HD For Indies

Sony HDR-FX1 HDV Digital Camcorder for $2,000 - dealmac.com

While the FX1 isn't my first pick (I'd MUCH rather see folks get the Z1U), this price is so good I had to share it. The $1995 price is $820 less than the best other price dealmac has seen. Hmm....something new coming out at NAB perhaps, and they're trying to clear inventory? Regardless, it's a helluva price, go git you one if you were thinking of an A1U or HC3.

Thanks to Paul of RoboGeek.com for sending that one in!

UPDATE - it has been pointed out to me that BMD announced the Multibridge Express for July shipment, and that Studio was the only one promised to deliver 2K (and it was to ship after the Extreme). So I have been unduly harsh in my original criticism that I wrote the other day. July was original ship date, 2K was not promised at time of annoucement at NAB. The product has been shipping since December and 2K support was added 3 or 4 months thereafter. Apologies to all for the inaccuracies and undue criticism.

Blackmagic Design: Software Downloads

BlackMagic Design shipped new drivers (version 5.5) for their Multibridge Extreme, and the main new feature is support for displaying 2K images at 23.98 or 24.0 fps on a 30" LCD (Apple, Dell, etc.) These displays have 2560x1600 resolution; 2K res is 2048x1556.

The other big news is that the new drivers are in flavors for BOTH Mac and Windows, so Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and Final Cut are both supported.

From the press release:


Software release Multibridge Extreme 5.5 includes:
- True 2K, 10 bit RGB real time playout support for Apple Final Cut Pro
on Mac OS X and Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 on Windows XP

- True 2K real time preview for popular effects and paint applications
such as Adobe After Effects 7.0, Photoshop, Shake and Combustion

- Support for 30” dual-link DVI-D displays at full resolution 2K 2048x1556,
and support for 2048x1536, 2048x1157, 2048x1106, 2048x1080 at 23.98 and
24 fps

- Closed caption support in high and standard definition analog and digital
video

- Added Windows 2003 server support for software version 5.5 for Windows
XP


Multibridge Extreme is ONLY for PCIe Macs & PCs (the PCI-X bridgeboard has been removed from the website, so don't expect it anytime soon, if ever), and lists for $2595.

Mike's Comments:

First off, it's about time! The product was announced nearly a year ago at NAB 2005, and we're less than a month from NAB 2006 and it finally has the feature they promised at last year's NAB. While the switch to PCIe certainly is an understandable reason to delay product release (and they only have one PCIe card out, but at least it's the best one), it is frustrating to see products announced at one year's show and not see it working as promised until very nearly the next show. The Multibridge Studio, which is the bigger brother, of course has not even shipped yet. OK, enough whining, on to the cool news:

The press release states that it maps pixel for pixel, so your 2K images are likely to be overly tall - 2K scans are usually anamorphic, and at pixel for pixel, the image will be too tall. This also implies that the image does not fill the screen, but has about 250 pixels on either side of the image and a small number top and bottom of the image that are blacked out. This is the sharpest possible option, but it would be nice to scale to fill screen at correct aspect ratio. But this would involve some serious realtime math, so I'm not expecting that anytime soon.

As for editing 2K on Final Cut or Premiere, I think I read recently that Premiere Pro 2.0 can handle 10 bit 4:4:4 now (and anybody bust me if I got that wrong). Final Cut, however, much as I love it, can either do 8 bit RGB 4:4:4, or 10 bit 4:2:2 YUV, but CANNOT properly process (as in cross dissolve, color correct, or any other filter) 10 bit 4:4:4 RGB.

And both editors cannot properly interpret logarithmic data as far as I know. Final Cut definitely not, Premiere Pro not as far as I know - I've never heard this mentioned.

That is their CURRENT status however. Perhaps at NAB we'll see improvements. There were rumors of a "super" version of Final Cut Pro (Final Cut Extreme I think they called it) earlier this year on one of the rumor boards. Perhaps 2K support for Final Cut Pro is to be announced at NAB? That is complete conjecture based on rumor and this product stuff, but it'll be interesting to wait and see.

Personally, I'd be delighted to see it happen, but it would seem to be an impractical move for Apple - it is SUCH a small market to serve, and while it would have prestige, with so few customers using it for that, how well would it actually work to fit those client's needs? If there were problems, how much manpower would Apple put behind it to really, REALLY work right, rather than well enough to trumpet that they could do it? With more and more work sliding over to digital acquisition, would Apple be best served to support digital film workflows in this way, or should they be focusing on better HD support? I'd think they'd serve more customers better by putting effort into more day to day practical stuff like supporting realtime SD and HD on the same HD timeline (but I hear that would require a COMPLETE rewrite of HUGE chunks of the core code, so while I'd love to see it, I'm not expecting that this year).

But since I DO want to work on film style workflows, I'd be DELIGHTED if Apple supported 2K in FCP 6.

: )

-mike

F350 Arrived - The Digital Video Information Network

....is a thread over on my friend's excellent DVinfo.net site. Mike Devlin, a reader, received their F350 (the better of the two XDCAM HD cameras) and has started setting it up and will be letting readers know on DVinfo.net how it comes along.

They plan on testing 60i vs 24p resolution, HD-SDI image quality vs. recording to XDCAM disc, chroma key testing, wire removal testing, etc.

Keep checking back for more details.

-mike

AppleInsider | Apple releases Final Cut and Pro apps for Intel Macs

Hooray! It's finally out! If you haven't put in your order, put it in now.

Whoever gets theirs and has an Intel Mac, please contact me, I'd like to post some test results ASAP.

-mike

I'm having to divert some time and energy to a couple of things the last few days - the server this site runs on is going to go dark in next few months (I've been living on the largesse of a generous acquaintance), and the hard drive is starting to fail. My mail has been difficult to retrieve, so I'm backing up all mail and web data and quickly looking around for a new hosting service that will accomodate current and future MUCH higher bandwidth needs (downloadable files, anyone?). I'm thinking of Yahoo vs. Dreamhost (or is that DreamSpace?) as two leading candidates.

Don't worry, this isn't like last time where I was offline for 3 weeks, this is just a day or two of running around and securing new stuff.

I'm also scurrying to secure some new office space, plotting out office configurations etc. for myself and some co-conspirators of coolness, and that's eating some time. I'll post ASAP, BlackMagic has some cool announcements about new drivers for all their products, including (finally!) 2K support on the Multibridge Extreme, and separate video and alpha simultaneous outputs on the DeckLink HD Pro Dual Link.

-mike

LCoS Display Technology Shoot-Out: Part A

Already, LCoS provides the highest resolutions, the highest non-CRT Contrast Ratios, and the most artifact-free images of any display technology. For people that are sensitive to flicker and eye-fatigue, LCoS operates at the highest refresh rates (120 Hz) for the smoothest most flicker-free images. This article will be an in-depth examination of 5 LCoS HDTVs, all but one of them prototypes, in order to get an early look into this unfolding technology.

Some (OK, a LOT) of info on LCoS (that's Liquid Crystal on Silicon) display technology.

This is back to blogging at it's basics - this is something of interest to me I came across and decided to link to. I'm researching what HDTV I'll buy and this looked like a good place to start getting some info.

After recently helping my girlfriend Melissa shop for an HDTV and discovering there were NO decent CRTs for HD, I realized I'd need something non-CRT for myself as well. SED is too far out to wait for, LCD & plasma seem to have dissapointing resolution and/or low contrast and/or elevated black levels at the price point and size I'm interested in so they're out. So I'm considering projectors of some sort, either rear or front depending on how geeky I want to get (and MAYBE, if I DO end up getting an out-of-home office, if I convert the spare bedroom to a Media Room). Stop me before I parenthetically tangentialize again.

Point being, read this to start wrapping your head around what LCoS does for HD stuff - I am.

-mike

Red Giant Software%u2019s Magic Bullet Suite Adds Support for Adobe After Effects 7: "Red Giant Software today announced the availability of Magic Bullet Suite 2.1. The software plug-in now supports Adobe After Effects 7. Magic Bullet Suite 2.1 also includes the robust DeepColor RT GPU render engine, which runs up to 7x faster than the CPU alone - allowing users to do real-time film look treatments on the desktop in standard definition. Comprised of 18 After Effects plug-ins, Magic Bullet Suite delivers a complete production pipeline for processing digital video footage for output to DVD, TV, or film."

Magic Bullet is a popular choice for making video look more like film, doing 60i to 24p conversions, and other indie digital moviemaker stuff. Now with OpenGL acceleration should make a significant different in rendering speeds.

I've been horribly remiss in NOT getting my review done of Magic Bullet for Editors, I need to catch up.

