HD For Indies

Hey all -

I got home from NAB at about 4:30am on Friday morning, and slept the sleep of the dead...no, the sleep of zombies run over with a steamroller. Got up around 2pm and didn't do much but cook dinner and watch War of the Worlds on DVD (doesn't hold up to the Big Screen experience at all).

So what's next?

-Rita Sanders was kind enough to come in and help organize bins from The Texas Shootout while I was gone

-in a very Rube Goldberg-esque manner, the XDCAM HD cartridge that went home in a camera was handed to a person who took it to NAB who gave it to another person whom I'll have lunch with this week to get it back. Then I just have to get my computer, an XDCAM HD deck, and that cartridge in the same place at the same time.

-in the "The Universe Taunts Me" category, I was at NAB and saw 24p footage from the Sony F350 XDCAM HD, Canon XL H1 and JVC GY-HD100U HDV camcorders being cut natively in FCP 5.1....but I don't have it. I'm debating whether to wait until that ships, or just DEAL WITH IT in the meantime. Probably the latter.

....all of which leads me up to it is time to start going through all that footage and doing some actual analysis of the over 500 clips that I have (6 cameras, 24p, 24pA, 50i, 60i, live, from "tape", etc.) rather than just flipping through them and saying "that's interesting." The goal is to go through all the footage, document some hard numbers, do some analysis, render some opinions, render out a lot of 6-up comparisons, and make that footage available on SD and HD DVDs for purchase.

-other major tasks - I need to migrate the server for HD For Indies from the freebie/buddy server I've had to a "real" server, that'll be able to handle some of the new tasks I want to throw at it

-I want to do some serious testing of the stack of PCI-X, PCIe, AJA and BMD HD-SDI cards I have and see where the differences might lie.

-oh yeah - and got through the few hundred photos and 168 audio notes I have from NAB and post all that stuff up, so that's probably my first priority since it is a matter of timeliness about all that info.

-just as a "I just thought of this" point, I'm kind of glad there aren't major new OS, NLE, or camera options shipping imminently that would obsolete all this research that I want to do that'll take over a month I'd bet.

-also along those lines, since the "technology demonstrations" that Apple showed in the booth were of minor improvements (support for new cameras), and there was ZERO mention of a Final Cut Studio v5.5 or v6.0, I'd think that a significant new version is some distance away - if they were going to ship this spring/early summer, they would have previewed it I'd bet.

So I'm probably taking tomorrow off to do some Catch Up On Life stuff, but Monday, I'll split my time between server migration and starting to go through all the pics and stuff.

But feel free to check the website Sunday, I might post some stuff. Check often and compulsively. Click reload lots. And click on some ads on the right if you see something interesting if you feel like that too (or not).

: )

-mike

FilmShots

Another interview with Ted of Red, this one a podcast with Filmshots.

-mike

Labels: Red

Digital Cinema Society - Streaming Highlights From NAB 2006

...is an interview James Masters did with Ted Schilowitz of Red Digital Cinema Camera Company on Day Two of NAB. Ted talks about deliverables, Jim Jannard's role and involvement in the company, etc.

Scroll down and look for:

"Clip
Quicktime Movie"

and click on the words "Quicktime Movie"

-mike

Hey all -

I'm sitting bleary eyed in McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, plane is set to board in half an hour.

Today was the blitzkrieg assault on NAB for what I hadn't seen yet. I missed a lot of stuff, but saw a lot of stuff too. Flipping through my pictures, I see that I visited the following. More to follow, just touching on what I saw, it'll take me some time to write it all up. So consider ALL of this Late Night Beer Talk until I can go back through my audio notes and confirm stuff. If I get stuff wrong, tell me but don't bitch at me - this is alll off the top of my head! And yes, I should be posting links to all this, but it is now (as I revise and edit) 1am and I'm on an airplane at 37,000 feet travelling hundreds of miles an hour. Even if the WiFi signal got up here, I doubt I'd be able to surf for free on an unlocked network for very long!

: )

Stuff I saw on NAB 2006 Day Four:

Silicon Color - makers of Final Touch HD that I am intimately familiar with but need to finally write a review of - recently released Final Render, their distributed rendering product. It is shipping and everything.

-ADTX makes very high speed fiber channel RAIDs, I think I recall seeing 585 MB/sec - wow! uses ATTO 4 Gbit cards for PCIe Macs (other choices too, that works though)

-S.two has a new packaing of their field recorder, they call it S.two Take2, it costs something arouind $50K. There is also a docking station and ADIC tape storage, either SDLT 600 or LTO3, I can't recall which. It does two simultaneous backups, the idea is one drive mag to two identical backup tapes. Slick, solid workflow, kinda pricey, is that the only way to do it?

-LaCie has some new itty bitty storage options that are bus powered, 160-320 GB, but my image is corrupt and I can't see much. I'll have to refer to my audio notes. And my &*^($&^$ card in my camera is corrupting images, so I'm losing a bunch of my pictures and don't know it until I try to review them. Time for a new chip! They got some award too, I have in notes somewhere. for Litle Big Disk (that new little bus powered guy - and it's cute!)

-EditShare is a hardware/software NAS solution that runs on GigE for shared workgroup stuff for Mac/PC. They specifically are addressing the workgroup edit needs of sustained throughput, etc. Definitely need to follow up with this, could be lowest cost workgroup editing solution I've heard of (except for that 10GigE Small Tree solution I saw at MWSF but haven't followed up on).

-Panasonic was showing a 103" 1080p plasma HDTV. Wow. Damn. Gimme!

-also a model "only" 65 inches across (about 5 1/2 feet!)

-the FireStore DTE FS-100 is shipping, This is the gadget that plugs into the FireWire port on your Panasonic AG-HVX200 and replaces the functionality of a P2 card mostly, but the price/GB is vastly better. $2200, holds 100 GB, and ALL recording modes go onto it at 100 mbit, so it is inefficient in it's storage. Got an imperfectly clear answer as to whether you'd have to manually remove 3:2 pulldown or not when shooting 1080p24, etc. Guy thought so, not sure.

-Panasonic's AJ-HDX900 is very much like the SDX900, except high def. I think writes 1080p23.98 but with 3:2 pulldown. Jeff somebody was back who explained Varicam pulldown to me so well two years ago. Tape not P2

-Saw a P+S Technik Mini35 adaptor on an HVX200...but it had tape around the lens joint. For real, or a mockup?

-Ikegami Editcam - no 1080p23.98 supported at this time, so no indie filmmaking, but records to DNxHD codec, so great for Avid users, suxors for everyone else. Records to a hard drive.

-Grass Valley Infinity - I think I missed it...Doh!

-JVC GY-HD200 and GY-HD250 - they BOTH record to 720p60 in HDV....but still using 19 mbits for 60fps, not 30fps - sounds like with lower data rate per frame, which scares me in terms of image quality. They are downplaying that, saying they'll probably go with a 10 or 12 frame GOP (so obviously that is still up in the air). Due September, $8Kish for the 200, more for the 250. 250 also available in studio trim. 250 has an OPTIONAL S16mm lens adaptor, ability to flip image at the chip (for when using the adaptor), and has HD-SDI and timecode out BNC ports. Oh! And RUMOR (totally unconfirmed) has it that it is essentially the same codec - so the "sticktion" problems of pixels sticking in patterns between GOPs in subtle motion may still be there, and that is a darned shame, because that is one of my quibbles (not lethal, a quibble) with that camera.

-talked to guy from red rock micro about his 35mm lens adaptor he was showing on the JVC cameras. Adaptor, rods, and follow focus for around $1600. Pretty cool, I'll have to catch up with him on this product. Nice guy.

-JVC working on a 24" 1920x1080 production monitor, the DT-V24L1D. Boy, that just rolls off the tongue...

-Doremi still makes DDRs, and they are still expensive. Looks like very competent, professional gear, but in the back of my mind I know I'm still holding a grudge against them for their snarky attitude towards me in the booth last year. Not fair to them, I know, but it makes it hard for me to like their product/be totally fair.

Along those lines, DAMMIT, I realize now that I missed out on getting over to RaveHD to talk to Ramona, who is a total princess of sweetness, and they are very open about client feedback and changing the product to suit the client's needs in their attitude. They have a new version that I have press releases on but I really wanted to talk face to face, she was very cool last year. If I had to pick a company to work with between those two, RaveHD would win in a heartbeat based on price and attitude.

-Thomson IS making a modfied Viper body, but it's not big deal - mostly to make it more robust to mount more heavy gear on it, maybe some ergonomic stuff. But nothing radical.

-oh yeah - the Sony F900R is lighter and has HD-SDI on it, but was largely built to be a green product that they can sell and be legal according to the stricter European regs. A Sony rep, who was manning the F900R station, said that if you put it side by side with an F900/3, it'd look the same.

-saw it they other day - the Sony 1080i 180i (yes, 180 fields/sec) is $270,000. Yeeeeeehaaaaaw! Sign me five of'em. Yeah, right. Oh, and they can do 720p180 as well (and 180i150 and 720p150). But for the networks to shoot high speed on the football field, these should do great. Output goes down a big fatty cable (I'd guess) to a big honkin' box of hard drives, roughly double microwave sized. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime couldn't have shot handheld with this on his back in his prime. Not a portable solution AT ALL.

-the Thomson/Grass Vallley Venom flash memory (no drives) recorder for the Viper is out, is about $50K, don't recall the capacity but hope I got it in my notes.

-the ARRI D-20 is getting rented out these days, around $3000/day, 3 day weeks. It does have an optical viewfinder/mechanical shutter arrangement, and BOY that makes a difference! Even with the 1080i viewfinder on the Panasonic HDX900 (which is B&W anyway), the clarity is a tremendous difference, and this is a BIG boon for the operator. ARRI is doodling with recording RAW at full 2800ish by 1400ish (I forget the 4:3 image sensor res, I'm doing this all off the top of my head) RAW feed to a modified Quantel eQ or iQ like device in a road case for recording, realtime playback of RAW and grading on set. No price yet, just experimenting and showing off the idea. This is a good thing, though. No plans to ever sell the D-20 at this point in time. They slap a rebadged Venom on it and give it an ARRI-esque name. Forgot to ask max frame rate, but take everything I say about this as potentially wrong until I confirm with their guy that he said it right and I remember it right. Consider this beer talk that might be wrong, in other words, as I write this now. Lots of cool modes on their modified viewfinder. If the ARRI guy is reading this - I said I'd check with him before publishing, sorry not doing that, but all are duly warned this is NOT verified, OK? Later stuff will be verified.

