue at all), .pt (anyone? Bueller? Bueller?), nat.gov.ru (Russian gubmint?), somebody at apple.com, somebody at Weta Digital (Peter Jackson's FX crew), and so on. I've seen hits from ILM and Digital Domain in the past, too. It's very, very gratifying to be so widely read. Welcome all, and thanks!

So that is all totally non-sucky in my book, and I want to THANK EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU for taking time out of your busy schedules to check out the site.

Thanks, and I plan to keep at it!

-mikey, smilin' big!

CBS, NBC to Offer TV Shows for 99 Cents - Yahoo! News

More details

-Law & Order:SVU
-CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
-NCIS
-Survivor
-The Amazing Race

video on demand

$0.99 an episode
-rental not owning

OH! That's another difference with the iTunes vs. VOD - you OWN the show and can watch it infinitely

Playlist: Networks consider iTunes to sell video

I reported on the rumor the other week, but here' s more details.

iTunes faces competition in video market
Goldman Sachs says that Apple could face stiff competition in the digital video market during 2006, as Viacom and General Electric have agreed to provide on-demand TV shows to cable and satellite companies--just hours after their premiers--for $1 each, half the price of videos on Apple's iTunes Music Store.


...and the interesting thing is that, for those on-demand TV shows, they'll be delivered in near-DVD quality instead of teenie tiny size. The trade-offs - while Viacom and GE will have better quality, playback will be strictly limited to the living room (or bedroom or wherever a cable boxed TV is). Which is, anyway, the most preferable viewing environment. Apple's offerings will be more mobile - on iPod, on a friend's TV (if connected to video iPod w/cables), on laptop or desktop computer, or any TV (friend's included) if connected to a laptop with video out capabilities (like my trusty 12 inch Powerbook I'm typing on here).

Options are good - notice how fast all this stuff is happening right now? And for $1, that's worth the convenience to me of NOT recording on VHS. Come to think of it, I have 3 VHS decks in the house, and I've NEVER recorded an over the air show with any of them. I've made dubs and VHS copies of video projects, but that's about it.

Me hates VHS. VHS bad. Ongawa, and whatnot.

Yeah, I should have a TiVo, but I don't have the time to watch that much TV, nor do I want to be TEMPTED by that much TV. Too many things to do in life, like stare at Powerbook....

-mike

More and more gore pervades pop culture

Talks about the steady rise of violence, especially clearly detailed and delineated violence, in media, but movies and TV is where we want to focus. I'm not commenting pro or con, just noting that the technical ability to portray extreme violence has made improvements in quality and lowered costs, as well as the more significant societal acceptance of portraying it. I liked the author's point about sublimated sex drives in a post-Janet Jackson environment. Sexual content is regulated, but violent content largely is not. There used to be rules about shooting someone in the head on camera in the past, I don't know if those rules still stand.

(Mmmm, head shots....

....I'm so kidding)

-mike

MacNN | SoftRAID v3.3 offers improved Tiger support

Version 3.3 of the RAID formatting software I strongly recommend (especially for mirrorred configurations) is now available. Better support for Tiger, SATA, hotswap enclosures, etc., as well as faster mirror rebuilds.

From their press release:

SoftRAID 3.3 ships; Faster mirror rebuilds and Disk Warrior compatibility

SoftRAID, LLC is pleased to announce the shipping of SoftRAID version
3.3, with full Mac OS 10.4.3 compatibility. With this release, SoftRAID
3.3 improves its Mirror rebuild technology, moves towards Intel
compatibility, and fixes several minor bugs including a conflict with
Disk Warrior.

Mirror rebuilds are significantly improved under SoftRAID 3.3. Volume
optimization algorithms have been changed to make Mirror rebuilds faster
and more transparent. Volumes optimized for Workstation and Server now
get higher rebuilding priority from the OS, allowing faster rebuilds
regardless of other disk activity.

SoftRAID 3.3 fixes a conflict with DiskWarrior 3 under Mac OS 10.4, which
prevented users from using the popular diagnostic and repair utility with
the SoftRAID 3.2.x driver.

SoftRAID 3.3 improves compatibility with third-party SATA cards,
enclosures, and drives. SoftRAID 3.3's main window now assigns each SATA
bus a unique bus ID.