-mike

HD DVD Part 4: Mark Knox, Adviser, HD DVD Promotion Group

Part 4 of an ongoing discussion about HD-DVD. Knox talks about the security of HD-DVD, and how if somebody cracks a disc (not the overall key, as there is no One Key that will crack everything), their personal machine can be disabled with future releases, but that everyone else should be OK.

Hmmmm....the goal is ambitious and sounds secure, but there's still this analog hole thing...

-mike

Think Secret - Avie Tevanian to leave Apple, S.F. Chronicle reports

Avie Tevanian has been a key technological player for Apple. Did he get a better offer, get burnt out, have a blowout with Jobs, or what?

This causes me some concern as for Apple's future software progress. He's replaceable (most everyone is), but it is a blow.

-mike

I try to rarely if ever just dump full press releases here, but this one is interesting enough I want to share it all. RaveHD is a Linux based DDR (digital disk recorder) with a lot of interesting capabilities and flexibility. One that chiefly caught my eye was the ability to save out native QuickTimes in either 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 (RGB) color spaces. Other DDR vendors are strictly concerned with deck emulation - they want it to act EXACTLY like a tape deck. RaveHD is smart enough to go beyond that and start looking at it as an IT based solution, capturing DATA and moving that data around in a variety of different ways (HD-SDI, GigE, FireWire, whatevah) on a highly extensible platform.

While I have not ever personally used the product, I've spoken and emailed with Ramona from SpecSoft (the maker) many times and have been very impressed with what they've accomplished so far. At NAB last year, Ramona explained how they could very quickly put a QuickTime wrapper around the DPX data to get it into a QuickTime format, for instance.

The new product can do SD, HD, dual link for RGB 4:4:4 and even 2K over HSDL (High Speed Data Link, an acronym I've suddenly seen popping up a great deal more of late, and expect to see more of at NAB) at up to 10 bits/channel. Anyway, on with the show...

(Oakdale, California -- March 27, 2006) SpectSoft LLC., a leading provider of uncompressed video solutions on the Linux platform, today announced RaveHD 2.0 officially begins shipping and will be showing at the upcoming NAB convention in Las Vegas.

SpectSofts newest version not only offers new features that include reverse audio, slave record, deck standby, and 2K HSDL support but the overhaul of the existing code base now takes RaveHD 2.0 to a client/server product and makes this product an extensive VTR replacement solution. The client/server implementation allows studios to control many DDRs from a single interface in addition to making the GUI modular and easily modified. RaveHD also supports both PCI and PCIe I/O boards on both the Intel and AMD platforms in addition to new support for the Nvidia products. "RaveHD is data agnostic and can now offer this same approach to the hardware it sits on", states Ramona Howard, President of SpectSoft. "All of these changes make RaveHD a great deck replacement, with a bunch of cool tools for a variety of workflows."

RaveHD supports uncompressed SD, HD, Dual Link HD(4:4:4) and 2k(HSDL) in a single system as well as hardware accelerated upconverting and downconverting. The RaveHD Xenon system features integrated RS-422 hardware that allows for both slave and master control, unlimited scalability, dual 10/100/1000 gigabit Ethernet and includes Fiber and Firewire upgrade options. Features such as the frame oriented, standard file system storage, centralized database asset tracking, embedded timecode, embedded audio, Varicam flagging, programmable cadence engine(2:3, 3:2:3, 2:3:3:2, etc) and conform capabilities all in a simple to use interface are all standard in every RaveHD system. RaveHD works natively with DPX frames but does offer some built-in tools for those working with Quicktime and other formats in addition to tools that allow embedding audio in/out of the DPX frames.

Some of the immediately apparent changes in RaveHD would be the user friendly interface and added deck functionality whereas the underlying code changes are less apparent but far more powerful. A few of the major changes in the structure is the ability to add additional hardware easily, which will be shown at NAB and the ability to pass everything around using XML. " XML has proven to be a robust way of passing everything from commands to data around", comments Jason Howard, Lead Programmer. "RaveHD 2.0 is the release that brings everything together that we have been working on for several years", adds Howard.

"The development of 2.0 has taken a bit longer than anticipated and we are excited to finally get this out there. RaveHD can be seen at several upcoming demos which include Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Also based on what our customers were asking us for, this year we have taken the demos at NAB to a private suite at the Hilton", states Howard. RaveHD can be seen on the showroom floor in several booths (Central Hall C2548 and South Hall SU3819) and will be a great place for passerbys to see uncompressed video running on the Linux OS but the suite is where the hardcore demos will be done. Interested individuals can contact SpectSoft for both private and group demos.

Priced at $25,000, the RaveHD Xenon System features 6TB of local storage in a SATA array configuration(upgradeable to 9.6 and 12TB) and offers one of the highest quality video solutions on the market today, addressing many concerns seen by other systems. "This system is a great solution for not only the traditional DDR but as a deck replacement altogether", states Ramona Howard, President of SpectSoft. "The feature set we have built into RaveHD is unlike any other software package on the market today and it just keeps getting better with the development help we see from our customers."

Mac mini (Core Solo) : Page 1

More dated news (this from March 5th), but still interesting. Especially the part where they test 1080p H.264 playback. It does fine for 480p, OK for 720p24, but isn't QUITE there for 1080p playback in terms of rock solid 24 fps playback.

Turns out the integrated graphics (no separate graphics card) isn't such a bad thing - it outperforms the old G4 based Mini, and the tested configuration was with the default 512MB of system RAM (the Intel Mini uses system RAM for video RAM, apparently up to 80MB worth in the 512MB configs), so perhaps more RAM MIGHT help. The dual core version would probably do better as well.

I'd be very interested to know how the dual core version does, not just with 1080p24, but also 720p60 and 1080i60 footage.

-mike

Original Sonnet press release gives the specs on the models, but we care most about the Tempo SATA E4P (4 external port multiplying eSATA ports).

If you have a PCIe Mac, this is what I recommend for budget uncompressed HD. The one catch is that it only has 4 ports, so you need a port multiplying enclosure (4 or 5 drives with one SATA cable connection).

But then you're all set.

HighPoint-RocketRAID 2220

This is more old news from about a month ago -

Highpoint makes a PCIe version of their 8 port SATA II cards. It is still all internal ports, it still has a funky driver/interface, RAID 5 is still super slow compared to RAID 0, but hey, it's out there and shipping...I'm waiting for the Sonnet stuff myself.

Woops, I spoke too soon - it's official, Adobe's Creative Suite 3 won't ship until Q2 2007, but it will definitely be Intel native. Ouch! Some sources have said next April, but the "by end of year" is almost certainly wrong in light of this announcement.

AppleInsider | Adobe Creative Suite 3 not due till Q2 of 2007

MacNN | BWF2XML brings audio to Final Cut Pro

This is news from when I was offline a few weeks ago, just catching up.

BWF is a format used by some digital recorders, this'll get it into Final Cut Pro.

Showreel article : HDV on the set of 24 pt1 A day in the life of HDV

headline says it all.
Part 2:

Showreel article : HDV on the set of 24 pt2 The boys are back on set

LOTS of excellent info, I HIGHLY recommend ANYONE thinking about which camera to get read these closely.

CNN.com - Coming soon: Download-to-own films - Mar 23, 2006

King Kong will be first film to use this method on April 10th in the UK - for $35ish, you'd get a download of standard def size, a portable download size (think PSP/iPod), and they'd mail you the DVD.

All on same day the DVD is released.

AND, this is from Universal, which is one of the major studios. 35 films at first, including The Bourne Supremacy, Pride & Prejudice, Nanny McPhee (??), and Bridget Jones.

Color me biased, but I'm guessing the boy oriented titles like King Kong and Bourne Supremacy will outsell Pride & Prejudice and Bridget Jones by a wide margin at first. Call BS on me if you wish, but that's my prediction.

More coverage here at the ever excellent CinemaTech: More on Universal download-to-own ... HD-DVD players delayed

-mike

No Copying With First HD Video Players - Yahoo! News

Boils down to this - since the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) specifications aren't finalized, and aren't likely to be until late spring at the earliest, the first HD-DVD and ALSO the first Blu Ray players will NOT be able to do Mandatory Managed Copy (the ability to legally copy high def DVDs to your home media server, for instance). There is an interim spec that simply does not include that capability, and THAT is what is going out with the first players for both formats.

Now, the interesting question is will they be able to in the future - much has been made of the ability to update the firmware on these players via Internet connection or data on discs put into them (even on commercial discs). Would it be possible to update the firmware to include this capability? Or would it require more than just firmware updates? And even if it were possible, would the manufacturers go to the trouble of enabling this feature that they fear might threaten future sales of their playback devices?