-ReflecMedia is cool stuff - grey cloth with reflective microbeads (like the shiny stuff on your running shoes that reflects headlights directly back). That combines with a ring of LEDs around the lens (in three different sizes to work with different lenses) that are either green or blue. Since the blue or green light reflects directly back, it works amazingly well (or at least it looks that way). When I was looking off-axis at it, it looked flat grey. But looking at the image from the camera, which had the ring of lights, it looked pretty darned blue. More on it later.

-Vision's Phantom Camera has a very interesting high speed camera - a big one with a 65mm sized imager that'll do 125 fps, and a smaller one (35mm sized I think?) that'll do up to 1000 fps at HD res. Much more on this later, very very interesting. But $100-$125K for HD model, $200-$225K for bigger one. Records the raw output from single sensor CMOS. They showed some super slomo (like 1000s fps) from their other industrial cameras in the booth that had clearly been color corrected, and it looked pretty damned good, so this bodes very well for the future of this product, I wish them all the best - Connie from the company was earnest and open about the fact that they have mostly done industrial cameras in the past (and for over 10 years I think), and are just showing these cameras for the first time here and

-Most Wicked Tech Award goes to the mk-v.com (that URL may be wrong, could be pron for all I know as I write this offline) for their incredibly bespoke bit o'gear - it is a steadicam rig that let's you rotate the arm on a pole and keeps the camera (mounted on a horizontal beam about 6 feet long) to stay up as you rotate it around. Hard to describe, amazing in action. About $80K, but obviously an incredibly specific bit of gear.

-Miranda has the DVI-Ramp2 that does DVI to HD-SDI conversion.

-JL Cooper has a Final Cut Pro control surface with jog/shuttle and a bunch of automated fader switches. Very slick in action. Also a smaller jog/shuttle and a bunch of buttons. Looks like serious gear, more robust and client presentable than the Contour Designs' ShuttlePro v2 (which I own and use).

-Cobalt Digital makes an HD analog component to HD-SDI converter for about $1200 I think it was. No DVI to HD-SDI.

-Teranex has dropped price on their big stuff to around $50K and does realtime dust removal, and user guded scratch removal. Supposed to do a very high quality upres, but I didn't have time to watch (got the 3 minute demo at 3:41 when the show closed at 4 and I had lots left to see).

-Quantum makes SDLT 600A, which is like their SDLT 600 tape drive, but with a GigE port and an FTP server on it (for one root user at a time - tape seek times are up to 6 minutes, not 6 milliseconds like a drive!). About $7K, and uses MXF wrappers (doesn't transcode/alter/degrade video content). Can even grab just sections of a clip based on timecode. Very interesting idea. Stuart English from Red booth talked to me for a few minutes about it and asked what I thought, said an interesting concept but I needed to mull on it - would it be stable, reliable, around for a while? What was the break even point as compared to just backing up projects to drives? 300GB per tape. Sounds like some possible workflow advantages, but my paranoid self wants to investigate the alternatives.

-stopped by Ciprico (now owns the Huge brand, Medea is now owned by Avid but I forgot to ask about'em during my interview the other day), they are making some KILLER fast storage, like 300 MB/sec plus from a single 10 drive 4Gbit fibre channel array (I think that is right, not sure), and they striped several of some sort of RAID together and got over 600 MB/sec. Better yet, they have what seemed a prototype (not pricing set yet), with 40 (yes, 40) 2.5" SATA 7200 rpm 100GB Hitachi drives, 4 groups of 10 drives, throughput (don't know what RAID level) in the 1.3 to 1.4 GB/sec. Yeah - gigaBYTES, not gigaBITS, per second. Wow. That'd be sufficient to do the full res output of the Red camera RAW I think at max size, bit depth, and frame rate based on my napkin math. I recall something about an Infiniband to fiber bridge for speed. Infiniband is FAST - 20bigabit/channel - so that's what, 2.5 gigabytes per second per Infiniband port? Fast stuff, bodes well for the future.

In the last few minutes of the show, I was practically sprinting around the show with my map folded to show the last few booths I wanted to hit. I did a hit and run at Flip4Mac, just enough to snap a pic of their booth graphic and steal 90 seconds of time from a very tired but polite rep who answered my last few questions. It looks like in about a month there will be an import module to pull Ikegami Editcam footage in (and transcode I guess? Gotta look it up on the website) and also one for XDCAM HD (but Sony will have their own import module - or are they merely licensing the one from these guys?). Both modules will be about $500 apiece, due in about a month.

Rumor around the campfire from VERY unofficial sources (other showgoers talking to third party vendors) is that the next version of FCP might come out this summer. I could buy that for the support of new formats (the technology demonstrations of support for 24F mode on the Canon XL H1, 24p mode on the JVC GY-HD100U, and Sony's app to import XDCAM HD and edit it natively), but that doesn't feel at all like a major release. Maybe the next release is a 5.2 or a 5.1.1 or somesuch - that's the next RELEASE, not the next VERSION. The vibe _I_ got from talking to the oh-so-please-don't-quote-me-on-that Apple folks I talked to was that a new version would be out before too long, my own PERSONAL interpretation of that was that I might see it in the May/June timeframe, but that's just my personal guess based on them saying that technology demonstrations preceded shipping versions by a not very great amount of time. We'll see, we'll see.

Actually, after the show ended I was walking back to the RED booth to collect up my stuff and on the way passed by Matrox and realized I hadn't checked out this MXO thingy that I'd heard some buzz about. The folks there were nice enough to give me the 60 second scoop, and I asked for an eval once it shipped, so maybe that'll be coming my way. So here's what it does - it's a Mac (PC later) hardware device that plugs into the DVI output of your computer and converts the output to an SDI or HD-SDI signal. 720p, 1080i, 1080p maybe in future releases (all configurable hardware). BUT, unlike some other products that I've seen in the past or heard of, it ALSO has a software component - a QuickTime module that takes the QuickTime output and routes it to the DVI output to go to their hardware gadget for SDI/HD-SDI output. They say it does interlace correctly, and if it is doing what I think it COULD and MIGHT be doing, this sounds like a really, REALLY nice idea that could make it possible to do good quality output from even a laptop. So if your ingest if FireWire based, this could let you capture then monitor and then output to high quality stuff. I forgot to ask/look to see if it also has analog SD/HD component output, which is what would make this product killer. Oh, and it's $1000, waaaaaaay below other similar products. I think I recall something about gamma and white point control, BUT that might be me mixing it up in my head with another product. It is nearly 1am on the plane as I write this. Late night beer rumors, remember? Don't take any of this as gospel.

Somebody passed on a second hand story about how at a FCP user group my name came up (the good part) and a speaker dismissed me as a BlackMagic rep or on the BlackMagic side/team/something, with the possible implication that I was not to be trusted or was biased or something (the not so good part). To set the record straight - I worked for BlackMagic in their booth at last year's NAB, no secret there, and for doing so I got some "store credit" that I used to discount the price I paid for the Multibridge Extreme I bought - which was the same deal the other folks got working the booth who weren't BMD employees (mostly resellers). I wrote a review that went in some magazine I think, they have me on their site as a user story, and I had previously purchased some other BMD cards (at the time because they cost less than AJA products, and I am tight when buying gear for myself), so I have a tendency to write more about BMD than AJA - because I use'em regularly, and because I check for new versions of drivers and stuff. I have some AJA gear that I'm going to be running through it's paces, and I plan on a big ol' head to head review/comparo thingy in the not too distant future of all these bits o'gear, and I intend to be as non-biased as I can. But I like the AJA gear just fine, used it daily without major problems at the color correction business that I'm no longer involved with for about 6 months, and it's totally solid gear (that was a Kona2 for those keeping score). Their gear is solid, I love their UI to control stuff, and I get along fine with those folks - I just worked with Ted for a week with Red (he no longer works with AJA), but we've been totally friendly and cool over the last coupla years I've known him, and I hope to develop a rapport with Jim Thorne who is his replacement at AJA and I got to briefly say howdy to at the FCP User Group meeting Wednesday night (which Red totally crashed the party, coming on stage and giving away a Red "r", the paying sponsors must have been miffed when we took the stage and got wild, jubilant cheers from the crowd, I'll post pics and vids, it was OH SO MOST EXCELLENT to be the Rock Stars).

Interesting conversation with Grant Petty of Blackmagic Designs - he sees their market more as the indie content creators, and small shop creative professionals in general. Talking to Ted Schilowitz (formerly of AJA, now of Red), and hearing AJA messaging over the last year, they tend to focus their message more towards the broadast and more broadcast/business type of clientele. This is the first time I'd considered these two companies weren't aiming at the exact same type of users (although there is certainly overlap in their product lines).

Also, ran into Lisa from hdrvfx.com in the Red booth - they sell HDR panoramas, reflection maps, stuff like that for 3D rendering. All their stuff is real world shot, not 3d rendered, and is purchaseable onesy-twosey off their website, not on a big honkin' CD or DVD with zillions of other things you don't want (great thing about the web - make purchasing a hands off operation, no human intervention required, makes selling things in smaller quantities toally doable). Pricing starts low, I recall something was $4, something else was $13 to start. Available in a variety of resolutions, sounds good for those needing these niche products. Keep in mind these are HDR - high dynamic range - so it takes about 30 photos to make a stitched panorama with multiple exposures taken at each viewing angle. Haven't seen any of their stuff yet, but she gives good vibe as a reasonable human being (not everyone at the show did, BTW), so worth taking a look.