"Our engineers continue to refine SoftRAID 3 to give our customers the
best backup and archive solution available," said Miriam Block, Managing
Director. "We have also invested considerable time working with third
parties to test their hardware configurations to ensure compatibility
with SoftRAID."

Block also noted that SoftRAID is nearing completion on Mac-Intel
compatibility and expects to be ready when Apple releases the first
Intel-based hardware for Mac OS X.

-mike

Macworld: News: Grokster shuttered in court settlement

A significant win for content and copyright holders over the Wild West attitude of the peer to peer companies. As much as I'm in favor of free exchange of info, Grokster was, pretty much, making it easy to share obviously copyrighted materials. Other cases I'm sure will follow along similar lines - an end of an era.

Yeah, lots of bootlegging went on, but the raw, open sharing of tons of stuff (by volume, not percentage) that WAS legal was very cool about it all.

MacNN | Apple to unveil Mactel Mini at Macworld Expo?

A new report by UBS Research suggest that Apple could release an Intel-based Mac Mini as soon as January 2006 at the upcoming Macworld Expo and that more video content and digital entertainment offerings for the fifth-generation iPod will be available at the conference.

Hmm. Maybe. Or, at least an announcement at the show with units shipping within 30 days.

Another longer article here, with more details such as suppositions about Yonah motherboards and Intel's Viiv hardware platform (and I'm full expecting a Viiv Mac Mini with TV connections sometime next year).

-mike

MacMerc.com: Avid preping products in anticipation of Intel Macs

Avid plans to be ready for the move to Intel by synchronizing development of both Intel & PPC Mac platforms. At roughly the same pacing, they'll be migrating to overall synchronization between Mac & Windows platforms by mid 2006, so the PC version won't be different (usually ahead) of the Mac version.

Good news!

-mike

2005 Machinima Film Festival

Machinima time again! Machinima is making movies using video games as a realtime 3D rendering tool, basically staging stuff in the game and using a character's POV to record it. The first really good one was Red vs Blue using the Halo engine to tell the silly and ironic story about a bunch of soldiers stuck in a remote outpost.

I think one of the more interesting possiblities as the toolsets evolves is to use this kind of tech for previsualization, as Spielberg did for certain scenes in the movie AI - build a virtual set in low polygonal resolution, and use a virtual camera to line up shots, figure out compositions, etc. if you are going to be using CG later.

CinemaTech: The shake-up at Warner Bros.

Scott tracks the changes going on at Warner Brothers. Sounds like Warners is getting ready to release fewer movies and push them harder with marketing. Blah.

Scott's insightful comment -

. I just think they're wrong, that the future is about making more movies that take bigger chances, and create new characters and stories, rather than milking established franchises. The more expensive a film, and the more heavily a studio's financial results rest on an individual release, the less likely that movie is to be fresh or original. ("Miss Congeniality 2," anyone?)


Again, lazy blogging on my part, read the original NYTimes article here.

Macworld UK - CBS 'in talks' with Apple for iTunes video

I'd heard rumor of this and commented about it, but now it is confirmed - CBS is in talks with Apple to have downloadable TV shows.

CBS has started airing episodes of Threshold as Real Media for free, but that is only as a streaming video that you can only watch on your computer while connected online by watching it on CBS's website - rather limiting.

Perhaps they have realized that the ability to watch anywhere, anytime, on a wider range of devices (computer online or off, iPod, iPod or computer connected to TV) is a more desirable thing.

-mike

Wired News: Video and the Podcasting Star

Mike's takeaway - writing decent text is hard enough, producing decent/interesting/professionally produced audio is much harder, and producing good video is much much harder than that. So don't expect tons of good content to be out there. RocketBoom is decent, and I'd imagine it takes them a LOT of work to get that produced.

-mike

Broadcast Flag Bill Writers Run Drafts Up the Pole:

Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee are circulating drafts of three bills that would give federal agencies the ability to write regulations preventing digital radio and TV broadcasts from being pirated.

Two of the legislative proposals would give authority to the Federal Communications Commission to approve so-called 'broadcast flag' regulations that would prevent digital broadcasts from being uploaded on the Internet.


Once again, the industry is trying to clamp down on the ability to work with digital media, impeding it's most basic functionality - to be copied and sent wherever/whenever. Once again, fair use, academic use, satirical use would be out the window.