-mike

AppleInsider | A closer look at Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro

This is from a few weeks ago, I'm catching up on older news.

A nice little analysis of some of the differences inside the new Apple laptops.

They don't discuss the lack of FireWire 800, which is an issue for working professionals - it (was) the fastest laptop data bus. FW400 remains, but tops out around 35 MB/sec in most configs. The new expansion port creates an opportunity for FW800 or eSATA or other buses, but there are no products announced that I've heard of for the port. (edit - now there have been some announcements)

-mike

Download CPR

More news from about a month ago, but still good to know:

Avid adds support for the HVX200 to their Xpress line.

It now adds support for the following HVX200 formats:

720p/60p
720p/24p
720p/30p

There are other changes and fixes as well.

BTW, compatible with Xpress Pro Studio users as well.

AppleInsider | Intel offers new details on Power Mac-bound desktop processors

Gluing together tidbits - WWDC is scheduled two months later than usual, now set for August 7th, and Intel's announcement that they'd ship the high speed "Conroe" chips in the second half of the year, it is likely we'll see Conroe based Intel Macs in destop tower form at WWDC.

Intel also announced a quad core chip (yep, 4 processors on one chip) called Kentsfield to ship in early 2007 - so maybe we'll see them announced at MWSF 2007, shipping in bulk a few months thereafter?

-mike

AppleInsider | Blu-Ray forces Sony PlayStation 3 delay

..since launch of Blu Ray is getting pushed back, that is pushing back PS3 and other Blu Ray implementations, such as for desktop/laptop computer optical drives using Blu Ray-

"one of Apple's two primary optical drive suppliers were estimating delivery of half height Blu-ray drives -- designed for desktop systems -- for the second calendar quarter of the year. However, delivery of slim slot-loading Blu-ray drives -- designed for notebooks -- was estimated anywhere between the beginning of the third quarter to the end of the year.

News of ongoing Blu-ray delays may mean that Mac users will also have to wait for the next-generation drives to show up in Apple's computer systems. Prior to this news, it was expected that the company's first-generation Intel-based PowerMac systems would be the first Macs to support Blu-ray in the form of the half height drives."

AppleInsider | Microsoft delays launch of Windows Vista

Do I need to say more? Every major OS is always late, and MS has it even harder because they have to support such an incredibly diverse variety of hardware.

In theory, this is around the time that Apple would release "Leopard", OS X 10.5. Many of the features touted for Vista are already in 10.4, so 10.5 (which we'll likely here about at WWDC which has been scheduled for two months later than the usual May/June timeframe).

Microsoft is reportedly planning six core offerings of the Vista operating system, targeting how people use computers instead of PC hardware specifications.

Three will be aimed at consumers, two at business users, and a stripped-down version for emerging markets, Reuters said. "Unlike the current Windows XP, there will be no versions designed specifically for advanced 64-bit computing, multimedia computers or Tablet PCs."

-mike

AppleInsider | Apple iTunes to sell discounted access to monthly shows

Apple Computer's iTunes music and video store on Wednesday took its first step toward a monthly subscription model with a new service called Multi-Pass that lets users buy TV shows on a monthly basis, Reuters reports.

Such as The Daily Show - get a month's worth for $9.99, or $1.99 per episode (16 original episodes per month roughly).

This ties into other evidence about Apple wanting to do a movie download service.

Think Secret - Adobe Creative Suite 3: Ready this year?

Rumor site Think Secret proclaims that Adobe is trying to get Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, etc.) ready this year that will run on both Power and Intel architectures under OS X.

Photoshop CS3 purportedly with have live filters (nondestructive edting), presets for video (aspect ratio etc.), GPU acceleration, Camera RAW 4 support, video I/O, and more.

Illustrator CS3 should be faster than earlier versions, which underperform the old version 8.

More interesting, however, is the rumor that Adobe is planning a Mac version of Production Studio. They pulled Premiere from the Mac platform after Apple came out with Final Cut Pro. But with Apple switching to the Intel platform, Adobe can now leverage all of the code optimization they've done for Intel, thus reducing the cost of coming out with an OS X version. It would almost certainly be Intel only, however.

It would be nice to

1.) have a viable option on Mac to Final Cut Pro
2.) have the nice integration of Premiere and After Effects on the Mac
3.) have a second serious DVD authoring tool (from Adobe) on the Mac as well

But, this is all rumor, and not likely to be announced for quite some time.

-mike

Toshiba may delay HD-DVD's launch until April - Yahoo! News

They say it is to coincide with HD-DVD movie releases. After saying in January they'd launch in March, Toshiba is shifting to April.

Sony has also decided to delay PS3 until NOVEMBER, in part due to delays with Blu Ray.

Macworld UK - Apple MacBook Pro is fastest Intel Core Duo notebook

...as in faster than Windows laptops. As in, Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro running WinXP does a better job running WinXP than other Intel Core Duo Wintel laptops.

OK, that's cool to know.

"The MacBook Pro is the fastest Core Duo laptop we've tested running the Photoshop scripts. It's faster than other laptops originally designed for Windows. This bodes very well for the performance of an Intel-accelerated OS X Photoshop, when that finally appears."

This also bodes well for Final Cut Pro and other video apps running on Intel Macs.

-mike

Focus Enhancements and JVC Professional Announce Availability of
DR-HD100 DTE Recorder for JVC ProHD Camcorders - MarketWatch

...but you can't pull the native HDV into Final Cut Pro..yet. They're working on it.

"QuickTime HDV support for direct import to Apple Final Cut Pro will be available as an upgrade option soon"

So what good is it? Well, long recording times (longer than a tape) is one plus. The ability to just pull the files over faster than realtime is another, with clips already broken up as, well, clips, instead of footage on a tape.

"the ability to monitor DTE recorder status in the camcorder's viewfinder. When the camcorder is set to DV record mode, users can select between DR-HD100's ten different DTE Technology file formats including Avid OMF, QuickTime, Canopus AVI, AVI Type 2 and many more. When the camcorder is in HD mode, it can record 720p M2T files directly to disk, which can be directly imported into applications such as Canopus Edius Pro and Avid Xpress Pro HD. QuickTime HDV support for direct import to Apple Final Cut Pro will be available as an upgrade option soon."

$1495 for the 40GB model, $1895 for the 80GB model.

In time, the ability to shoot several hours of footage, plug the 1 lb DTE unit into the FireWire port on a laptop/desktop editing station, and pull the files over without needing a deck will be a useful thing. Then you just have to back up the files somewhere else is the catch.

-thanks to Kelly Dodds for sending this in!

AMUG PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad Core Review

Typical highly detailed report from these folks.

I wrote this about a month ago and never finished it, so here it is now:

There's been a huge discussion on the CML (Cinematographer's Mailing List) about the new high end P2 camera, with massive asides about data migration, short and long term archiving. Someone brought up the excellent point that while you CAN dump data off P2 cards at the end of the day onto a hard drive and then wipe the cards, at the end of a long day's shoot is probably the WORST time to be in a position where you're going to wipe source media, HOPING you shot it right. And the idea of just holding onto a stack of P2 cards to dump into edit bay at end of shoot gets financially non-viable in a big fat hurry, especially at no more than 8 minutes a pop at highest resolution and frame rate.

Then somebody brought up the argument that film is the ultimate backup, destined to live for an incredibly long time.

Then somebody wisely countered that is only so if telecine/scanning equipment is around. Then I had to fire off a long response, which might well get bounced back to me, so I'll just run it here. Here's what I said:

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

Bob said:

When it comes to LONG term storage, it's time to put the concept of just needing a light source to recover the broad data stored in film to rest, and start talking about what it is we're really going to do to ensure preservation of the footage which needs preserving.

----

I agree - while film is, and has been, the best storage medium, when (or if, to allay the arguers) it is no longer a cost effective medium, the number of playback machines available on the market will plummet.

For kicks, a friend sent me a film trailer from the original Star Wars. It is neat, it is nifty, it is only something I can hold up to a lightbulb and make a pile on the floor without the proper tools.

Proper transfer requires a telecine machine, as Bob stated. Imagine some killer super high res, super high dynamic range recording medium comes out that isn't film. Just for sake of argument, say that happened today, and in 10, 15, 20 years, film was considered too arcane and expensive and inefficient to work with compared to Medium X at $1/minute or whatever. At what point would telecine machine development stop as a dying market? And how many years after that would it be tough to get one working? Imagine you still had that Mac or PC from ten years ago sitting in a closet. Now imagine it'd fire up. Now imagine if it wouldn't, and you had to go find a SCSI drive, Mac OS 8.whatever (or Windows 95), and get it all up and running. Ugh - be a nightmare, wouldn't it? And how different would an aged telecine machine be?