I ever so conveniently, late in the day, stumbled across eCinemaSys' booth, and was that a stroke of luck - I got there right as they were starting their last presentation of the show, and I had to sign an NDA (having to do with European patent stuff, so I got a "private viewing" not a "public demonstration"), and blazed into the darkened tent they'd set up in their booth and plowed right into Martin Eurejian (sp?) himself - The Man That Is The Company. He has a new, 40" LCD based critical color monitor that was doing some nice very low level blacks at a true 24p (dunno 23.98 vs 24.0, press releases coming next week), he said it was either 10 or 12 bits at the pixel level of real world response (I can't remember which, will have to check my notes), but that even after gamma and calibration settings should get at LEAST 1000 gradations of real world performance (so therefore must be 12 bit to be cutting DOWN to 1000 levels). Wow. Shipping sometime later this year, can't remember when. Martin's a very smart guy and has industry credibility, LCDs have been hard to make Do Right for color critical work, he's doing some of the most bleeding edge work out there.

CineTal has a 24" 1920x1200 pixel LCD monitor for color work, I talked for about 5-10 minutes with a couple of their guys; their product range covers from about $8K up to about $30K for 24" LCDs with various features (some of which are pretty hard core, like frame stores, built in wave/vectorscopes and such). They come with presets to calibrate for both rec 709 (HD) and for the DCI stuff.

Back at the Red booth, I ran an errand and got to meet Les, The Dude who owns Cooke lenses, and got to see a P+S Technik 35mm adaptor for the first time, face to face (seen picky-churrs, never held one). It's a heavy and solid thing, heavier than the redrock product (not that means one is better than the other, just observing here).

And DRAT! I also missed out on all holographic storage, and I really wanted to check into that. Sigh - that's the tradeoff of working 2 or 4 days at a humongously huge show.

They did have a MyNAB website that I was "too busy" to go look at, but I saw a sign at the show that it helps you find what you want, even helps plot a map or something - it would have been worth the half day it would have taken me to go through all that, because just like time on set is invaluable and never replaceable once it is gone, time during NAB is the same way - you need either sleep, or partying (excuse me, "networking"), or to be hittin' the show full on and it's VERY tough to find time get organized, or the potentially bad decision to blog during show hours, or even find time to keep in touch with the rest of your world back home during times like these. The right way to hit NAB? You make a list of what you KNOW you want to hit, then you use the MyNAB to find other things of interest, then you map out a course to efficiently work through the halls (it took 20+ minutes to go fetch something in Central from South hall), and you mark up your map with destinations circled, names written, and even then it'd be tough to see everything you want over 4 days, so you triage and prioritize - see the most important Day One, and work your way down to Day Four is follow up for new questions you thought of staring into space in the shower, and seeing those things that would "be nice to catch" rather than "I'll be hacked if I miss it" stuff. Leave a little time for catching the neat new stuff that there's buzz about, like for me the crazy revolution steadicam thing and the Phantom camera I hadn't heard squat about unti Jarred Land from dvxuser.com clued me into it (and it was Jendra that told me about the Revolution, for that matter).

OK, I think that is enough for now - I'll probably post this around 5am Austin time from home, right before I crash out.

I'll be going though notes and posting bazillions of pictures related to all this (unless my damn memory card decides to eat them all) ASAP, but I gotta roll back into my life once I get home - I've been gone for over a week now.

-mike

(edit - it's 4:35, got home 10 minutes ago, time for posting and BED!)

Labels: Red

....is largely deferred - I'm beat at nearly 2am. I'm betting I'll write up a lot on the plane and on Friday once I'm home.

Went to Apple booth - it's better to not have a press badge showing, just slows things down for what I want to ask.

Went to Avid booth - had a nice long interview with Xpress Pro product guy, I hope my audio recorded interview is more than just murk.

Same for the nice long chat I had with Matt Dowlong from BlackMagic about their product line, and specifically their new under $1000 PCIe card that does EVERYHING except 4:4:4 (but does do analog HD component in, among other things). It sounds very very similar to the AJA Kona LHe.

Went to Grass Valley and found the Infinity camera, spent 10 minutes until he raised his hands when I asked about frame rate stuff and he said "Stop - it's not a film-like camera." (meaning no 24p). So I said thank you very much and that was it for that camera.

Went to Sony booth, saw lots, too much to say here. Vegas is 8 bit pipeline, still.

Went to Adobe booth, saw no new product except for some Adobe Reader stuff that was new to me.

In their booth, had a long talk w/lots of pictures and video about the Silicon Imaging camera, that also won an award. It's an 2/3" inch CMOS sensor image block that sounds the RAW output down a GigE connection to a WinXP Embedded computer is the gist of the thing. Some cool UI stuff, more later.

What else? Autodesk has high end toyz.

Went to the Final Cut Pro user group, ran into Greg Bernstein, haven't seen him in at least 7 years! We worked together in San Francisco 10 years ago. Hi Greg! I also met Shane Ross, the Little Frog in High Def guy. Along those lines, I've run into tons of folks I've only emailed or heard about. It was also incredibly gratifying all through the show to be referred as, and I quote exactly: "Hey!...you're the HD for Indies guy!" Everyone has been super nice, capped off by the incredibly kind gentleman from Venezuela that brought me a bottle of rum all the way from Venezuela just as a thank you for doing the blog.

"Ah, shucks folks (looks down and kicks dirt with toe of boot in the dust of the corral)" is about all I can say - everyone's been great and nice and extended a very warm welcome, and I really, really appreciate it.

One eye closing itself now, gotta crash.

-mikey

I tried to blog this one from the show floor, but I couldn't get online. But this morning, a package was dropped off at the Red booth, and opening it up, Ted discovers that Red won a major award at the show - the AIM Award for Innovation In Media for Content Creation (or similar verbiage to that effect).

Score one for Red! Ted told a hilarious story at dinner about how he stole the RED t-shirt off Mark's back zipped over late to receive the award at some big industry luncheon - so it was a row of grey suits, then Ted and JoAnne Yu (who is of course, whip sharp as well as gorgeous) in bright red RED t-shirts. So the photographers were all madly snapping away at their most blatantly obvious metaphor they were going to be presented with all week - a row of bland, grey, same as always Guys In Suits, who just lost out to a guy in a bright red t-shirt with the hot babe standing next to him.

It'll be interesting to see the NAB daily newspaper tomorrow, I'll bet a shot just like that is in there somewhere.

Update - no pic unfortunately, but official coverage here.

Labels: Red

here's a partial list of what I plan on hitting the next couple of days in no particular order - anybody see any gaps?

And more importantly, for the ones with no booth indicated, anybody know where I can find them?

Autodesk - Maya & Toxic - sl3719, S110-MR, S112-MR
Colorspaceinc.com Center Central Hall Booth # C11331
Vision Research, Phantom camera - C10225
JVC - C3217
Canon - SU131
Sony - deck? (HC5/7/FX2) - Vegas? - SU107
Ambarella - H.264 based camera NO BOOTH #
Panasonic - cameras and 26" monitor C2518
Grass Valley Infinity SU-2906
Arri - C6926
Panavision - ???
Thomson - Viper stuff - SU2906
ADobe - Silicon Imaging, too - by Apple in SU
Apple - JPEG2000 codec? in SU
Avid - SL701, SL2387, S229
Silicon Color - SL1816
eCinemaSys C2333
Cinetal - C7729
Codex Digital - DDRs - ???
Christie - SL1519
Vydeo - eSATA for laptops -??? NO BOOTH
Sonnet? - no booth #
Firmtek/Seritek - SL1238
Huge Systems - SL4987
Medea - IN AVID BOOTH?
Gefen - SL541
G-Tech (in B&H behind Sony)
Kinetta - NO SHOW -
Cineform - NO BOOTH #
Iridas - Framecycler, Speedgrade HD - SL4987
Bogen? C5119G
Pixel Corps - and the other plugin Pavillion stuff behind Adobe-ish
-Bella Catapult (and other keyboard stuff) - SL1773
Tangent Devices? - no booth #
Other hardware controller surfaces? a little help, folks?
Sonic - HD DVD authoring - sl3750
EditShare - SL1410
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-mike

Hey all -

FINALLY getting around to organizing some pictures:

Pictures from Day Zero and Day One with Red - exclusive, behind the scenes pics of setting up the booth, getting ready, and then the first official day of Red in public

Crowd Pictures from Day One pictures from 9am to 9:40 or so showing how fast the crowd grew on the first day - pretty amazing for a stealth launch with minimal publicity and zero advertising. Times beneath each photo.

Pictures from Day Two at the Red booth, including Snake Girl - the booth across the way from us was getting similar crowds, but they make some boring stuff and had to resort to fire eaters and a belly dancer with a snake - no kidding! So of course I had to get a picture with her.

: )

-mike

Labels: Red

Theory of RED

The proposed specs on the Red camera are all very exciting, and it should be very interesting to see how it all plays out.

But one thing I want to come back to is WHY this camera exists, and what it is trying to do.

One of the first conversations I had with someone about this project involved dicsussion of film vs. video. Disregarding all the quality differences, it was a discussion of the two completely different approaches that the two types of products were produced with.

Film cameras were really about buying a body, and putting different lenses on the front and different media (film stocks) on the back.

But with video cameras, it is very, very different. If you buy a nice enough video camera, you can swap out lenses on the front end. And that is a very good thing. But what you can't do is swap out media on the back end. The closest thing you can do to it is plug different decks into the back of it, but that is an incredibly limiting choice - you're tethered to that huge blob to capture it's data, which is itself tethered more often than not to an AC power outlet.

If you want to record to a different media and still be mobile, you have to go out and buy an ENTIRELY NEW CAMERA. I'm not aware of film stocks that come out that you have to buy a whole new camera for as long as it is still the same basic format - 16mm vs 35mm, Super or not.

One of the goals of Red, in my opinion, is to be closer to the film camera kind of model - you buy a camera body with a lot of capabilities, but you can put different lenses on the front and put different recording media on the back. You can buy new lenses or recording media to suit the needs of your project.