-mike

Next-Gen "Analog Hole" Legislation Proposed

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unearthed a proposed bill that would regulate any analog recording device, allowing content providers to encode rights restrictions inside the content itself.

...

As presented, however, the bill would close the so-called "analog hole" on virtually all devices. Although digital streams can be encrypted and encoded with various restrictions and permissions, once converted back into an analog format, the stream can be copied or manipulated freely -- the analog "hole," first referred to by Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America around 2002. The provisions of the act would take place a year after its enactment.

Such an analog hole allows a consumer,for example, to tape a televised baseball game on his VCR, even if Major League Baseball expressly forbids him doing so. Under the new legislation, such rights would be enforced through technology.


Laaaaaaaame. It would require virtually all analog devices to be capable of honoring digital rights management.

Once again, the industry wants to dump fair use right out the window.

-mike

OpenHD. scalable. accessible. affordable.

OpenHD is a certified solutions plan to run Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows XP systems that have been certified to work correctly. With the variability of PC motherboards, graphics cards, chipsets, etc., this sounds like a good idea, but the price points are surprisingly high - $7500 for an HDV certified system, $16,000 for an uncompressed HD system (running on SCSI no less!) with only 1.6TB of storage, another for $13,000, etc. Yikes. FCP running on G5s is MUCH more affordable.

-mike

CinemaTech: Public radio piece: Digital cinema, James Cameron, `Chicken Little'

Scott covers a piece that he was quoted in on NPR.

CinemaTech: Murch, Apple, and `Jarhead'

Lazy blogging again - Walter Murch edits with Final Cut, he cut Cold Mountain with Final Cut, and now has cut Jarhead for Sam Mendes with Final Cut. He talks about the advantages of editing in high def 24p, and using Quicktime movies to quickly preview sequences for directors and others hundreds or thousands of miles away.

-mike

Tight Ship

Nice detailed article in Millimeter on how Serenity was brought in on such a (relatively) low budget. Lots of details on shooting styles, tricks to save money in VFX, etc. The most interesting thing to me - they shot Super35 with anamorphic lenses and did a digital stretch to get 2.35 aspect ratio (I may be getting something wrong here, but that's the gist of it) to get a clean look, and that the DI process was key to their success.

interested in how to make scifi on a lower budget? Read on. Interested in how to shoot film and take advantage of lower costs for film quality digital post production possible now? Read on.

Thanks to Paul from robogeek.com for pointing this out.

-mike

Joseph Tura sent in this report on Chicken Little and the 3D process they are using:

Mike:

I saw "Chicken Little" on Friday afternoon in a theater in the Chicago suburbs. I've got to tell you, this technology has the potential to really upset the cinema applecart. It's phenomenal. Take 3D movies, subtract the sync problems (one projector running at 144 frames per second), subtract the dust and dirt, subtract the jump and weave of film in the gate, add digital imaging and you have the most amazing image you've ever seen. Clean, crisp, dimensionally perfect. Incredible.

Unfortunately, it deserved a better movie. "Chicken Little," while not an unmitigated disaster, is a hyperkinetic mess that, at its worst, tries unsuccessfully to ape the Pixar films. It's also crude and primitive from a 3D modeling and animation standpoint. If this film had NOT been in 3D, I would have ankled it.

But someone will make a great film in this process, and the race will be on. Jim Cameron is apparently prepping "Battle Angel Aleita," a sci-fi film that will marry live action and CGI, based on a Japanese manga story. If anyone can exploit this process, it's Cameron.

By the way, you have it slightly wrong about the single-camera thing. The process you are talking about is a 2D-to-3D conversion process that some people claim works. I haven't seen it, and I can't imagine it possible could work. There's simply no way to derive stereo imagery from most 2D films. But people (including Lucas) claim it works.

"Chicken Little," as I understand it, had a second eye view rendered by ILM, who were responsible for setting the 3D variables and making an effective 3D film out of it. I think the "other eye" view is shot from a "virtual camera" position a few inches from the first one, so it is TRUE stereo, not a conversion.

I strongly recommend you travel to see this presentation, if possible. It opens your eyes to one very potent piece of cinema's future.


Great report, Joseph, thanks very much!