And for those that were still around, how much would it cost to get stuff done on it? (That's my point about me and my Star Wars trailer - at what cost to do anything useful for it? What if that cost is greater than the utility I'd derive from it?)

Technology is all about price point. Look at transportation - it is possible to jump in a rocket and go to the moon, it is possible to jump in a car to the end of the corner for a Slurpee - which one gets done regularly? The affordable one, to make an extreme example.

I'm not saying this will happen anytime soon. Film may continue to hold it's edge for decades and decades yet to come, both in terms of quality AND cost effectiveness. But all media that require any kind of reading device are pretty much doomed to eventual obsolesence. I'm reminded of the Sumerians vs. the Egyptians - Sumerians had baked clay or stone writing and clay/dirt houses, while the Egyptians had paper writing and stone houses. Sumerian writing survived in abundance, Sumerian architecture did not. The Egyptians were the other way 'round. (If I'm getting the details wrong pardon me, but hopefully you get the idea).

I could see virtually all of our information, data, film/video etc. being lost to future generations way down the line (one good nuclear war would certainly do it, or a widespread disease that made data migration a low priority over, say, not eating grubs to survive. Then again, who gives a damn about saving all the old episodes of The Facts of Life under those circumstances?). Everything that you can't just pick up and LOOK AT will likely be lost, except for the best of it that we want to forward migrate. Words have been forward migrated for centuries, and since it is a recreation of information, the reproduction quality is excellent. Visual art has a harder time - statues wear down, paintings fade, etc., and they are much more difficult to replicate, and certainly lose their value in the process.

I'm gettting all too many lessons about reliability and backwards compatibility these days - I'm writing this on my desktop as my laptop's dying hard drive hopefully copies off several years worth of email, pictures, etc. I've got some software eeking away at trying to rescue my data. And it is on a less than one year old drive I've been using a lot (as much as I advocate digital workflows, RAID 0 for production, etc., these suckers do fail, and it costs days when they do. And, of course, this is all on modern equipment, with software available, and I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. If I shelved that laptop for 10 years, how much of that would that still be the case?

I fear not.

As I wrote on HDforIndies the other year, if you're going to archive, say, Lord of the Rings source, what are you backing up? A background plate of an empty field, of which 20% will be visible in the final shot? A bunch of other shot plates of props? What about the bunch of digital assets for CG characters/actors? On some kind of digital archiving media, then two machines to retrieve it (in case on croaks), and paper instructions on exactly how to retrieve it? And then what? Two of the computer systems used to composite it, with archived installers for the correct version of the software to open the composites so that anything meaningful could be done? It gets crazy. Best I can make of it - black and white color seps of the final product - it can always be rescanned/telecined....woops, assuming that technology continues to exist.

Right?

We're all wormfood in the end, folks...and so is everything we do, given enough time.

Go write a book or carve on a cave wall if you want your work to live.

: )

(I feel I can say this, since so much of what I spent a decade working on was CD-ROMs and the like that won't even play in current machines, or if they do now they won't in 5-10 years. Check out Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project for a laugh.)

As a side note, I recently heard about a DI project that was revisited after a couple of years (client came back to make changes, I'm guessing for HD of some sort). They couldn't get the session to open. The software version or hardware they had two years ago was incompatible with what they presently had. What good is data if you don't have the technology to read it? It is going to take decades I think before things get standardized enough to have any serious interoperability.

-mike

New Applications For Canon XLH1 HD Camcorder : MobileWhack.com

The Wafian recorder uses HD-SDI to capture the 24F mode from the Canon XL H1 to the Cineform 10 bit codec in 24p (removes 3:2 pulldown).

Very cool that they have all this working now.

It is definitely way better quality and much lower cost than an HDCAM deck. And arguably equal or at least in the ballpark of a $100,000 HDCAM SR deck for a fraction of the price.

Also, no reason why this recorder wouldn't work with ANY camera with an HD-SDI output (that is a standard HD-SDI anyway), or a camera with an analog component outputs run through an AJA HD10A or similar analog to HD-SDI converter. Such as a Sony XDCAM HD (the 350, the nicer one has HD-SDI), F900, F950, Panasonic Varicam, etc.

Latest gossip also indicates that Cineform is looking at being able to work with software other than just Adobe's, and that they are also looking into a QuickTime codec version of their excellent Cineform codec.

Notes on trouble working with HD in mixed Mac/PC environment

...so I get a call from a client of mine who I've consulted with on working with Varicam footage in the past. They want my advice on how to work with some HD footage.

They've shot some 24p Varicam footage (that's the DVCPRO HD based $60,000ish HD camcorder) and they need some help with workflow. I think they have Final Cut Pro HD on a G5, but they don't know how to use it. Hey, they want me to do it for them, I'll all in favor of that.

I assume they're going to cut it in Final Cut Pro.

And then, because the Spidey Sense tingles, I ask

"Whatcha gonna do with it?"

"Oh, we're going to do some After Effects with it." client says.

"On what platform?" I ask.

"On PC." they say.

Ding ding ding!

Turns out they have Premiere Pro 1.5 on a generic PC with no HD-SDI board, and they have 720p24 Varicam footage.

Suddenly, a simple FireWire capture gets a lot more complicated.

What they want me to do is capture HD on a Mac and deliver it to them for usage on a WinXP box for use in After Effects, and maintain highest possible quality.

Long story short, what I end up doing is capturing over HD-SDI into my BlackMagic Multibridge Extreme. As an interesting side note, I'd left my 9 pin deck control cable at somebody else's place I'd lent it to (wait, that isn't the interesting part, hang on), so I didn't have the cable handy.

What I ended up doing was changing the setup in the Log and Capture window to use HD-SDI for audio and video capture, but FireWire for deck control. Worked like a charm - not a problem.

Nothing is ever as easy as you think it'd be. After setting up the presets for 24p capture, I captured the whole 30 minutes worth of footage as one file (as per client request), but it kept coming out as 60p. After a bunch of testing including capturing snippets of video from various portions of the tape, I finally figured out that they'd recorded bars at the head of the tape at 60fps, but shot all their content at 24fps. Since my capture started in the section with bars, my settings were ignored and the footage captured at 60fps, since it started as 60fps on the tape (it is a bad, Bad, BAD thing to mix frame rates in a given capture, and in general it is Bad Working Practice to mix frame rates even on the same tape). After figuring it out, I started my capture after the bars and it worked fine.

Then on the second tape, there were a number of timecode breaks towards the end of the tape. Let me be clear - Time code breaks are the bane of an editor's existence. They are not the potholes but the flat tires on the highway of post. Everything has to come to a stop and you have to fix each one. (or perhaps the STDs, the Severe Tire Damage thingies that keep you from driving Out the In in a parking garage is a more apt metaphor - they CAUSE the flat tires). After it failed to capture as one big file a couple of times in a row, I had to go in and find out how many and where the time code breaks were and work around each and every one of them (or are time code breaks like land mines? I just don't like'em.) So it took longer to find and work around the time code breaks than it did to capture the other 25 minutes of footage (which worked fine and unattended up until that point).

After capturing the footage to the Apple 8 bit Uncompressed 4:2:2 codec (no point in using the 10 bit codec since the tape format is only 8 bit), I used Compressor to convert it to a good cross platform codec.

I used to use the BlackMagic codec for cross platform work, but it introduces a very noticeable shift in the luma (brightness) of the footage, so this time I tried the Sheer codec from Bitjazz. It is mathematically lossless QuickTime codec (exact match of the source material) that is usually around 40% smaller than the Apple or Blackmagic codec. Yeah, the files are smaller. Yeah, the video looks and is exactly the same. No, I don't know how it works, I just trust that it does.

(I tried to capture directly to Sheer, but ended up with half sized files (640x360). This is a known issue with BMD cards and Sheer, and Andreas Wittenstein, the developer of Sheer, is working on it.)

There is a free reader version of the codec downloadable for QuickTime (and an AVI version is under development) from the site at the link above for both Mac and Windows, thus it's cross platform.

But because they needed to read it on a PC, I used Cleaner to flatten the file (flattening gets rid of the resource forks - used to be a Mac QT file wouldn't read on a PC unless it was flattened. I haven't had to move footage cross platform in a while, so I went ahead and flattened it to be sure).

OK, so now it was time to get the file over to them. They'd sent me an MS-DOS formatted FireWire drive.