Need 720p or 1080p or 1080i or 2K? You can do that now with the built in recording to RED-DRIVE.

Don't want to subject it to heavy g-loadings for fear of crashing the heads? Use REDFLASH.

Want uncompressed RAW? Use REDRAID. Need RAW and to be untethered? Use REDRAM.

"Well gee, what if something better than REDRAID comes out?" - there's a high speed port on the back of the camera that will connect to the REDRAID. At this time, they are talking about using something like Infiniband of multi-link fiber channel on an adaptor to go to the REDRAID. But since it is a port, it's possible that if some GooglePlug comes out in a couple of years, you could use that to connect to some new kind of storage technology.

Want a new image sensor? It is upgradeable.

Want to record to something else or new that comes out? The camera has built in HD-SDI single and dual link, 4:2:2, 4:4:4, even 4:4:4 RGB log output. Plug into these industry standard taps and away you go.

-mike

Labels: Red

Studio Daily | First Look at RED!

Steve Gibby has this nice detailed interview with Jim Jannard, founder of Red, and details on the camera. Should have linked to this Monday, just lost it in the fray.

Pictures too!

-mike

So now it is Wednesday morning -

I had told the Red folks I'd only be able to work for a day and a half in the booth and that I'd need to boogie on out mid-day Tuesday to start hitting the show floor.

But I didn't - the experience has just been too good for too many reasons to leave.

Tuesday morning the crowd at the booth was a little slower getting started than Monday, but I think that was just because everyone was hung over from partying.

But it quickly built up to the kinds of crowd that it did on Monday, as in massive. Frederic Haubrich and Ted Schilowitz were taking turns doing the presentations out in front of the booth, and every time the crowd filled up the aisle and spread wide. We were joking that some boring optical connection and routing booth around the corner was getting about the same kinds of crowds we were, but they had to resort to fire eaters and a belly dancer with a snake, whereas we had a closed tent and just talked about our product out front and people were lined up waiting, running around back to sneak a glimpse through the gap in the corner of the tent! (I'm not making this up, those guys really DID have a fire eater and snake girl, I'll link to pics in a bit)

So I ended up working the booth for the rest of the day. I personally saw Disney's technology folks came through, Technicolor staff, Sony, Canon, Zeiss, Cooke, all kinds of industry folks, on top of the crowds of regular show goers.

People continue to believe in the vision - at the end of the day, when the rest of the phone calls get returned, I expect around 185-200 cameras will have been reserved before the show opened this morning. Passing on my shot at #12 yesterday...hmmm. Bad idea?

I literally didn't see a single other thing at the show, Red was nice enough to bring lunch in for us instead of us having to scatter to the winds to forage for sustenance, so today is my first day getting out there. Thanks muchly to all who posted comments about what I should go see, that is largely my guide for the day.

Please continue to post comments with booth #s and I'll see if I can check mail through the day.

I'll see if I can get some pictures posted too before I head out.f

Oh, and a bit more on Red - the sensor is upgradeable, Jim has committed the company to that.

Did I say you can send a Viper FilmStream like 10 bit RGB 4:4:4 log signal out the dual link HD-SDIs? You can.

For 2K, you'll also be able to record to 10 bit RGB 4:4:4 log REDCODE codec, too.

So the codec will have 4:2:2, 4:4:4, and 4:4:4 RGB log modes clearly.

For anyone who says that Red can't do it, this thing isn't for real (not concern of doubt, but a definitive statement of CAN'T), I overheard someone say "grow a pair of balls and go say that to Jim's face."

: )

If you have any questions about Red, email me or post them in the comments - I can say as much about this camera as any Red employee.

-mike

Hey all -

...so I've had zero time to look over press releases and figure out what I should go see at NAB 2006. So I'm turning to you folks - what should I go see? If you know of a company or technology that fits into the stuff I usually cover or that you think would be of interest to the readership, please click on the Comments link below and let me know. If you know the booth #, all the better - please include it.

-mike

Hey all -

It's been an incredible day. It is after midnight and I'm finally getting back to my room after getting up at 5am.

For those that don't know, I've been working in the RED booth today and will again tomorrow. Why? Because it is Sliced Bread 2.0 as far as cameras and workflow goes. Many web friends and acquaintances walked up to me and asked quietly essentially the same questions - "Dude, is this thing for real?" and I unhesitatingly said yes. With that, they'd walk their credit card over and order one. It's a no brainer - if you can afford to let RED hold your $1000, you get a place in line (a line growing longer about 10 cameras per hour when booth is open), and can get a refund any time you feel uncertain about it. You'll be able to see test footage and hear people's comments about it, and if you order now, there will be over 100 units already shipped that you'll be able to hear user feedback on before you're committed to pay the remaining $16,500 for the camera body. This isn't some shakily financed deal, this is Jim Jannard's, the founder of Oakley's, personal baby project. If folks want their money back, they'll get it. So what's to lose?

When the doors opened at 9am, there were already a few people standing around the booth. But 9:10 there started to be a group standing in the aisle outside the closed tent of the booth, and by about 9:20 it was a LARGE crowd. Don't believe me? Check out the pictures for yourself - time pics were taken below each picture.

I went back and forth between manning the booth and manning the workflow demonstration area - we had a Kona3 demonstrating the newly revealed (via driver update) 2K capabilities of the Kona3. That's right - 2K playback in Final Cut Pro. It's awesome - you can play back either traditional 2K (2048x1556) or the newer DCI spec 2K res (2048x1080). Even with a 2048x1556 timeline (using PhotoJPEG to compress since we didn't have a huge fast array in the secondary demo room), I could still play back to a 1920x1080 device via a combination of scaling vertically (1556 to 1080) and cropping slightly horizontally (2048 to 1920). It worked great, and looked AMAZING on the $14Kish CineTal 24" LCD panel monitor (configured as was, but they can run anywhere from $8500 up to $25K depending on bells and whistles). I'll have to go by their booth and have a long chat Wed/Thurs.

The Kona3 also can now use the dual link HD-SDI as an HSDL (High Speed Data Link) to communicate with the kinds of devices that use that - datacine, scanners, etc. The advantage is that it is wicked fast (15 fps 2048x1556 10 bit with alpha), and can go LOOOOOOONG distances (using two BNC cables). This'll be a good thing in a bunch of ways that aren't immediately obvious.

To be fair, I should mention that BlackMagic shipped drivers earlier this year that support 2K playback on my Multibridge Extreme (but not HSDL transfer as far as I know) earlier this year. I just haven't had a chance to plug it into a 30" LCD to test it, so this was the first time I did 2K FCP playback.

Some more RED tidbits I picked up during the day - there will be a battery included. The camera will support dual link log RGB 4:4:4 out the HD-SDI taps like a Viper does. All taps (outputs) will be hot, simultaneously, all the time. With two BNCs to support dual link HD-SDI, there's no reason why they can't be configured to do twin mirrored single link connections as well. There is a number to call on Red's website for those that want to call in to reserve one, but you'll be trying to get through to Chris Petrillo who is also busy taking orders on the show floor. How busy is he? By lunchtime, around 60ish orders had been placed and he had 75 or so cell phone messages. By the time we practically had to shove people out of the booth, at 6:30, half an hour AFTER the show closed, the count was around 100 people that had put $1000 on a credit card (Visa/MC, no Amex at the moment) to reserve their own. Some asked about should they reserve a lens, and the response was "Not yet." And when you reserve a camera, you get this gorgeous little hewn ingot of metal in the shape of the logo with your own serial # engraved on the bottom. Remember that "r" shape from the old website for red? It's a cast metal one of those. It's nice, just another class touch from Jim and his guys. Smart folks are asking Jim to sign them as a keepsake. I spent a long, hard time thinking about whether I wanted to get camera # 12, and in the end I passed - I'm a post production consultant, for Pete's sake - I don't even own my own DV camera, why would I want to own a $20Kish high end camera of my own? (Because it is sooooooo cool!). I figured if I keep on good terms with these guys I could always borrow one if/when I needed it.

Numerous Apple staff came by, including a high level FCP person I know (name withheld, not sure if I can go public on who) who was there for the first preso at 9:20 or so. His eyes lit up more and more the more stuff we told him about what it would do. Later in the day, I was told by another, even higher level person in the Pro Apps Group that I could say that "Apple has seen this, and is very interested" (or did he say excited?) about what RED is up to. I think/hope that will bode well for trying to get native codec support in FCP, which was one of the most common questions I was asked while working the booth and demo room (where we're showing 2K workflows, since RED can do 4K/2K/1080p/1080i/720p resolutions).

By the end of the day, we had to practically shove some folks out of the tent at 6:30, half an hour after it was announced the show was CLOSED for the day. Around that time, I checked in with Chris who said they'd booked about 100 reservations that day in 10 hours - a busy day of filling out forms for him. He figured that by the time we open for bidness tomorrow and 9, he'll have made enough callbacks from his huge long phone message list that the count will be in the 120-125 range.

So these things are moving FAST. Call or come by if you want to reserve one (and you can get your money back at any time no questions no hassles) Call 949.206.7900 if you're ready to reserve one.

Later in the day I briefly got a chance to escape and check out the Apple booth. Other than the new 17" MacBook Pro, which has FW800 and a gorgeous bigger screen than the 15", it's pretty much like the 15" as far as I could tell in my high speed skim of the specs.

Xsan got bumped to v1.3, but sounds like it is just bug and stability fixes and the ability to create LUNs bigger than 2TB. Nice, but just a fix of an obvious hassle.

Final Cut Pro, however, is NOT a new version as I inferred from my swingby of the booth before they opened on Sunday. What it is is a technology demonstration, for a version of FCP they would not name a version # for, with no announced ship date. So at SOME point in the future we'll see a new version with 24F support for the Canon XL H1 and 24p support for the JVC GY-HD100U. Now that's great, and I wish I had that now, but it's not a reason to bump to 5.5 or 6.0 if that's all we're talking about. There was NO mention whatsoever of an FCP 5.5 or 6.0. I guess that the switch to Intel kept'em busy. Rumor mongers - you were WRONG! Maybe at IBC we'll hear mention of the next major version of FCP. But 24F/24p support? To me, that is a 5.1.1 or 5.2 at best version jump. I'd love the features, I'll all for it, but OK, if that's it, get it on the market and let's GO!