-mike

Jury Out on Kodak's Digital Transformation: Financial News - Yahoo!
Finance

This is late - I started this on Oct. 27th and just forgot to get back to it, but it is still topical I think.

Article on Kodak's woes. As they try to transition from analog to digital imaging, they are going into the red. They lost over a billion dollars last QUARTER, not last year. They hope to have profits back up to $1B by 2007. They hope.

Why am I covering this? Why do I, or should you, care? Because Kodak makes your film stock. And why am I covering film in HD For Indies? This isn't Film for Indies. Because if you want the best possible image quality, right now that is still film. You can still use HD in that process - posting in HD after telecine/datacine.

But the professional 16/35mm cinematography market depends on the consumer 35mm still market for it's lifeblood. The massive infrastructure that Kodak has built up over the last century around film is starting to come apart - and it is the efficiency of scale that allows for the current price point and infrastructure around film's current price point. I'd imagine the factories that make 35mm film, and all the infrastructure they need, are the same or right next to the lines that produce motion picture film. The motion picture film industry lives at the behest and largess of the consumer film industry because of this.

Picture 10-15 years from now - how much consumer 35mm photography will there be? Probably very little, just the hardcore film junkies. That will play into how much money Kodak would put into related film technologies, such as motion picture film stock. If it were scaled back to just a little bit of consumer film, and whatever motion picture film stock was still produced, the price would i (which frankly, I think will be less as digital cinematography continues to improve and fewer and fewer commercials and TV shows get shot on film over time)

Thanks to Michael Flynn of B-Scene Films for sending that link in!

PS-I really appreciate it with readers send in links that I haven't hit yet - send in a link of interest with your name and your company's URL and I'll credit you, too.

UPDATE: It'll take lots more products like this 39 megapixel still camera to get Kodak back in the game. Since they did film, and not cameras, and film is dead, they have to jump into the digital camera biz with both feet. It would be nice to see them develop some killer image compression technologies since they have so much core competency in imaging, but I don't know if they could pull it off inhouse - digital compression is NOT their core competency. But that wouldn't stop them from being able to go acquire a company (or license some technology) to market some thing as such, leveraging their good name, distribution & marketing muscle to push it into the market. I do like the IDEA of their Kodal Look Management System, but haven't personally done a project on it so I can't say definitively how well it works. And in any case, that is a very niche professional project aimed solely at film projects - a niche niche product.

-mike

Macworld UK - Analysts impressed by million video feat

Missed posting this a few days ago. 1 million downloads in less than 3 weeks. Yeah, I'm thinkin' there's some demand for downloadable video content for pay now.

Wired News: The Cover-Up Is the Crime

The gist is this: Sony installs DRM (digital rights management) software on your Windows PC to keep you from ripping the audio content to an MP3 like you could with a regular CD. People hate that already. But what is insidious about it is how they went about it - installing a rootkit, which not only allows altering profoundly how your computer operates, but also hiding it's existence in the first place. So your computer runs slower (1-2% CPU load at all times, even when not playing audio), it creates a security risk, AND it hides it's very existence so you don't know you have a security issue to manage. UGH! Ultra lame.

Recently they got busted for sneaking this in there, and are catching hell for it. Read on for more details.

Sony is also scheduled to release patches for anti-virus software for this, and also something else that I'm not sure if it is a de-installer or not.

In any case, it is pretty appaling that they did this, they hid it, they tried to pretend it was OK that they did it after the fact, and never were clear about what they were doing in the first place. Ugh.

-mike
UPDATE: and their patch might break Windows, too.

Making the Movie: HD Expo Report #1: The Future

John Ott is attending the HD Expo and sent in a link to his lengthy report on his blog. Lots of details about future of film, and RealD, future of theatrical projection, etc.

THANK YOU JOHN for sharing this, and anybody else, feel free to send in your comments/links/experiences if you've been attending HD Expo as well.

-mike

Update - after first getting confirmation from Sonnet, it also looks like Firmtek and Highpoint can't support port multiplying either with their current products.