Again, I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it used to be that there was a 2GB file size limitation for MS-DOS volumes. At around 30 GB, obviously this wasn't going to work for the uncompressed Sheer files. So I reformatted the drive to be Mac OS Extended (Journalled) and told the client to use MacDrive, a PC utility that lets you mount, view, read and write files on a Mac formatted drive attached to a WinXP box. There's even a free time limited demo.

The client delivered the drive they had with a USB cable, even though the drive has FireWire 400 ports as well. Copying about 60GB of data over is time consuming, and USB 2.0 is about half or less of the speed of FireWire 400. So I used one of my own cables to speed up the process.

Got a call from the client just a little while ago - all is working well.

In the end, I spent several hours troubleshooting and doing this job. If all had gone smoothly, it should've taken about an hour and a half.

Lessons learned/observed:

1.) It's never going to be as easy as you think.
2.) Yes you CAN use FireWire for deck control for the Panasonic 1200A deck while capturing audio/video over HD-SDI
3.) Sheer works as a cross platform codec
4.) Never assume the client has done it right - EVERY job ALWAYS has a bunch of stuff go wrong. The only question is how many things go wrong on the average job - is it 3, 5, 9? (yes this is a repeat of #1, but it bears repeating)
5.) Never assume a post workflow is going to work as expected unless you personally have done it before, or someone you have good reason to TRUST has done EXACTLY the same thing before with the exact same software and gear and it has worked for them.
6.) Always ask a zillion questions when you have to integrate with somebody else's post process. Get incredibly specific and make no assumptions - you have Software X? What version? (people have amazingly out of date software all too often...I'm still on Photoshop CS #1, not CS 2). You have a BMD/AJA card? Which one? What drivers? (Lots of PC stuff has lagged getting 720p24 support - 720p60 might be supported initially, but 720p24 often came later). So forth and so on. You might have 9 steps in your post process (or more), so be sure that there are no breaks in your chain. It only takes on weak link to fail, or cause a major workaround that eats a lot of time and budget.
7.) ...thus I try to ALWAYS charge by the hour rather than flat rate.

: )

-mike

This will be a quick one -

I just got out of V for Vendetta, and earlier today I saw A Scanner Darkly.

Both films:

- involve a future where our government watches us constantly, where electronic surveillance is ubiquitous
- have a protagonist that wears a mask
- have a protagonist that suffers severe damage from an attempt by others to achieve a greater good
- involve a world where dissenting citizens are dissapeared
- involve betrayal on a massive scale by those with power against those without

As movies, I enjoyed them both. I felt depressed and glum about our future after Scanner Darkly, and at least V for Vendetta had an upbeat ending.

But both are blunt messages criticizing our current administration and it's practices.

During V for Vendetta, the audience actually burst out applauding, en masse, when V says "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." As I sat there and heard the first person start applauding, I had a moment of pause, where I wanted to applaud it but was afraid to - would people think I was seditious or something? Would anyone think less of me or think me weird or a freak for doing so? It was that exact moment of fear that the movie was talking about - we shouldn't be afraid to let our voices be heard. It's that inch that matters (reference to the film). YES, it is a big loud Hollywood film with 'splosions and ridiculous amounts of fake blood, but it's got a point that resonated with me. Probably 75% of the audience sat quietly in their seats as the credits rolled through to the end, far more than at most screenings (especially so since the film started so late).

As an added touch of irony, it was at THIS film, and this film alone at the festival, that security was the tightest. No cameras (not even camera phones) allowed in the theater, and we got the full metal detector wand search on each and every person who came into the theater. What an unintentional bit of irony that our personal space was invaded and compromised so that the distributor (the one with power and money) could feel safe while watching a film discussing the risk of surrendering power for safety. As a result, the film was almost an hour late to start as they had 4 security guys to wand all 1200 or so people getting into the theater.

I hope both films are successful and that people take their messages to heart.

More later, just wanted to write that down while I was thinking about it.

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Ben Franklin.

-mike

PS - also saw Before The Music Dies, and that was great. More later.

SXSW Day Five: Panels, Maxed Out, Hard Candy

Tuesday was my official day at SXSW - I was on a Mini Meeting about Digital Intermediates with Christian Zak of Technicolor and Doug Delaney of Post Logic. The meeting was lightly attended, so all those present got to get a very personal experience and with the panelists. I learned a good bit of stuff, too. Some tidbits I recall:

-overview - for those who don't know what it is, Christian gave a nice concise definition of DI (digital intermediate) - the use of digital technology to create a digital film intermediate for color correction in lieu of actual film color timing. Film is scanned in, usually at 10 bits per channel logarithmic (not linear), usually at 2K (2048x1536 or x1556) or 4K (twice those #s) which has an anamorphic aspect ratio. The imagery is digitally color corrected (and other fixes and changes made as needed such grain reduction, dust busting, etc.) and then imaged back out to film. Thus digital and an intermediate step between shot film and projected film.

-getting bids from a variety of vendors and then stitching a workflow together - scans here, conform there, DI somewhere else, filmed out elsewhere again - is probably not a good idea. At all. While you might be able to save some money skipping around here and there, the inefficiencies of moving all that data or material around, the greater difficulty of maintaining effective communication to ensure creative intent is maintained, is just asking for trouble. Even if all that went well, there's the lurking demon in the corner - if there's a problem, you're likely to get a lot of finger pointing amongst vendors, with folks saying things like "it wasn't made clear to us", or "they aren't calibrated correctly" (or not calibrated the same way you are), or just a simple "we did our part right, it must have been the other guys" is just a world of trouble you don't want. While some parts of the process, like the conform, are strictly technical in terms of being done right or not, you're just asking for trouble if you expect multiple (often competing) vendors to all work perfectly and smoothly together. PLUS, everybody has their own workflow, their own calibration system, calibrated to somebody's lab soup or somebody's color setup or whatever. So suck it up and stick with one vendor and tell yourself you're actually saving money and hassle in the long run if one facility's scans or conform costs less than the DI house's would. In the long run, the hassles, worries, running around, and redundant communication may well make it not worth it.

Doug mentioned a project where the client insisted on doing the conform somewhere else. It was wrong, and they ended up having to come back and do the DI again. Whether it was the entire thing over or a portion I don't know, or at least filming out again I don't know, but a nice example of Things That Can Go Bad.

Christian said he didn't like doing mixed vendor projects either - I'm assuming he meant because of the additional communication needs and hassles involved he just didn't want to get into it. You're putting more work on the vendor to interoperate with the other vendors, and they aren't getting paid for it (that's my assumption), which doesn't help your creative rapport any, either.

This gave me pause, as I've been cogitating on how to piecemeal stuff together. I'd called a vendor on behalf of a client of mine to get scans and was told they don't do scans for out of house projects - and I'm understanding more and more why - it creates a potential liability for them if there are concerns or problems down the line that they wouldn't want to have to get into. I'll have to do further thinking on this to come up with a more optimal solution, I dunno what that is going to be.

Any time you're dealing with a single vendor for a project, it's one stop shopping, and also one stop accountability. If it is their responsibility and something goes wrong, it's absolutely clear it is their responsibility to fix it on their nickel.

Then I went and did my Studio SX interview with Cyndi Greening of CinemaMinima.com. Studio SX is a little fishbowl they set up in the corner of the trade show and video an interviewer and interviewee. (The interview will get posted online soon, I'll link to it when it does.) Cyndi and I have done several podcasts in the past, swapped a zilliion emails and talked on the phone many times but never met face to face since we live in different states. I was taller than she expected, she was shorter than I expected, but we were delighted to meet each other. Upon seeing each other for the first time, she gave me a big warm hug - that's the beauty of the Internet and phones and whatnot - we'd established a friendship without ever meeting. They told us we'd have 10 to 30 minutes to talk, and after what felt like 8 or 10 they signalled for us to wrap it up - turns out we'd been talking for over 20 minutes but it breezed right by. Afterwards we sat down and talked about me producing some training materials. I've recently decided to reduce the amount of time I'm going to spend hands on in the color correction business and get back to more research and other stuff like I was doing 6-12 months ago. I'm definitely going to be producing some training materials for indie filmmakers, covering issues that I'm not seeing sufficiently addressed elsewhere, or fast enough. I'm pretty light on my feet when it comes to getting things done (as long as I have time, which I haven't of late).