I also finally got a chance to check out G-Tech's G-Speed (no info on website I could find) at the spiffy party they threw in the Wynn, their new 4 gigabit fiber channel array. 3.0 TB raw capacity, it does RAID 0,1,3,5, or 6 (which is double parity, cost one more drive's worth of space than RAID 3/5). The 3.0 TB model lists for about $6K if I recall correctly, and in RAID 3 config (Roger, the head guy, said RAID 5 ought to be about the same) clocked in around 240 MB/sec using the AJA disk throughput doohickey - PLENTY fast enough for uncompressed HD. Expected to ship in June, the hardware is done, they are just messing with the cabinect form factor/aesthetic stuff. Oh, it's also hotswap, which should rock! In RAID 3 or 5 trim, that 3.0 TB (6 times 500 GB Hitachi SATA drives) will yield 2.5TB, which with the usual funky hard drive math means 2.31TB of usable, formatted space in RAID 3 or 5 configuration. Roger said it should work with Xsan, too. With Medea recently purchased by Avid and it's future unknown to me, I think this positions G-Tech very very nicely to compete with the existing players of Apple, Huge, and Medea. I hear Huge has some good stuff at the show I haven't been able to check out yet, Medea's in Funky Land as far as I know because of this Avid thing until I can talk to them and get the skinny, and the speed and bang/buck that G-Tech offers in this first product is quite, quite competitive with the Apple XServe RAID.

Afterwards, we all gathered back in the hotel lobby, did some fascinating recap of the day, strategized for the future, I'd like to think that I came up with some KILLER marketing ideas for the next year (that I can't discuss), and managed to FINALLY get some dinner around 11:30. Got back to room 12:30ish, did some work and then typed this, and it is - oh damn! 3:10am now. OK, that's it, I gotta go to bed, up in 4 hours! I'm wide awake and cruising on the juice of a Day Well Done - RED couldn't have imagined a better launch day.

Ah, well, shortly Once More Into The Breach (but willingly)...

-mike

So the specs and pricing and stuff are up for the RED camera, and let's just say off the bat that it rocks. But there are SO many choices in shooting modes it can be confusing. There's a matrix on the handouts here at the show, and perhaps on the Red site.

So here's my take on it:

More on RED

The camera was designed to modular - start light and small so it'll go places big cameras won't, but be able to bulk it up for large production needs using the optional cages that give hard mount points for rods, lens support, viewfinders, remotes, etc. It is a helluva lot easier to make a small camera big than a big camera small.

It has more in common with the working style of a film camera than it does a traditional video camera - the ability to shoot anywhere from 1-120 frames per second, between 720 and 4520 pixels tall.

A bit more on recording modes: there are four variables here:

1.) What pixel size you shoot

2.) What pixel size you record

3.) What video/data format are you recording

4.) what physical recording device does it go on.

One at a time:

1.) What pixel size you shoot -

1.) The Mysterium Sensor is 4520x2540 pixels, and is a Super35mm sized single CMOS sensor. All modes start from there.

2.) So when shooting in the following modes, you're recording:

4520p - it is the full output of the sensor, up to 60 fps

4K - it crops off around the edges to get down to 4096x2160, up to 60 fps

2K - in this mode, up to 60 fps (more on other modes in a minute) - start with the 4K above, and then scale it down - so it is super sampled (or oversampled, if you prefer that lingo) to give smoother results with less noise, better signal/noise ratio, less aliasing, and this in turn helps the dynamic range. So when recording 2K or less, you have an oversampled, cleaner/smoother image. Remember this applies to the rest of the formats below

1080p - take the 2K and crop it a bit more - so for 1080p, you have an image that is oversampled about 4x - it is 2x in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. This is GOOD.

1080i - take the 1080p and use each 1080p60 frame to generate a 1080i field. This is, yet again, oversampling, and provides a VERY nice, clean, sharp, smooth 1080i. This is actually an ideal way to generate a 1080i image and is in no way a compromised image

720p - through a combination of scaling and cropping, the 4520p is scaled and cropped to 720p for a highly oversampled (I think about 3x in each dimension, I'll need to ask Graeme Nattress to confirm), so should be extremely clean. This description differs slightly than the handout on the show floor, but Graeme assures me 720p is optimally derived after I grilled him on it, not just scaled down from the 1080p as may be indicated elsewhere.

In the viewfinder, whatever mode you're shooting will show with reticles around the SurroundViewTM viewfinder - you'll be able to see what's in frame and what's about to come in frame - more like an optical viewfinder on a film camera.

OK, back to 2K - what if you want to shoot some serious high speed, like 120 fps? And what's this about the ability to use Super 16mm lenses?

It works this way -

The sensor is Super35mm sized. The camera can accept Super 16mm lenses. when you mount a S16 lens on it, the image hits the sensor the size of S16 film, not the size of S35 film from an S35 lens. You're now using a small center piece of the imager - this is called windowing. By windowing the sensor, you can use S16 lenses and get a 2K res image out of the camera, you're just not oversampling anymore. But, by using a smaller piece of the sensor, it is possible to crank up the cycle rate on it, and get a higher frame rate. Therefore you can go up to 120 fps at 2K res (or 1080p or 720p, and 720p WOULD be oversampled in this case) when using S16 lenses. And we're talking about DCI 2K here - 2048x1080, not the anamorphic film scan 2048x1556 pixels.

The decision was made to keep the depth of field the same for 1080p and 720p, FYI, so it doesn't change when you switch modes. Convenient! You're NOT windowing when switching between those modes.

A word on anamorphic - you don't need to use anamorphic lenses with this camera (unless you really want to). I had a lengthy chat with both Graeme Natress and Stuart English about this, and they said what we have here will work just fine for widescreen implementations. I'll probably follow up in depth and write more about it, but in general, you're in good shape - it is a native 16:9 sensor to start with, and you can always crop the image to get 2.35:1.

3.) What video/data format are you recording in? It depends:

When shooting 2540p - you're assumed to be shooting RAW at this point and want maximum quality. RAW is the unprocessed direct output of the Bayer pattern from the CMOS sensor. It is uncolor corrected, and isn't even directly viewable - it's still grayscale data at this point that has to be processed to figure out which pixels are R/G/B. In any case, 4520p is always RAW.

When shooting 4K, same thing.

When shooting 2K, you can now start using the REDcode codec. For 2K, it is assumed you want log data (like a film scan or Viper FilmStream mode), which does a better job of recording highlights and is akin to 12 bit linear. If that doesn't make any sense, that's OK, just know that in 2K you have a choice - either RAW, or REDcode 10 bit RGB 4:4:4 log variable bitrate wavelet. It might be possible to go out the dual link HD-SDI with 2K, I'll have to check. In theory it is possible, especially with the new AJA Kona 3 card's capabilities.

When shooting 1080p, you have yet more choices - you can record uncompressed out the HD-SDI (single or dual link), or you can use the REDcode 10 bit 4:2:2 codec. In 1080p, I THINK you can do RGB 4:4:4 1080p, but I'll need to double check - that isn't explicitly stated on the data sheet. But 10 bit 4:2:2 REDcode wavelet is an option, as well as uncompressed to the REDRAID.

There seems to be a gap here that I need to follow up on - is there a 10 bit log RGB 4:4:4 for 1080p? If there a 10 bit linear RGB 4:4:4 for 1080p? Or is it assumed you'll start with a 2K and crop down in post somewhere/somehow? I'll have to ask about that.) - actually, I just talked to Graeme about it - yeah, it'll be fine. He said something about codecs are still under development, and Red won't do anything to artificially limit users. My own thought - yeah, that would be so completely against the spirit of what they are trying to do here.

For 720p, 10 bit 4:2:2 to REDcode VBR wavelet codec, out the HD-SDI single link uncompressed, and possibly uncompressed to REDRAID, again I'll need to check the matrix on that one.

And lastly, where do you record it to?

Options include:
RED-RAID - high speed RAID for RAW recording, possibly uncompressed recording as well - have to check. This is an external device, they are considering either Infiniband or dual link fiber channel of some sort.
RED-RAM - I'm guessing for short bursts of RAW or high speed I'm guessing, external as well. But it'll have a higher capacity than REDFLASH. Sufficient.
REDFLASH - internal 32-128GB flash memory. I need more info, but I'm guessing for shorter takes to REDcode, maybe RAW, maybe uncompressed?
RED-DRIVE - internal to camera, hard drive based (probably 2.5" drive mechanism)
...or out the HD-SDI, single or dual link depending on frame size and rate and what fits in the HD-SDI spec for frame and data rates and bit depth. At that point, you can hook up to conventional decks or DDRs or other recording gear.

If you assume a bitrate of 100 mbits, and assume a REDDRIVE of at least 40 GB (and these are just safe assumptions about datarate and drive size for an example here), that'd be an hour or so of footage. Higher data rate and higher capacities obviously change that. But count on being able to probably do about an hour of recording on the REDDRIVE.

Again, that is all just to say this camera is all about choices and finding what works best for you.

-mike

Labels: Red

NAB 2006: RED - pricing and availability

Today at NAB, tons of new details were dropped about the RED camera, and so far it sounds just stunning. So much new information has come out, I'm going to drop it in a series of articles covering different facets of the camera.

Let's start off with what's new information that's relevant to potential buyers: The price and how to get one.

PRICING
First off, drum roll please, the price:

$17,500 for a Red One camera body (no lens, no digital mag)

The price for the 300mm lens (f2.8, fixed 300mm, details in other articles today): under $4750

Recording modules: Ted Schilowitz said that there would be a recording option under $1000, but did not specify storage type or capacity. I asked some more about it and he said that product at that price point would offer a useful amount of recording capacity. (My personal interpretation of that statement was that it would be well more capacity than a P2 card)

HOW DO I GET ONE?