FireWire Depot - FireWire USB SATA - Five drive SATA hot-swap enclosure

5 drives, one SATA port, no waiting. I'd expect to see performance in the 200-220 MB/sec range. Unlike the hardware RAID 5 from Wiebetech I linked to earlier today, this is strictly RAID 0 (or software RAID 1 or 1+0 using Disk Utility). At $600 for an empty enclosure, this is an interesting option if you need lots of hotswap storage that can scale to handle a LOT of data - 8 ports times 5 drives of up to 500 GB capacity means a maximum theoretical capacity of 20TB - wow! Of course, if you wanted to halve the capacity and throughput, but gain data redundancy to prevent lost data, that would work too for the same price.

Using these enclosures, you could make a RAID 0 big enough to max out the throughput capabilities of a PCI-X SATA card. Nobody (that I know of) has ever made a RAID 0 capable of more than 550ish MB/sec. Even assuming that is the max, it should be possible to make a RAID 1+0 with Disk Utility capable of at least 270 MB/sec. Interesting indeed!

Hmm...thinking more about that - with Seagate 7200.8 400 GB drives down to $230, that would be 5x$230+$600=$1750 for each 1850 GB (formatted) of capacity. That's under $1/GB including enclosure. Add a $300 SATA card, and you have a 14.8TB of formatted capacity for about $14,300. Want data integrity and plenty of throughput for uncompressed HD? OK, that's same price but half the capacity, so that's under $2/GB. DAMN. Apple's recently updated XServe RAID? 7TB of raw capacity, but realistically 5.550 TB of formatted RAID 50 capacity, at $12,995, so $2.34/GB. Hmm. Not that big a difference, except that the native SATA is more modular to get up to those capacities. Of course with XServe RAID, you get hardware RAID, only two cables instead of up to 8, smaller form factor, fiber channel connectivity, SAN possible, management software, better failure handling, etc.

Port multiplication is a very interesting feature to be suported.

I'm not exactly clear as to whether any/all SATA II cards would support this, if you are a vendor, please let me know.

-mike

Update- looks like the current Sonnet cards don't support this kind of port multiplication. They are aware of the issue and future products look to rectify that situation. From the sound of it, current products are unlikely to be updateable to handle that. Further update - it would appear that Firmtek and Highpoint have the exact same limitation as well with current products.

Two articles were brought to my attention (thanks Tim!) about Chicken Little being released on 84 digital 3D screens this weekend:

'Chicken' release set on more than a wing and prayer

and

Exhibs, studios have eye on 'Chicken' rollout

It has been a sprint to the wire to get ready for this, and Disney is rolling out a tremendous amount of equipment in a very short period of time and hoping it all works, with lots of technical challenges sprinkled on top.

The most interesting things to me about all this are:

1.) Disney, like the other movie studios, sees most of their income coming from sales of DVDs from their large library of films. If they want to keep people coming to the theaters instead of renting DVDs (or high def DVDs soon) and watching in the comfort of their living rooms or home theaters with big screens, surround sound, and soda/popcorn for <$10, they need to offer something that CAN'T be replicated at home. 3D is one option to do that - so this is a big test to see if audiences like it, appreciate it, are willing to see it in the theaters, and are also willing to spend up to $2/ticket more for the experience.

2.) They were willing to sprint to upgrade theaters to digital projection in order to do this, with secure servers included in the equation. New projectors, new digital movie servers (with security and major encryption), and new screens (yep, the thing at the front of the theater had to be upgraded for this process) were installed, all to get an extra $2 a ticket. Now that these systems are installed, other digital movies can be shown, either 2D or 3D. But after all the talk and slow deployment of digital projectors for 2D movies, Disney plunked down and rushed for 3D digital. 3D was, apparently, the killer app for Disney (or at least they hope it will be). HOWEVER, my sources outside of this HR article say that the real push for this came from RealD, the company that invented the 3D technology, and that Disney itself, while taking part in this, wasn't the motivating force. At $150K per screen or so, it isn't a cheap conversion. And with a rumored $50K/yr maintenance contract (how can that be right?), it had BETTER pay off big.