OK, on to movies -

I hiked over to the Paramount and walked in on the opening credits of Maxed Out, a movie about the credit industry, the predatory practices they employ, and the government's collusion with them (and the government's own debt problems - did you realize YOUR part of the national debt is $88,000?). Think of it as this year's version of Super Size Me, but about debt not food. But similarities in terms of shocking corporate behavior. (Fortunately, it does NOT involve the filmmaker taking on massive debt for the movie. Oh, wait a minute, they probably did!) I don't have much to say other than this was a VERY good film, a great serious doc that I think EVERYONE should see. A lot of docs (Punk Like Me, Darkon) have been fun and entertaining or emotionally resonant, but this one is actually USEFUL in your day to day life. A film on debt? How boring would that be? Not at all in this case. If everyone in America saw this movie and read The Millionaire Next Door (excellent book BTW, highly recommend), PERHAPS we could fix our national debt problem in a lifetime or two. I have no doubt this will get significant distribution - it's just too good. Plus, they clearly have budget, as they licensed a bunch of top notch music.

I went to a couple of parties, ran into Erin of the American Film Institute that I'd had a great 30 minute conversation with last year and we caught up a bit on her life's excitement.

Then I went to go see Hard Candy with Melissa (my girlfriend). The film is about a 32 year old man who befriends a 14 year old girl online and they meet. There's all kinds of icky child stalker vibe at first...and THEN. And then the tables get turned, and you find out she's the one after him with malevolent intent. 90% of the movie takes place in his house with just the two actors, and it is INTENSE. The battle of wits and the battle for control waxes and wanes back and forth with nail biting intensity. There's a scene where she's going to castrate him, and Melissa said "I've never seen so much male squirming in my entire life." This was the most intense film I've seen in the last six months. Nothing I've seen since Fantastic Fest has caused me so much anguish to sit and watch. It is incredible filmmaking, but I don't think I'd want to sit through it again. The performances by Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page are powerful and intense. Ellen Page, who looks the part of a 14 year old girl, delivers a truly knockout performance with a quiet, feral intensity that is just frightening. Her ability to swing from dippy 14 year old to incredibly malevolent harpy of vengence is just flooring. She is DEFINITELY going places, she definitely has talent and power. It reminds me of the earliest roles that I saw Christina Ricci or Kirsten Dunst in - you say "Wow." and watch for whatever they do next.

Oh, and I'm certain the film made every guy rethink every bit of porn that he has in his home. : )

-mike

SXSW Day Three and Four: Darkon, Punk Like Me, District 13

Saw Darkon which had been getting good word of mouth based on a great trailer. The doc is about a bunch of people that do LARP - Live Action Role Playing, in this case a game called Darkon that involves medieval combat with padded swords. The trailer at first invites making fun of these folks, but the filmmakers never do - they really respect these folks and what they're doing, and take an honest look at why. Some players are stay at home Dads, or overweight teenagers, or single moms still living with their moms. Folks that don't feel that they have control or power in their day to day lives, but through Darkon, they have control.

But it is still funny as hell when you see soliders in chain mail preparing for battle....and a jogger goes by, looking at them and clearly wondering what the hell is going on. Medieval nights coming out of port-a-potties is always good fro a laugh, too.

Hmm. This isn't doing it justice, it isn't a "lovable losers" kind of a thing, there are some very inspiring segments when people talk about what is the sum total of your life, where do you find value, purpose, and satisfaction, etc.

This is definitely on my short list of best films I've seen at SXSW this year.

---------

Punk Like Me is a doc about a 37 year old guy that bluffs his way onto the Warped Tour to live out his punk rock dreams...20 years after he should have. In the end, he brings his wife on the road...and his toddler, and his in-laws. Silly and funny and still has a heart in the end as they realize they really DO want to rock and not just fake it, and suddenly their fake bank (4 practice sessions before they hit the tour on the road) wants to be real, to really rock and have that magic rock and roll connection experience with the audience. Lots of fun, lots of laughs, and something I can certainly connect to - I'm the same age and had a vaguely similar idea 10 years ago (a group of us were going to pretend to be Bom!, a Swedish super group that had been big 10 years previously and now on a reunion tour. The plan was to go to Vegas, scam our way into everything we could, have a camera crew pretending to be MTV Sweden, and hit up every has been star festering in Vegas for interviews, and see who would say "I loved you guys!", etc.). Anyway, a fun doc, one of my favorites so far.

I also saw The Oh! in Ohio, with Parker Posey, Paul Rudd, and Danny DeVito. It's about a married couple where the woman has never had an orgasm, ever. And yeah, it's a romantic comedy. The husband is depressed because he feels less of a man for not being able to give her an orgasm, she explores her sexuality for the first time, and actual hilarity ensures. I see this as an attempt at a female 40 Year Old Virgin kind of a thing, and it works. In my top 3 films I've seen so far for sure. Some fun additional minor characters like Heather Graham pop up (from under the covers even!) throughout the film.

On a lark, caught the midnight screening of District 13, and man am I glad I did! It's like a French Ong Bok. No, that's not quite it. Ever see those videos of the guys that run and jump and scale walls and jump down from buildings and roll or climb up impossible looking stuff? Imagine that. Fighting. Not much of a plot, but rockin' action scenes. Add a dosh of political commentary about racial tension in Paris, and shake it like a Polaroid. Amazingly impressive fight sequences - the first really killer move (Our Hero runs towards a locked door, leaps up, grabs the pipes on the ceiling, shoots his feet through the transom window over a door to break the glass and then flies through it in a beautiful seamless back arching movie -- the audience LITERALLY "Oh!"'d and APPLAUDED. And this at a midnight screening after we're all tired after 3 days of movies. Plot? Acting? Character development? Who cares, it ain't that kind of a movie. Not my usual genre, but every once in a while...every once in a while, a profound Kicking Of Ass is a magnificent thing to see.

(my ode to The Dude Abides)

-mike

Scott Kirsner of CinemaTech hit the trade show floor at SXSW and posted some links to the stuff he thought was interesting:

CinemaTech: Some links from SXSW

Here's all my raw notes on this panel, given by a Sony rep

----------

XDCAM HD

-has thumbnail mode to find clips
-has random, non-linear access
-plug and play w/current infrastructure
-does proxy video on the fly - records high res, frame accurate proxy for the high res
-proxy is like 2mbit
-over File Access Mode or GigE, can do about 20x realtime to get the proxy off
-low res proxy quickly, conform to high res later on (video is 1.5 mbit) in a pinch can air it, better than videophone (imagine wartime Iraq phoned in video).
-what's the pixel res of the proxy? The guy didn't know

-XDCAM was introduced to take over betacam and other stuff

-XDCAM HD has 2 year "bumper to bumper" warranty

-XDCAM HD is on the heels of the SD XDCAM stuff. Sold about $11,000 XDCAM standard def stuff sold so far

-has slow shutter (three frame accumulation is what they call it, frame blending is what I'd call it)

-"keep your ears open at NAB for some significant announcements between Sony and Apple" - so yeah, expect it to support XDCAM HD

-they're using MXF - MXF is a SMPTE standard file wrapper. MXF is an interchange format. it is a wrapper to go around the internal file format standard, helps interoperability between systems and equipment.

It isn't the mechanism to DO the transfer, it is a way to HELP the transfer

-e-VTR reads all 1/2" formats, mark an in and out, and it goes out GigE as a file - that is cool. MXF is involved in this.

-AVC is for capture and control for laptop and desktop, including downconvert

-File Access Mode mounts the Blu Ray XDCAM HD disc as a disk so you can access as files to pull over the footage

-has 9 pin deck control

-can drop a memory card on a memory stick to record proxy video, is about 1 GB/hr on the SD camera

-product lineup - HDV is low end, HDCAM and HDCAM SR are the high end. XDCAM HD stuff falls into the middle between the low and high. It has similarities with both low and high end in terms of ease of use, FireWire, but also professional 9 pin integration, HD-SDI etc.

23GB single side single layer. At lowest high def data rate, 2 hours.

When dual layer comes out, expect to get double capacity

-in the future (a yearish), a 2/3" system will come out to use bigger discs (and also 4:2:2 I've been told)

3 recording modes:
1.) 18 megabit 4:2:0, 120 min or more VBR (variable bitrate)
2.) 25 megabit, 4:2:0, 25 mbit is very similar to HDV. Audio is uncompressed here, HDV is compressed audio, 90 min or more
3.) 35 mbit 4:2:0 VBR, 60 min or more

METADATA - data about the data - frame rate, camera I'm using, all kinds of metadata that is written to disc. Don't need to use post it notes on the tapes etc. - the data travels with it all the way to the NLE (if the NLE supports it), XML based

-there is provided metadata space. There are some defacto metadata, shot markers in camera, there are tools to assign flags that work with an Avid (can use for good take/bad take etc).