If you're interested in reserving one today, they aren't taking orders, but they are taking deposits as a placeholder in line, so that you get a very clear indication of where you are in the queue for production, with no prevarications. In order to distinguish who is serious, they are asking for a $1000 deposit via credit card, which is fully refundable at any time, no questions asked. These are non-tranferable - if you don't want to buy it, you can't give or sell that line position to somebody else - that place in line simply goes away.

This is not to raise cash to develop the camera, simply a way to tell who seriously wants one and reserve a place for those folks.

At this time, they are trying to limit orders to 5 units. If you insist on trying to get more, talk to Ted or Jim. Also the price is what they consider fair and firm - the price is the price. Note that they are selling directly and not through resellers at this time.

If you don't feel comfortable putting a deposit down on a camera that isn't finished yet, fine - later this year they'll be showing actual cameras, and then shipping them late this year/early next year (current plan) - you can always wait and put in an order later, but you'll be behind everyone else who put in an order before you.

So the optimists (with a deposit) get theirs first, the pessimists will have to wait their turn.

update - as of noon, I think there were about 100 reservatsions placed last I heard. So get on it if you want in!

-mike

Labels: Red

The RED website has been updated with pics, specs, all the goodies - go check it out. I'm continuing to publish my take on it here, stand by....

I wrote this at 5am this morning, been crazed at the show - over 100 RED orders so far last I heard. I've been released to publish the goodies:

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

Red Camera: Basic Specs

So without further ado, here's the specs (which are of course, subject to change, as the camera is under development) on the Red One camera.

I'll obviously have much more to say and comment about it over the next few days, but let's start here:

CAMERA UNIT ITSELF

-VERY small, modular in design.
-the body will weigh less than 7 pounds without battery, lens, or recording module.
-the basic body ($17,500) includes HD-SDI, dual HD-SDI, HDMI, XLRs, and a bunch of other inputs and outputs.
-a port for RAW recording will be included, but you'll need to buy a separate recording module for recording RAW - it'll be some kind of high speed serial connection, that's still being decided

MYSTERIUM SENSOR
-single CMOS sensor
-as said before, it's 4520x2540 pixels
-29 square micron pixels - that's BIG, so a lot of light per pixel - helps signal/noise, helps light sensitivity, helps contrast, etc.
-11.5 megapixels
-24.4mm x 13.7mm (Super 35mm sized)
-dynamic range >66db, aka depending on lenses used, etc., somewhere in the range of 11-15 stops
-depth of field is equivalent to using Cine lenses
-it can be windowed down to 2K to use Super 16mm lenses and frame rates up to 120 fps

Acquitision formats:
4520p (4k+)
4K
2K
1080p
1080i
720p

Frame Rates:
Variable 1-60 fps for 2540p, 4K, 2K, 1080p, 1080i, 720p
Variable 1-120 fps for 2K, 1080p, 720p by windowing the sensor (using a smaller part in the middle) and using 16mm lenses
And of course, all the usual suspects - 23.98, 24.00, 25.0, 29.97, 30.0, 50.0, 59.94, etc.

RAW Output:
1-60 fps 2540p, 4K, 2K
1-120fps - windowed 2K (as described above)

Video output:
single and dual link HD-SDI
2K 4:4:4 RGB
1080p 4:4:4 RGB
1080p 4:2:2
1080i 4:2:2
720p 4:2:2

Digital Media Magazine:
-the digital mags will have FW400/800, USB 2.0, and eSATA ports, so you can plug it into your computer and just GO - copy the files off, or play from the mag.
RED-DRIVE will use hard disks in the 40-160 GB capacity ranges
REDFLASH will use flash memory in the 32-128 GB capacity ranges

REDCODE codec: will be a variable bitrate, wavelet based codec:
10 bit: 4:2:2 1080p/1080i/720p
10 bit log: 4:4:4 2K
(I'm GUESSING that it will be full raster, but I haven't seen that explicitly stated yet)

Audio: 4 channel uncompressed, 16/24 bit, 48 KHz minimum specs

Viewfinder: Built in high res LCD, with on screen display, focus assist, exposure assist

Construction: magnesium alloy (and I must say, the proto looks GORGEOUS, my first thought was "this is the alien spy sattelite")

ACCESSORIES:
RED-RAID - high speed serial interface, 2540p RAW data recorder, 12V D.C.
UHD Lenses - in development - RED 35mm and 16 PL mount Cine lenses. An optional B4 mounting kit will also ship at some point
UHD Viewfinder - SurroundViewTM (let's you see what's out of frame, like an optical viewfinder to see what's coming into frame, not what just did come into frame)
Camera Bages: Tripod or on shoulder use, powered accessory mount points (stainless steel mount points - very nice!)

Those are the basic specs.

Labels: Red

There are two ways to get all the scoop on the RED:

Right NOW, come down the NAB SU (south upper hall) SU1401 booth and find me. Black pants, black RED shirt, 6 foot 3, glasses, brown hair.

if you're coming in from south upper - come along down the left side past Sony, past the blue banner hanging from the ceiling that says Escalator to Multimedia Downstairs or something like that. about 100 feet past the escalators, start looking to your right for a big red ball with a silver ring around it (the RED logo), and a red and white tent. That's us.

If you're in South Lower hall, come up the escalators, turn right, and in 100 feet or so start looking off to your right diagonally for the above.

OR...

wait a few hours and I will Tell All. I've been giving tons of access and details, but somebody else has first dibs on posting details, I'll be posting mid-morning to lunch sometime.

And there's LOTS to tell!

Also, Apple's new 17" Core Duo laptop is out, and I hear it has FireWire 800.

I also saw, wandering through booths yesterday, that there is SOME new version of FCP, because I saw a station that said 24fps support for the JVC GY-HD100U. So that's all good stuff!

I'll be blogging on other than RED starting tonight probably - today is all about RED, several articles to post.

And with that, I'm late as hell and gotta blaze, see you at the booth!

-mikey

Ran into Roger from G-Tech last night, and he told me about their new storage product, G-Speed. The press release doesn't go out for a few hours yet, so I can't say exactly what it is, but you folks know the kind of storage I like - fast. G-Tech doesn't have their own booth, they are in the B&H booth, which is in the South Upper Hall right behind the huge Sony booth when you first enter. If you're shopping for the kind of storage I usually cover, you owe it to yourself to go check it out.

Tell'em Mike sent ya.

: )

-mike

Today was a good one - James Cameron got us rolling with some great, passionate discussion about why 3D movies matter.

As usual, here's my raw notes:

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NAB Digital Cinema Summit 2006, Day Two Notes: james Cameron keynote
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KEYNOTE: JAMES CAMERON ON DIGITAL 3D

James Cameron is giving the keynote

Elizabeth Monk Daley is the dean at the University of Southern California Cinema/Television

(she's introducing Cameron)

talking about Cameron - he comes at it from the perspective of making better films.
-born Ottawa
-came to LA in 71 to study physics at Fullerton College, machinist and truck driver
-in 78 decided to bea filmmaker, hired by Roger Corman
-worked for corman as VFX artist and designer, quickly went on to do his own films
-Terminator in 84 from his own script
-wrote and directed The Abyss, T2, True Lies, and Titanic in 97, (highest grossing movie in history, $1.8B in ticket sales), 14 Academy Awards, pleased that he's going for 3D

this is Cameron:

Human beings don't like change - if it ain't broke don't fix it. Our business may not be broke, but it could use some fixing. Falling box office and day & date release causes concern, how to get people back to theaters.

Can d-cinema provide the magic to do that? For me, yes. Digital is an enabling tech for 3D. Digital has a sound biz model for why it should be done. Those reasons are not why he's excited about it - for me, it's about 3D.

My vision is that it might be the most important part of d-cinema.

46 3d movies released from 52-55, then it died out completely. in next 25 years, only 3 titles. Why? People were fascinated by the stereo experience, but got turned off by crude cameras, producing stereo that created a lot of eyestrain even under the best projection conditions. The projection was dark and prone to error in the field. If it was 2 perfs out, the L&R eyes were reversed and you'd need years of therapy to recover. Plus, most of these movies sucked and you wouldn't have gone to see them without 3D.

The new 3d digital cameras have dynamic interocular and convergence, capable of producing perfect stereo images with no eyestrain. It's been solved. And the new 2K d-cimena projectors are a godsend. There's no point in making great 3d with no place to show.

the only difference between digital nd 35mm is one thing: Frame Rate. The reason you can show it on a single projector is because digital can do high frame rates (over 100fps) whereas film cameras are good for 24, maybe a bit more if you goose it.

Digital allows a triple flash per eye per frame (see yesterdays notes) - you're getting images at 144 fps but the brain is fooled into seeing the images simultaneously even though you're really seeing them sequentially. Digital can do something 35mm CANNOT DO. This is different from color, res/image steadiness/etc., this is binary. They just can't do it. Can you project 3d w/35mm projector? You can, but you're back to the 50's for the 3D tech.

Ghosts of the Abyss had over/under 35mm projecgtion in 50 theaters. it wasa nightmare process, dark murky pictures, really a non-starter. Anaglyphic is worse. For bright, stable, lucid 3d, you need digital projection.

6 ydars ago started down a path to shoot digital 3D.

Dissatisfied with the big bulky stuff at the time. Back then, plan was to shoot digitgal and blow it up to imax. Partway in, had an epiphany: the new digital projectors could be made to run 3d and didn't cost $2.5M apiece, so could be THOUSANDS of them. If the whole d-cinema conversion hapened, could be TENS of thousands of 3d projectors, not a few dozen. This was a glorious dream....that no one else shared.

got on horn with Doug Darrow of TI's DLP program, been working with them towards the goal of digital projector tech that is 3d capable. At first they thought of me as an intriguing annoynace, but after banging away that this was the one thing that their projectors could do that 3d couldn't, they got interested after d-cinema stalled (good as film?, doing tests, etc.) there wasn't a strong enough driver to do it. There wasn't a strong enough marketing hook to the public. No scratches, versatility, stable, etc. it'll save studios a boatload of money over time, but the average person is not going to line up around the block if Fox is going to have a strong quarterly profit. But 3D, he told Doug, changes alll that - now you have a very specific and marketable system to install in the near term, the benefits to be harversted by exhibitors and studios, but now something to intrigue the public's imagination, a differentiator for ttheaters, and a catalyst for d-cinema. It might turn out that he could be right - no scientist would take two data points to make a solid decsion (we usually use less data to make decisions in our business).