3.) The price tag - about $8 million to convert Chicken Little to 3D (and they had to go out of house to ILM to do it, that's another interesting story about how ILM is keeping itself fresh and necessary, I've felt Weta Digital has taken the crown on Best Visual Effects away from long term king ILM). THEN about $150K per screen, plus another $50K annually for maintenance (this from other sources) for the projectors, secure media servers, and new shinier screens. RealD is the real push behind making that happen, Disney is involved but it is RealD's process that makes this possible. Actually rendering everything in stereo (two cameras, one for each eye) would add FAR more than $8M to Disney's budget, so if this works it'll be great. I heard a rumor that the projection system works by switching the glasses off and on, left/right/left/right, as they display different frames, something like odd frames for left eye, even frames for right eye. Whether it is actually fields or frames I don't know. I think it uses polarized screens to do this, so maybe there is no actual flickering going on in the glasses, just light that is visible through one polarized lens or not. In any case, I heard that this process may cause eyestrain/headache/annoyance for some audience members, just have to wait and see.

Do read the articles, worth it.

Other sources also indicate that there is a commitment for 5 more 3D movies using the RealD process, with Zemeckis' "Monster House" set up as the next one, with a goal of having 200 3D capable screens up in time.

The RealD process itself is very interesting because it does NOT require rendering or shooting all scenes from two different cameras as most 3D processes do. Instead, they take the original, 2D master, and process to make another eye view. One "eye" version stays exactly the same, and the other eye's view is created from it using, I would guess, depth of field analysis, pattern/motion recognition and background generation/replication, and a certain amount of hand holding/steering of the process. Hopefully, it isn't someone defining an area and instructing the software "this is X feet from camera" or some painful process like that. Talk about "Time to make the donuts." But at $8 million a movie, maybe it is...remember that dimensionalized home video footage in "Minority Report" of the kid running that Tom Cruise's character watches at home? It's kind of like that in terms of trying to separate foreground from background I would imagine (except for the actual, poke-out-into-the-living-room part of it of course).

-mike

Well, darnit, I had a good 6-10 links open with articles all leading to the conclusion that Things Are Changing, and Quickly.

The NYTimes had a few articles last week about downloadable movies, the difference in usage patterns between big (giant home theater screens) and small (iPod video) screens, downloadable porn for iPods (porn is first in any new media of note), M. Night Shyamalan predicting the Death of Movie Theaters if the window between theatrical and DVD release is collapsed, more downloadable movie services that are charging, Apple has successfully sold over 1 million video downloads in less than three weeks, on and on and on.

Again, why care on HD For Indies? Because, as I've researched about how to put a movie together over the last couple of years, the tools to do it on the cheap are interesting, but meaningless if you don't have a place to distribute your results. Online distribution is getting real - it isn't real yet, it isn't profitable yet, indies don't have access to it yet, but I see all this changing quickly. I think I said this the other day - I fully expect Apple to take a very, VERY serious run at doing for downloadable movies what they've done for downloadable music. Whether long form as a format will carry over to downloads, or the shorter form currently favored for download and watching on computer or iPod.

-mike

This is completely inane and includes foul language. If you have a productive life or a delicate sensibility, skip this one.

Letter I'd like to send:

Dear Capitol One:

I really, really, REALLY do not wish to have one of your credit cards. I realize you have strong, perhaps even vehement feelings to the contrary, and that the abundant mailings you are sending me make your feelings known. OH SO KNOWN.

Now that I have torn up the FIFTH Capitol One credit card application IN A ROW going through my mail of the last few weeks, please let me be clear:

1.) I, Mike Curtis, do not wish to have a Capitol One credit card.

2.) I, Mike Curtis, president & owner of 3beam, Inc., do not wish to have a Capitol One Business Card.

3.) I, Mike Curtis, President and owner of HD For Indies, do not wish to have a Capitol One Business Card.

4.) I, Mike Curtis, President of the DEFUNCT AND SHUT DOWN company Strategic Media Lab, Inc., ESPECIALLY do not wish to have a Strategic Media Lab Capitol One Business Credit card.

I know, I know, you've asked me repeatedly, as all of these entities, that you'd really, really like to be my friend and charge me interest for my purchases, but please do kindly FUCK THE FUCK OFF and leave me alone, and don't send me any more of these. I'm getting tired of shredding them, this is just dead tree spam as far as I'm concerned.

-Mike Curtis


As a public service announcement, and also just to save some trees, go check out this link to get your name removed from the list the credit bureaus sell to credit card companies. It'll get you off the list for five years. You can also call 1-888-5OPTOUT to do the same thing (I just did).

Unfortunately, that only is good for personal, individual credit card offers, and doesn't work for the businesses. Drat!

UPDATE: See bottom for latest update.