Q: can you do this after the fact of shooting (screenig stuff off camera or deck)
A: yes you can. Each disc can write ADDITIONAL data to add metadata. There's also a 500 MB directory on each disc to put ADDITIONAL data on the drive, it's just raw space to add whatever extra stuff you want. THIS IS GOOD AND USEFUL AS ALL GET OUT.

XDCAM HD vs. HDV @ 25mbit
-MPEG layer 2 for HDV, uncompressed 4 track on XDCAM HD
-SD video codec - DVCAM on XDCAM HD, DV or DVCAM on HDV

discs are $30 apiece - if it breaks, shrug and ditch it, unlike P2 which you'll cry about if you break one

Q: when they go to dual layer, will it work with existing XDCAM HD?
A: NO - dual layer will be for 2/3" cameras, not for these 1/2".

The PDW-F350 is the nicer camera of the two:
-2 inch B&W viewfinder
-HD-SDI out
TC in/out separated
XLR audio inputs
24p/25p/30p/50i/60i capable
$25,800 with NO LENS

PDF-F330 - about $17K
1.5" view finder
HD/SD component output
TC in/out switchable
-RCA pin x2 audio output
24p/25p/30p/50i/60i capable

The 350 can over/undercrank to do fast/slow motion, like the Varicam can.

can shoot 60p and play back 24p

CAN'T DO 60P FOR 60P PLAYBACK (which is odd, but OK - you could do some tricks to get 60p at 60p at post though I'm sure)

Can take clips from camera and make a virtual playlist, and trim them down individually, in a non-destructive manner play'em back in order. Pre-editing stuff to in the field, on the camera.

When doing blocking, can queue up a clip, set in and outs, and flip back and forth to compare the shots - for sets or for news, saves a bunch of time without winding around on the tape (SAVES TIME!!)

-time lapse capability - set it up for a 7 hour timelapse and away you go

-both cameras have FireWire standard

-usually don't want to use cameras as decks or a feeder deck because of head wear- with optical, zero head contact, no head wear, so worth doing.

-camera uses 1/2" 3 chips, 4:2:0, 18-35 mbit, can also capture DVCAM in standard def mode. Native 16:9 chip,
native record modes:
23.98p, 25/, 29.97p, 50i, or 59.94i @ 1080 res
-uncompressed audio

4 position optical ND filter
-various speed shutter, has slow shutter mode (slows down shuttering, take advantage of the light coming in - it's frame blending.

1-8, 16, 32, and 64 frame "accumulation" that blends'em together, and gotta be in 50i or 60i mode to use it

-freeze mix - lets you ghost mix a recorded frame and live feed

scene files - all the setup that you have, can save as a file on a memory stick, can save an open ended number to memory stick, or save 5 on camera without the need for a memory stick at all

-time lapse - 1 frame or 3, 6 frames, or a trigger (1 frame/sec to 1/day) ASK ABOUT THIS - 1/3/6 WHAT?

-4 to 30 in roughly one frame increments, then leaps to 60 for

-Easy Mode - does a basic simple generic setup (looks like hell out of the box, is set up for news out of the box)

-can control some basic stuff with a remote

-3.5" flippable LCD viewfinder

DECKS:

PDW-F70 is the recorder

Traditional A/V - HD-SDI, FireWire native, lists for $15K, player is $10Kish, 9 pin deck control, etc.

options: each board is $2K
network board - GigE
MPEGTS board - HD MPEG TS in/out conversion
Analog HD input board - HD Analog component input
SD to HD upconversion board - SD input for HD up-conversion (does it do anamorphic, center cut, and crop?)

F30 is the $10-$11K playback only unit for feeding NLEs

Expand function - from the thumbnail screen, you can take a single clip and fill the screen with stills from the whole thing. Pick one of those 12 chunks and can continue to zoom in, breaking it down to 12 more chunks to "zoom in" to a particular location on the clip, and can add markers to mark in/out for ingest into editing system. Can whittle down to just the clips you want, just the portion you want. Can zoom in 3 times for 1/1728th of the source clip.

In playlist mode it'll zero out the timecode mode, so you'd lose the source time code, so NOT RECOMMENDED for film style workflows where you'll need to match back later

Going forward for archive:

XDCAM Cart - PDF-C1080 is a big 80 disc system with up to 4 drives - $80K, room for 4 decks, 80 discs, nearline storage - proxy server and full res server

biger 600 Disc XDCAM Cart avialable later this year for a bit more

eventually a jukebox - acts like a NAS device

XDCAM intelligent

-bare drive for internal/external computer mounting.

SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO POP A DISC INTO A BLU-RAY READ/WRITE ON YOUR COMPUTER, GOTTA GET XDCAM HD SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE IT IS A SHELLED, NOT BARE DISC. And there are additional issues as well beyond the physical form factor. The 500GB allocated extra space has to be dealt with for instance, so that's different firmware, for instance.

Also, lenses are likely to be $8K to around $22K - so full package is $32 to $47Kish then.

Mike from Sony gave the preso, very well done.

-mike

Thanks to Blake and esp for correcting some mistakes I made, read the comments for some further details on MXF

Up and breathing after blogging 4 hours ago, here's some other folks I know talking about SXSW:

Wiley Wiggins talks of the first weekend - News of the dead: SXSW, the first weekend (sort of)

John Gruber of Daring Fireball talks of Interactive Panels he's on or wants to see - Daring Fireball: Speaking at SXSW

(So far, Darkon, Punk Like Me, This Movie Is Not Yet Rated, Lifelike, TV Junkie, Maxed Out, Hard Candy, Fired, Behind The Mask, LOL, F*ck, Jumping Off Bridges, Nobelity, Things That Hang From Trees and Slam Planet are on my gotta see list. Plus V For Vendetta, just so I can say I saws it before everyone else.)

Cyndi Greening is now going to be interviewing me on camera for Studio SX at SXSW, which is great, since we know each other and she's interviewed me for podcasts in the past. She's here and blogging panels as well, here's some of her coverage:


Cinema Minima: SXSW Documentary Distribution Panel


Cinema Minima: SXSW International Documentary Co-Production Panel (LIVE)


Cinema Minima: SXSW Party at Latitude 30


Cinema Minima: SXSW State of Docs in North America

GreenCine has some great coverage too with reviews:

GreenCine Daily: Austin Dispatch. 1.

GreenCine Daily: SXSW Elsewhere

GreenCine Daily: Austin Dispatch. 2.

Those folks rock.

Oh, and if you see, write, or know of any other good SXSW Film coverage, please do send it in! Feel free to add it into the Comments link below, and/or you can email me (see address at top of site) and I can cut it into here as I have time.

-mike

Verrrrrrrrry slow getting going this morning, dragged into the convention center around 12:30. I was supposed to have dropped by the Omega booth earlier and hadn't yet, they had a presentation with Apple and Panasonic about the HVX200 workflow with Final Cut Studio, and that was cool, but mostly stuff I already knew - you can shoot with the HVX200 in a bunch of different modes and pull the native codec data directly into Final Cut Pro, the bandwidth varies depending on frame size and frame rate, metadata travels with it, it has good RT effects performance on a fast machine, etc.

I went into the trade show and wandered a bit - I talked to the guys from Plus 8 and they said they have a Viper camera that's in Houston from time to time, I discussed coming down and doodling with it and they were all for it, so I jus need to get back in touch with them and arrange a time when it is in Houston and not rented out. We discussed working with it in filmstream mode and doing some direct to disk recording, that should be a lot of fun to mess with.

I wandered over and ran into David from Cineform and we knew of each other but hadn't met yet - they've been doing some very exciting things, like their intermediate codec for high quality, high resolution work. He mentioned some work on a native Bayer pattern codec under development which could certainly have it's uses, and I asked about if they were ever going to get a QuickTime codec that used all the cooleness of the wavelet based Cineform codec and he just smiled. Hmm. I will definitely have to keep closer tabs on their progress in the future and see if they have anything new at NAB and other shows this year.

Then I wandered over and found the Sony camera area. They had the tiny A1U (or was it an HC-3?), a Z1U and A-HA!!! One of the new XDCAM HD prototypes on the floor running and working. I got a rundown from the guy on some feature stuff I wasn't fully clear on. Now that it's 3am and I've had, um, more than one drink and didn't take any notes, what better time is it to run down the features?