Polar Express 3D made history in 3d world. $121M on 2d screens. On 68 3d screens grossed $68M. 25% gross form 2% of the theaters. Lots of big films have been blown up to Imax. None of them have shown such a difference between Imax and regular screns. The difference? Feature length 3D that was sought out and paid extra for.

It didn't prove that success would translate to DIGITAL 3D. October '05, there were 43 digital screens, 14 were running 2K, none were running 3D. D-cinema had stalled for years due to chicken and egg conundrum. Chicken came first (chicken little). Disney installed 84 2K 3d installs. 6x more than before. 83 screens made 12.9M dollars. Average gross was 54K/screen. Average was $162K/screen for 3D theaters- vastly outweighs costs of doing 3D. (got figures from

3d sold out first and most often, overflow helped the 2d screens. 3D had stronger legs, ran as long as 13 weeks. 2% of the theaters did 10% of the gross in north america. that's a similar pattern to polar express but on a different platform. The commonality - feature length 3d. Confirmed audiences will seek out and pay extra for 3d, give good word of mouth, and the costs are outweighed significantly by the increased upside. Opinion dynmaics poll of 900 us addults - 12% (39M americams) would go to movies more often if they were feature length 3d films. Isn't that what we want? People to go more often? among 18-29 year olds, 29%. Some said it would depend onthe film. 14% would poay 2-3 dollars more.

The numbers don't seem that high - 50% have never seen a 3d movie, so that is the opinion based on PAST experience with 3d, which is a pretty sordid history. How mahy of these have seen digital 3d on a hollywood blockbuster? Very few. There is a predisposition to want to see 3D. The numbers will go higher once more folks see it.

We know people want it, will actively seek it out, and pay more for it.

This all needs to be driven by content, not format. Not about finding good scripts for 3D films, be like finding scripts for finding good color movies in the 50s - like when color was new, it was used onthe A - list pictures. 3D should be thought of as that kind of enhancement. Don't put a turbo on a sewing machine, put it on a sports car. Put 3d on a top tier market, and market on the merits of the movie, at the end of the trailer or tv spot, you say "In 3d at selected theaters" - if you sell movie as ultimate 3d experience, people will feel like they are settling for less in a 2d theater. Most folks will still see the movie in 2d rather than 3d for the next several years.

Make 3d the upselll/upside. Give consumers credit for seeking it out, and it is value add.

So where's this 3d content coming from? 3 ways to make 3d movies:
1.) Shoot a live movie with stereoscopic
2.) make a cg movie
3.) can dimensionalize a movie shot in 2d and make it 3d

how he sees it:

1.) Live action movies - he's been shooting live action, digital 3d for the lasat 5 years, all he's done - shot steadicam, hundreds of hours of handheld, helicopter, you name it. Nothing you can do in 2d you can't do in 3D. New cameras are mostly more sophisticated than cmaeras of the past, but are now electronic so are able to see it live and make changes, not bake in mistakes you can't undo later. Can do perfect stereo that produces no eyestrain. Camera package costs more, close to double, (2 of everything), factor in post and VFX have added 5-15% of the cost of the movvie. Put can gross 30-40% more. he's decided to shoot Battle Angel, Project 880, (new line and walden Journey to Center of Earth in 3D, first live action 3d to market on digital screens, about 800 screens is their goal). a number of other projects he can't talk about

2.) CG area - Zemeckis is doing Beowolf in motion cpature 3d. He says this is the only way Zemeckis wants to do it. Aas long as you want to do it in 3d, it is ridiculously easy to do to do 2 virtual cmaeras. Twice the rendering, but easy. It is the low hanging fruit in the 3D market for a few extra million dollars. Disney's Meet The Robinsons is being made in 3d from scratch. 3d and CG goes together likes peas and carrots. Chicken Little was dimensionalied at the last minute at higher cost than dual rendering from the get-go.

3.) Dimensionalization - was skeptical at first, but did some tests with InThree and "I did a real 180" when he saw it.

He's seriously looking at doing Titanic in 3d, looking at doing T2 as well, maybe some of the others if the costs come down. Peter Jackson, is looking at doing LoTR and King Kong in 3D.

Lucas is actively planning doing the Star Wars films. IT is technically feasible but very expeinsive. It is cheaper to shoot 3D rather than to shoot 2D and dimensionalize. It should be thought of converting the top earners of all time. Raiders of the Lost Ark would be really cool. He supports it because it'll create content to show on 3d, and the exhibitors need to know there will be a steady stream.

Bono on glasses - "This is not a problem, this is a marketing opportunity."

There's two kinds of glasses - active and passive. Active shutters open and closed 96 times a second, has a battery and a motor. New ones are light, in large volume they'll cost maybe $25 apiece. Need to get'em back and run'em through a dishwasher and it is a pain in the ass. The big advantage is that you don't need a special screen, and can use existing screen. For theater owner, i fyou want to move from big to small auditorium in week 3, is no big deal since can just move the glasses.

Passive - put an LCD filter over projector lens, install a silver screen. Glasses are cheap, under $1, can be given away, if you're cheap you can collect'em and use'em again. All the Bono marketing possibilities are there - Ray Bans or Oakleys. NEw systems use circular polarization and it won't mess up the picture. The only real negative is the cost of the silvered screens. They cost in the same general range as the active glasses. Lots of grumbling about silver screen is no good for 2D - THAT IS WRONG. Somebody will diagree, but that's what he uses. Nattering nabobs of negativity nattering on about change. But I'm not too biased on that. : )

whatever biz model works best is fine - otherwise you're splitting hairs.

Both systems work fine with a single projector. Every 2K projector out there can potentially be a 3D projector. And we're talking about eventually converting ALL projectors over time. The upgrade form 2D to 3d once the projector is in place can be made overnight. Can make decision downstream.

Anaglyphic 3d "we need to stamp out this unholy practice" - People are tempted to using this to release films on 35mm using this. Nobody over the age of 10 thinks this 3D looks good. Anaglyphic releases could cause a setback to the industry by giving new 3D viewers a BAD experience. 3d as a market is only as good as the brand association we build over the next few years. "Remember - red blue BAD!"

Where is all this 3D stuff going? Do I think all movies 3d in 10 years? No. Isn't like the pervasive changes of sound and color. In a few years, studios will ask about how many of the annual 4 or 5 of the tentpole movies should be 3D? Hopes it will be driven by filmmakers wanting to do it because it is cool, because they will want to create their own stereo aesthetic, like a new set of colors to play with it. The major animated 3D releases will, as a rule, come out in 3D. Timeless classics will be

Will it be a fad that blooms and dies like 3d in the 50s? No - a fundamentally diferent class of movies, the must-see major releases from the major filmmakers. Ina addition to making the movies you'd see anyway, in some theaters in vivid glorious digital 3d, and the quality will be perfect - no reason for it not to be, no crossed eyes and headaches and grumbling - fundamentally different from anything that has com ebefore. Dismissing it as a fad is not possible, but it isn't logical to dismiss it. How big can this thing get? As long as incremental cost is less than the incremental box office it creates, it'll be vialbe indefinitely. We have to get projection infrastructure into place, once you have the titles availble, and the teathers are avilable, it'll drive the economics and it'll improve over time as you have more theaters, which will encourage more movies, which will feed back to make more moviemakers to shoot in 3D, etc., is his theory. His theories so far are working on the timeline he thought.

Another fundamental difference - digital projectors can show live feeds that represent another biz opporunity. The digital 3D cmaeras can shoot live 3d that is hard to distinguish from human vision - what if you could use this installed base of digital 3d theaters to take place in live events across the world, the immediacy and power of that...."think about what you could charge..." : )

The home market - those who say you can't play it at home misses the point. You'll be able to pirate major release movies and it'll be viewable at home is happening. But you won't be able to watch it in 3d. You won't be able to pirate it in 3d, and even if you could, nothing to watch it on at home!

"We're so scared of piracy we're ready to pimp out our mothers" with day and date

if you have a successful 3d movie, people will buy the 2d version to watch it at home.

Eventually, it'll be possible to watch this stuff at home if there's another market, and it'll create a market for your film

If they buy your movie in 2d, later the 3d version will come out and they'll buy that movie again..."Am I evil for liking that idea so much?"

Even without 3d, including all the squabbling that the studios do, the wave is coming, 3D can ride the d-cinema wave, and even help drive the wave, giving people a tangible near term reason for wanting the projectors. We're passed the point where the fear of change outweighs the fear of NOT changing. He's not making movies for people to watch on cellphones. And he doesn't want day and date to erode the grand experience of theatrical cinema experience.

"We're in a fight for survival here" - maybe we just need to fight back harder, not wither away and die - d-cinema can do that, do that for a number of reasons, d-cinema is a catalyst for 3d, and it'll get people off their butts and bac in theaters where they belong."

gonna run a clip of 10 or 11 minutes from Show West that made some buzz for the digital 3d concept. Compilation of 3D from a number of different sources, that'll work from a bunch of sources. All CG, hybrid live/3d, straight live action production. Starts out with some stuff from T2 3D that was shot on film. All kinds of stuff. That'll take us into the panel discussion.

(wathced a demo of a lot of stuff - looks GOOD, but want to see what can REALLY be done with Cameron shooting some first rate action stuff - Battle Angel!)
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and that led into a round table discussion, I'll post those notes in a moment. Sorry for all the typos in this, was typing as fast as I could....

-mike

Once again, my raw notes from an NAB Digital Cinema Summit 2006: Day Two panel, this a round table on 3D Digital Cinema. On the panel:

Geoff Burdick, James Cameron, Joshua Greer, Vince Pace, moderator Jon Jandau are on this panel.