FresHDV | ATI uses GPU to transcode video in 1/5 the time CPU takes

From FresHDV:

ExtremeTech has noted that ATI has been investing in a new graphics card architecture that enables the use of 'GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPU) applications'. The X1000 series of ATI cards support this new architecture.


This is the foundation of what Final Touch HD is already doing to do high quality, realtime color correction. I also see this type of thing as the foundation for faster performance in Final Cut Pro 6, presumably shipping or announcing at NAB 2006, to finally take real advantage of CoreVideo and it's capabilities. No, I have zero actual factual confirmation of this, but to quote Agent Smith:

"It is inevitable."

This is why I said the other week that GPU will do more CPU type tasks to speed up FCP.

Read on for details of a demo showing MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and WMV9 encoding. This is all on PC platform, but the basic idea is what Apple has built into the OS with CoreImage and CoreVideo.

It is coming. And I saw it coming.

: )

-mike

UPDATE - Dan Pinard was quick to send in this link from MacOSRumors.com, talking about the new GPU computational development team, getting substantial accelleration of H.264 or MPEG-4 encoding, as much as 2 or 3 times faster than the CPU with even their first effort, but later 4 or 5 times faster as the tech matures.

-mike again

MacNN | Media 100 taking preorders for Media 100 sw

I've ragged on this dead-end product before, but just to be clear, stay away from this dying product, it has no future! Not enough interoperability, and dying on the ground, roots cut off.

-mike

RAID 5 versus RAID 0 on G5 Power Mac (RocketRAID 220)

Did I just blog this the other day? I'm too lazy/lame to check. Anyway, stats on RAID 5 vs. RAID 0 with the Highpoint cards vs. other cards and other storage options. LaCie S2S in RAID 0 and 0+1 modes vs. Highpoint 2220 in those modes. Interesting numbers, but it all boils down to It Ain't There Yet for uncompressed HD usage.

Their new PCIe based card, I think called the 2330 or 2320 or somesuch, purportedly has Mac drivers and unless they've changed the RAID XOR processor, will probably perform similarly.

-mike

FresHDV | First Cut - a nice little app for simple capture/logging

OK, busy day, lazy blogging, I'm just quoting FresHDV on this one, read on for more but this gives you the idea:

Skramsoft has introduced a very interesting niche DV production app called First Cut. It's an NLE for MacOSX that's designed lean on features/bloat and emphasizes it's use for quick cutting and logging of DV footage. Seems to be quite a departure from what is available at this time on OSX for editing, but the focus makes perfect sense to me. First Cut is lean, mean, and cuts fast.

The tagline is 'Why pay for a Swiss Army Knife when all you need is a good can opener?' Cost is a meager $150.00, which I imagine is well worth it for those that need such a tool (and nothing more...why pay for FCP features that you won't use on a logging workstation).

HighPoint-RocketRAID 2220

I have been extremely underwhelmed with HighPoint's products to date in terms of reliability, user interface, and form factor convenience. BUT, they have a PCIe 8 port SATA card. All internal ports, which is a bummer, but hey, beggars can't be choosers at this point in time. Claims to have Mac drivers, too. But untested by me.

-mike

Cinematography.com :: Professional Motion Picture Camera People, News and Resources

This is a discussion forum (pages long) about working with the ARRI D-20. As usual, the interesting stuff is at the top and it devolves from there. The good bit has to do with them being happy shooting with it, and an experienced film crew needed just minutes to adapt to the workflow on set. No biggie at all.

Interesting to note that the shooter doesn't consider it an HD camera - it was pitched as ARRI D-20, not HD. And he considered it better than a Viper. And he wouldn't have pitched F900 to the client for this job at ALL.

-mike

Ultimate AV: Here Come The Chinese

Toshiba/HD DVD group courts Chinese for cheap HD DVD players -

In an attempt to get low cost players out into the market as a means of securing market share early on, and hopefully stave off the apparent victory of Blu Ray, Toshiba and the HD DVD group are courting low cost Chinese manufacturers to make HD DVD players. A risky move - Chinese manufacturers are known for demanding, and getting, access to core technology under the rubric of needing to know how it works to make low cost units; then turning around and making cheap, unlicensed knock-offs a few years later without paying royalties.

This sniffs of desperation.

Thanks to Michael Flynn for pointing out this link.