-4 channels of UNCOMPRESSED audio, which is different from the Z1U's compressed audio
-1/2" imaging CCDs, not 1/3 inch
-three recording modes, amounting to 18 megabit VBR (variable bitrate), 25 CBR (constant bitrate, compatible with tape based HDV), and 35 megabit (also VBR)
-can record NATIVE 1080p24 (23.976 really), so no 3:2 pulldown (thank goodness!)
-forgot to ask native res of imaging chips
-records 1440x1080 like HDV, but has progressive options
-$30 for a 1000 time rewriteable Blu-Ray disc
-can shoot 60 fps for playback at 24fps
-appears to be like a Varicam in it's ability to shoot from 4 to 60 fps, BUT it actually records at native speeds (except for under/overcranking recorded at desired playback speed), so in any case NO duped frames to be worried about since recording to disc not tape - don't have to maintain a constant data rate (hooray! saves all kinds of complications and hassles in post)
-quite, QUITE likely that there will be a 50 megabit, 4:2:2 version in about a year (not official but...it's gonna happen), price point unknown. Quite likely will work with larger capacity/faster Blu-Ray discs (dual layer? Then capacity could double and record times would stay the same)
-35 megabit is VBR, so it is UP TO 35 megabit, no guarantee that it will BE as much as 35 megabit
-$25,800 list price for camera body that can do 24p, no lense included
-can use different vendor's lenses - there was a Canon on the floor model if I saw it correctly
-There will be "significant announcements from third party NLE vendors at NAB - so I'd expect to see native support of this XDCAM HD format from Avid, Adobe, Apple, and Vegas (since Sony owns Vegas now, especially). Any of those who don't support the format I'd be officially cranky with - they've all got native MPEG-2 editing now (not sure about Vegas but I think so - after all, Sony makes HDV cameras and Vegas, so why not support?)
-the DECK has a $2000 option for GigE, NOT the camera
-the camera has FireWire, but it isn't as useful as you'd think. There seems to be what some would call crippleware in how it is implemented, there are things you're going to HAVE to use the deck for not the camera. I'm looking forward to a generic Blu-Ray reader for computer and a driver to just pop it in and import and GO.
-camera has FireWire, XLRs, and HD-SDI. All good stuff.

More on this camera and workflow tomorow - I'm going to the 11am (if I can drag my butt there in time, it's 3:30 now) Sony XDCAM HD presentation panel.

This is DEFINITELY turning out to be The Year Of The Line - at the Cassidy Kids screening, Matt Dentler of SXSW pointed out that attendance (or badges or passes or some metric of people) was up 50% from last year - and I can thoroughly believe it. In years past, it was entirely possible to get out of one movie and blaze over a few blocks to get into the next at another theater, unless it was a weekend and a popular movie. NOT SO THIS YEAR. I've not made it into three movies now, including the same movie twice, when I arrived 45 minutes in advance of the screening. Didn't get into Thank You For Not Smoking's only showing at the relatively small (200 seats) Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, and missed This Film Is Not Yet Rated's TWO showings for the same reason at midnight two nights in a row. And I'm bummed because I heard the latter was really good from everyone I talked to who saw it. I had to drastically alter my movie schedule to start making sure I'd see stuff - depending on which rumors you believed, somewhere between 300 total people or 400 badges were turned away from a screening of the locally produced Jumping Off Bridges (which I did work for, but not upon, due to various complicated reasons). There are badges (highest caste), passes (second caste), and individual tickets (third caste, aka "The Hopeless"). Melissa, my girlfriend, only has a pass that she bought for $70. She hates line, so the prospect of waiting an hour and sometimes not getting in after paying for the privilidge is increasingly unappealing - when she marches off to the pass line while I wait in the badge line to get and hold seats, she announces regularly "I'm off to the Loser Line." At any popular showing (even midnight shows), individual ticket holders are truly hosenerated. Frank Reynolds, crashed out in the spare room, earlier said that the REAL trick may be to try to get on the Reserve List at screenings of your friends' films (and I'm amazed at how many folks he knows as a New Yorker here) if you don't want to camp out.

And camping out is the deal apparently so far this year - I realized that even with a badge (that costs $300 if you walk up to registration once the festival starts), you CANNOT see films back to back - at least over the opening weekend (and I hope crowds will drop during the week and then more after Tuesday once the conferences are over), I've been having to see a 2pm film, miss the 4pm round because I wasn't in line early enough, and catch a 6pm film. So every other movie slot is the most you can count on. I'll update tomorrow on this issue, won't be the weekend anymore.

OK, on with movies - saw Cassidy Kids (which I almost worked on, TWICE, but didn't get the opportunity to in the end), which was a Burnt Orange/UTFI production. What's that you say? Burnt Orange is a production company that works with the University of Texas Film Institute to produce movies in Austin but have students work on the film. A LOT of students. So they get to work on a real movie with real sets and real actors. A great idea. The film was shot on a mix of some flavor of 16mm and Panasonic Varicam. PJ Raval, an up and coming DoP acquaintance of mine, worked on the film (go PJ!). It involves storylines from 3 different time periods, with a different look for each. The plot involves a reunion of the kids that a TV show was based on from the 80s. The kids solved a murder back in the 80s, and then a cheesy Saturday morning TV show was based on them. In the present day, a DVD set is being released and the original kids the show was based on have now grown up and are brought together to be interviewed for the DVD. Long harbored secrets come out, long hidden revelations, etc. The intermingled timelines flow throughout the film, and the pace of revelation makes it interesting. Some fun local extra roles - John Pierson as a reporter, one of the Sinus Show guys plays the bad guy on the faux 80s TV show. Kadeem Hardison was elated (said during Q&A) to get to do drama and not have to smile. Judah Friedlander was great as the obnoxious bully child grown up into a total *sshole.

Hobnobbed a bit out front with some folks, then zipped over to Alamo South for the world premiere of Slam Planet: War of the Words.

Big, fat, honkin' disclaimer - this is the movie I worked on that's showing at SXSW. So of COURSE I loved it

I worked with Rita Sanders, the ever so on-the-ball editor of the film, and Mike Henry, the director and-a-whole-lot-more on the film, to help them with issues like 60i to 24p conversion, and especially the SD to HD uprez, which they loved and chose over a Teranex or Quantel eQ uprez for reasons of quality, overall price, and workflow convenience (yeah this is that proprietary thing of mine I've mentioned before). I also handled all of the technical issues to get the project to and from color correction, but I didn't color correct it, the colorist did, and he did a fantastic job -the film really looked great, and he deserves a major hat's off for the work he did on it.

Through chance, I ended up sitting next to one of the producers (Richard Kooris, also their very knowledgable Post Production Supervisor) one one side and the Team Urbana slam poets on the other, who are on camera for about half of the film as one of the primary slam poetry teams the film covers. What is Slam Poetry? GO SEE THIS FILM and find out for yourself. Even after working on the film for weeks, the slam poetry performances (much more spoken word performance art than what you'd think of normally as poetry) were STILL very moving and emotionally evocative, and the film does a great job of giving some insight into these characters inner lives, and the non-performance documentary coverage really connects you with these people. Very hard to do in a performance based documentary, and hats off again to the creative team (Mike, Kyle, Rita, etc) for the excellent work they did to pull several emotionally involving stories out of 400 DV tapes and put it in a crucible (I'd call that crucible Rita) and end up with 98 minutes of great story. Speaking of crucibles, this whole project very very nearly went up in flames, literally - a fire Jan 31st of last year destroyed the building where the edit suite was. Cripsy toasted Salvador Dali looking hard drives were pulled from the wreckage, and the data was miraculously pulled off of them. Some tapes were damaged or destroyed in the fire as well, but they were able to finish the film.

Tooting my own horn, the uprez looked great. The color looked great. And it wasn't just me - producers, editors, directors, etc. all were thrilled with how good it looked, especially considering that it was all shot on DVX100's (or sometimes lower end cameras) in 4:3 mode and THEN the center 16:9 chunk of it was cut out and scaled up to 1080p HD resolution.

Afterwards, I ended up getting on a big pink fuzzy bus (this is true, I hadn't had that much to drink...yet, and I'll post pictures to prove it), and I got to hang out with the poets (3/4 of Team Urbana came down, and Team Austin was in attendance too!) and Mike & Kyle & Rita and we all went out to celebrate. Elizabeth Wynn, Austin Mayor Will Wynn's wife, apparently is a big supporter and/or backer of the film, she was along for the ride too. If someone had told me this morning I'd get on a big fuzzy bus after midnight, complete with disco ball and backlit boas, and hang out with the mayor's wife and a bunch of poets and watch them shoot pool....I'd have bet money against it.

That's the beauty of SXSW and Austin - you just never know what fun stuff is going to happen next.

OK, 4:05am, now I've REALLY got to get to sleep.

-mike