There's some GREAT info to be gleaned in here, note the bolded section where Jim Cameron himself weighs in on the whole 422 vs 444, compressed vs. uncompressed thing. See my comments at end about it.

Raw notes below, as I took'em, typos and all:

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Round Table Panel

John Landau is the producer working with Jim at Lightstorm

Real D guy is here

Christie and QuVis helped do this today.

50 years ago, if there was a TV, it might have been color

Now, in cinema, there have been no serious advancements in the visual presentation of movies. 50 years, no serious advancements. Something to distinguish the home vs. theatrical experience.

Tech has enabled 3 things to come together -
1.) The capture technology - no longer encumbered with huge heavy cameras - T2 3D had to have stunt players go half speed because that was as fast as they could have been moved. Now can do steadicam

2.) Post technology is better - can do post convergence

3.) Digital cinema experience - 3D at a higher quality than has ever been seen

Let's start with Vince Pace of Pace Technologies developing 3D camera stuff -

what we've developed is a motion controller that introduces dynamic convergence and interocular control. No longer a mathematical guess of what it should look like, is a creative interpretation of what's desired. Very complicated gear makes it easy to do good 3D. The gap from capture to what'll look like in a theater is getting very short

-can go up to 20 miles, can do motion control remotely, cmaera system is comprised of optical block, lenses, dynamic control at the point of capture that let's em steadicam, remote crane, go 3 miles under the ocean, through fiber optics, allows'em to go to whatever - disk, HDCAM SR, record with no degradation, but keep POINT of capture very simple and film-like. Exciting to see all those functions come togehter.

"3D opens the door for filmmakers to mine completely new territoriies" - some filmmakers may be leery of new stuff to learn and won't be able to do the things they know. Everyone will do it diffferently and see different opportunities - Jim doesn't like to do the "poke you in the eye" 3d, likes to create a reality beyod the screen, remove the screento make a window into the world the movie creates. None of the core stuff of character and what not that don't change, a few things to learn to do good stereo, can do normal camera movement, all the normal tools are there, lighting is lighting, there are few little mines to avoid, doesn't take logn to pick this stuff up, you have live viewing and feedback, can see on a normal HD monitor on set, have a small 3d viewing station in video village or engineering station, and also have chosen to have 2K projection near the set to see 50 feet away and watch EXACTLY what it'll look like in a movie theaters. No dailies, no photochemistry, etc. The projection way is the BEST way to evaluate the footage.

In order to have fun with the new medium, lots of new areas to paly with

(Geoff Burdick, James Cameron, Joshua Greer, Vince Pace, moderator Jon Jandau are on this panel)

sound has become important over the years to make the experience more immersive. 3D when done well makes it more immersive yet again.

Editorially, how does it work? Do you edit in 2d or 3d? Current plan is to cut in 2D on an Avid as you would any other, do an ongoing conform with the other eye so you can check the 3d at any point. Is there a difference with 2D and 3D screening? They did a year of testing to learn the language. Adapting a Terminator film for 3D, they are rapidly cut action movies - can you cut that fast? YES, you have to control the flow of the audience's perception of the stereo, most is done at acquisition to prepare the audience. The basic principles of cutting don't change. The blizzard, super fast, action cuts might want to detune the 3D that doesn't rely on the stereo space. Shots work so well in 3D you tend to want to linger the way you might linger on a gorgeous master shot, as with Titanic

Cutting speed of Titanitc was about half of other stuff - Terminator 2 had some # of cuts at about half the length

VFX and a lot of great production value/design, wnat to linger on those shots and enjoy that world, don't hang so long that it'll get too slow in the 2D version.

When he (Jim) talked to Peter Jackson, he'll do it completely differently than Cameron will.

There haven't been new tools in a long time - it's exciting (cameron)

Vince Pace - is shooting 3D different? when shooting 3D, embracing all the layers of something forgotten in 2D experience - a good shot is a good shot at the end of the day, the 3D shot can be a more entertaining shot since there is so much more - as a DP, you use lighting to create layers, in 3D it is a big difference since that work is done for you. At end of day, don't leave any of the tools at home - you gotta bring all those to the table, but you need'em to make a compelling story.

Josh Greer - nobodies looked at as much 3D as him lately - RealD comes in after the hard work is already done. They come in and fill in the RealD hat - wanted to make sure the presentation was high quality as possible - make sure eyes are in sync, they come in and talk about what happens with the pipeline for 3D, how to color time for 3D, big issue with light to take that into it as well, not trying to get out of mastering, but want it to be a "do no harm" kind of a thing to keep the integrity of the artist's vision and keep consistency from room to room.

Jim - how does 3D play into creating VFX - two parts of that - don't have to make a $150M movie to justify 3d, in first few years the 3d will be driven by tentpole movies. The cost of shooting 3D isn't that big a bump, but doing FX is a bigger bump - compositing FX in 3D is more complex, adds a layer of complexity to the project - it has to work in Z space as well as X & Y - it isn't a showstopper, (it isn't twice as hard or expensive, it's gonna go up by some factor depending on FX you're doing) - there's a bell curve of expense. BAse cost plus the kick to go into 3D - that kicker for 3D falls on a bell curve. If you have a pure live action film it is realtively inexpensive. If pure CG relatively inexpensive to just render all shots twice. When mixing CG and digital FX and live action is the middle of the bell curve. Most of your big FX movies are going to fall into that category. John and Jim's movies next few years are in the next few years....but fortunately could be biggeest earners. If a $400M in 2d, but $450 or $500M in 3d, you've covered the costs in spades. And of course, as with all tech, as more peoople do it, economies of scale and costs come down. All VFX companies except for a few are doing their first 3D, and it is harder. Once they know how to do it, it is easier and less costly. First time takes longer and costs more.

Above the line - set, props, wardrobe, etc. aren't affected. Cameras, VFX, post are the only areas affected. On a big picture, post budget is not affected that much. FX budget will go up somewhat. Lots of greenscreen of them inside subs. Were doing those comps for $1500 or $2000/shot. good, high quality 3D composites in greenscreen efficiently. On set, can see composite in realtime, and can see the composite in 3D by end of day before you strike or leave the set.

portability of gear - on the acquisition end, lots of improvements - SR deck that handles two data streams that are locked together (SRW-1) - any dailies that they need to see immediately are easy - just take tape stock and rewind it and paly it back instantaneously for production - they are try8ing to save time- making cmaeras more expensive up front, but as far as efficiency on set, has gone way up. hasn't been tracked, but the point of having all the creatives on set together and show'em on set day of shoot is big - the savings later on is better. More and more decision making on set rather than in post. After the cut is made, is filmmaker still involved?

Josh Greer - at end of day about filmmaker involvement - hope is they build trust and will trust it'll be consistent screen to screen - a lot of variation and a lot of systems out there - it has to be a premium experience. If anaglyph were gonna work, it would have by now. If the experience isn't great to your eyeballs, best case it is uncomfortable, worst it is painful. Most work is done for us with servers and projectors which are incredible. First epiphany was seeing it in Cameron's screening room, and realizing Ti was going to roll out zillions of these. "My career turned on a dime at that moment."

In 2003 were 29 films over $100M. In 2004 went down to 24, in '05 went down to 19. We need to start presenting things that people can't get at home. For those skeptical folks, now is the time to embrace all that.

audience question - when we get into "normal" films for 3d, how is that going to go if it isn't family friendly fare? "It's gonna scare the crap out of 'em" - (Cameron)

Whatever you're trying to do, it's more in 3D. The clock rate in your brain goes up, you're more engaged and involved, committing more of yourslef to the audience with 3D, you're gonna be more there. People will get more out of 3D, be more scared.

Once the infrastructure is there, and after the initial "ride film" types happen, after the tent pole stuff, people will start to experiment. You're not going to shoot My Dinner with Andre, but think about Titanic minus the boat sinking - it would have been beautiful in 3D.

What did color do - it brought your more into the experience - this is the next logical thing. (greer)

Q: in film school - in 50s film industry had problems with an invasive home tech - TV. 50 years ago 3D was said to save the day, but it didn't do it. A: Cameron - 3D didn't work in 50s. What are we supposed to do, shrug and walk away? No, we can fight back and use this 3d, all the pieces are in place to do it.

3d doesn't represent what he tries to do on set - recreate human vision - people feel like they are more THERE (Pace)

Q: Vince - Sony F950 dual stream stuff - playing backin realtime on set - is dual stream 4;2:2 or 4:4:4? One or two decks? Syncing decks?
-not trying to make a statement about what to do
-is popular to do 4:4:4 for L&R, can master on 4:2:2, piggybacking decks, all are possible. The neat thing is that depending on your needs, we can accomodate that very easily on set. Can do SRW-1 4;2:2 synchronous on one tape, and do two decks with 4:4:4, also can do digital disk ddrives - as for compression, up to the budget and the needs of the shoot (post heavy needs less compressed).

Cameron on 422 vs 444 - you can do anything, can support wahtever you want, filmmakers and VFX folks can do whatever they want - uncompressed is an awful lot of data (even HE says that!). Comparing HDCAM, SR, SR 422 vs SR444 in tough composites in greesncreen, like water flowing in front of green, blowing smoke etc. Old 7:1 HDCAM format - not good (but Cameron used that for all hisstuff to date), SR format does MUCH better, almost no difference between 422 and 444 for composite purposes...James is going to do 422 to do dual stream to SR deck and play it back immediately. Unless a very very specific reason to do 444 for a very picky plate, will do 422 for his stuff.

another panelist - they go through the decks and go to QuVis to record to get into an NLE environment as quickly as possible

-in 3D, couldn't refocus his eyes for stuff that is out of focus in 3D. In the stereo experience in theater, have to decide where the audience should be looking, at the bottle or the crowd. If the audience is not looking where I want them to look - they'll be looking at the non-fused, the unconverged spot. Have to direct the eye to the depth of field AND the convergence. The part of the shot that is out of focu