-mike

macosxhints - Use higher resolution MPEG4s on the iPod Video

Geeky fun - looks like you can push past 480x480 for MPEG-4 on iPods for playback. Now, does it choke or skip? Dunno, but for the uber dorks out there like me, this is interesting stuff.

WiebeTech Micro Storage Solutions - RT5x2%u2122

10 bay hotswap RAID chassis, connects via FireWire or SATA or USB. Not your usual SATA box enclosure at all. IDE drives. Built in handles, made to be transported, they even offer a padded Pelican case (made for travel as a carry-on with wheels and plenty-o-foam inside).

It'll do RAID 0, 1+0, 1+0+spare, RAID 3, RAID 3 w/spare, RAID 5, or RAID 5 w/spare. Hardware RAID, pushbutton interface on front. XP or OS X (or Linux that supports FW).

Each bank of 5 drives connects via FW800, a single SATA, or a USB 2 port. So times two for the two banks of 5 drives each.

Up to 50 MB/s per RAID - feh, deal killer for uncompressed HD. Oh, and it is $3200 with no drives. Ouch. But you can build your own, which helps save money, and it can handle up to 5TB of RAID 5, which is nothing to sneeze at. But with a max data transfer rate of 100 MB/sec, that is too low for too many of the formats I'd want to work with. Now, if I needed a ton of secure storage for SD or compressed HD, I'd consider this. I'd consider other things, too.

-mike

Mac OS X 10.4.3

Macintouch readers chime in with their 10.4.3 notes; clearly there are some issues with fan noise in G4/G5s.

UPDATE - yeah, I wouldn't install this one. I don't see anyone crowing about anything really significant being fixed, and lots of complaints. I would hope there is a quick 10.4.4 fix, or at least 10.4.3.1 or somesuch.

In any case, lots of dual G5 fan noise complaints.

For best results (from the page):

Before doing anything... I repaired disk permissions, rebooted, ran all of Cocktail's autoPilot options and cleared out caches etc., and then rebooted again. Only after doing all of that, I downloaded the Combo (Full) Update 105.5MB. I ran the Combo Update, rebooted, repaired permissions again, and ran Cocktail again, and rebooted again.
Excessive I know - but I have done this on my PowerBook G4 15", and Mac Mini 1.42GHz, and also my iMac G5. It has worked flawlessly.
Only one small problem, and that's Pithhelmet (plugin for Safari) won't work - but that's a known issue, and a temporary fix has been posted elsewhere.


-mike

Usenet search engine preps porn for video iPod - Yahoo! News

Ahh, first in any market. So why is HD For Indies covering postage stamp sized porn downloads? Because here's yet another (future) distribution model. These guys are taking stuff off of Usenet and posting it up, and I predict they'll get sued in short order for copyright violation.

Plus, it R funny.

-mike

Apple - Shake Trial

It has some major shortcomings, like no saving, no undo/redo, no copy/paste, 40 node limit.

But you have full rendering capabilities. As soon as I have time, I'll be starting my 30 day demo to play with the Optical Flow stuff.

-mike

Personal Technology -- Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.

Walt Mossberg, the personal technology writer for the Wall Street Journal, writes about the invasive nature of DRM (Digital Rights Management).

1.) Hooray! I'm glad these issues are getting wider coverage.

2.) Read this if you don't really understand what DRM is and why it matters.

Salient quote from the article:

In my view, both sides have a point, but the real issue isn't DRM itself -- it's the manner in which DRM is used by copyright holders. Companies have a right to protect their property, and DRM is one means to do so. But treating all consumers as potential criminals by using DRM to overly limit their activities is just plain wrong.



-mike

MacNN | AJA Video ships PCI Express video card

The $1800 Kona LHe from AJA is the first PCIe HD card to ship for the new G5 PowerMacs with PCIe.

It is a very powerful card with both analog and digital inputs and outputs for SD and HD.

About the Mac OS X 10.4.3 Update (Delta)

Apple released 10.4.3. I've had one friend have trouble updating her 12" PowerBook, would loiter during bootup for frightening periods of time (grey screen spinning dealie).

Supposedly fixes/addresses issues with tons of stuff, I have no reports on it yet. Unless you have a crippling problem that this is supposed to fix, I'd hold off and see other users' reports.

-mike