I downloaded the Lite version and have been playing around with it, but it is not a very intuitive program.  I am about fifty pages into the manual, but have yet to be able to get a sequence of content I cut together in CS5.5 into Resolve successfully.  I can’t export it into any format Resolve will read, besides uncompressed HD, which my array is not designed to handle.  Using an EDL to link to my Canon 5D source files is giving me all sorts of issues as well, which is something we experienced at the office when we first switched from Speedgrade to Resolve.  Clearly it is going to take some time to learn how too get anything useful done in the program.  If I do get it to work, the automatic tracking tools are the features I am most interested in playing with.

In other major news that doesn’t directly affect me, Blackmagic-Design also acquired Teranex last week.  The first major change they made was cutting the price of Teranex’s primary flagship product, the VC100, from $90,000 to $20,000.  This is similar to what happened when they acquired DaVinci last year, but much more extreme.  It will be interesting to see if some of that high end image processing technology makes it into future Decklink cards, or any similar products.

Canon’s existing video DSLRs have two major things going for them.  One is that their small lightweight form-factor is easy to use and allows the cameras to be put into places that any other high quality camera wouldn’t fit.  The second is that with such a large imager, they give a unique style to the images they shoot, that many people prefer, even when compared to the results of cameras that cost 10 times as much.

When compared to existing HDV and AVCHD camcorders, the idea of a video DSLR totally revolutionized the low end market.  It had so many advantages in that space, that it even caught the attention of the high end market, in places the Canon never dreamed that it would go.  For the money, nothing else even comes close in regards to image quality, so DSLRs are an obvious choice for students and other independent filmmakers, and freelance videographers.

But people who are familiar with larger professional cameras look at a DSLR and see a huge stack of limitations. (SDI output, 15min record limit, remote control, excessive moiré and aliasing, etc.)  They are looking for the image style and quality of a DSLR, but without those limitations, regardless of the cost and size of the resulting product.  The C300 seems to be aimed at that market, and instead of revolutionizing it, it is just going to offer itself as one more option, which is a disappointment to those who were expecting more.  It offers nothing to further the interests of the independent videographer or film-maker, because that is not who it is targeting.  It is designed to tie into the existing equipment that larger organizations have invested millions of dollars into, the benefits of which, they are not willing to forego, in favor of the image style and depth of field offered by existing DSLR sensor systems.  Whether it will be successful in its target market remains to be seen, but I am confident that many of its key features will eventually make it into future products that are more similar to the existing 5D and 7D DSLRs.

Cineform’s big news was their acquisition by GoPro, and a reduction of their prices.  Neo (Previously “Neo4K”) is now $300 and the full Neo3D is $1000.  There is also a new free utility called the GoPro Cineform Studio posted on the GoPro site, designed to help users easily process their footage from the new GoPro3D.  That download effectively makes the basic Cineform codec freely available to anyone who needs it.  I highly recommend having the Cineform codec available on any system you do video work on, since it is a useful cross-platform compression format.

Adobe announced the next step for the Creative Suite line, which is a .5 update for most of the products.  Premiere 5.5 adds merged clips for better sync sound support, and some improvements to exports and Media Encoder.  After Effects 5.5 has a new Warb stabilizer, that should help fix rolling shutter artifacts in DSLR footage, among other uses, and it also has new options and presets for stereoscopic work, primarily focused on motion graphics.  Soundbooth has been totally replaced by the return of Audition as a standard part of the suite, which should improve support for multitrack editing and surround sound.  There are a variety of new features in the update, but nothing totally revolutionary.

AJA has a few new things to show.  The Kona 3G now supports outputting 3G SDI signal on all four ports at once, allowing preview of 4K media at full resolution, provided that you have a 4K display available.  They have updated their frame convertor with the FS2, adding support for HDMI and 3G SDI.  I am still trying to figure out if their implementation of 3G includes support for 2K over SDI, which could make it a useful tool in DCI theater systems.  They also showed off a new piece of hardware under development that they are calling Riker.  It is an external box connnected via 8x PCIe, that could support stereoscopic 4K at some point in the future.

Blackmagic has a variety of new products on display.  The Hyperdeck Shuttle allows uncompressed recording of SDI or HDMI to a SATA based SSD.  At $345 it is a bargain, until you count in the price of an SSD that supports uncompressed HD capture.  They will also have a rack mount version with two drive slots called the Hyperdeck Studio.  Among other things, they have a new Decklink 4K I/O card with 4 channels of SDI for $600, and some more live video switching products as a result of their acquisition of ATEM last year.  A stripped down version of DaVinci Resolve was announced, that will be available as a free download, which should further bring advanced color correction to the masses.

Sony has a variety of new products available.  Their OLED based displays look amazing, but are still quite expensive.  With the lack of HDCam-SR tapes available from Japan, Sony’s new SRMaster series of solid-state media products are probably going to get a big external boost into the market.  The new SRMaster devices replace tapes with 1TB SRMemory modules that use the same MPEG4 codec as HDCam-SR tapes, but with many benefits, including direct access to the compressed file format, and faster transfer options.  In the camera world, the F65 is Sony’s first 4K camcorder, writing 16bit 4K files to SRMemory, captured from what Sony describes as an 8K CMOS sensor.  On a more practical front, the PMW-F3 looks like a great camera for many applications.  While I don’t like the formfactor, the large single-sensor CMOS should produce an image similar to the look and feel that DSLRs have made popular.  That fact that it can output 4:4:4 RGB over the dual SDI outputs on the back is an impressize option.  Sony also has a small stereoscopic 3D camera coming out, that records to the same MVC format that 3D BluRays use.  There will also be an update released for Vegas 10 that will allow encoding of 3D BluRays, and that feature alone could make it worth purchasing, if you expect to need that capability anytime soon.

Convergent Design has a new recorder on display, the Gemini 444, which records uncompressed SDI at 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 to SSD drives.  I am still a bigger fan of their original MPEG2 based NanoFlash devices, since that is a more efficient use of space.  On the other hand, the dual link recording option is nice for stereoscopic 3D work, or VFX plates and greenscreen shots, especially if you have a new PMW-F3 with full RGB SDI output.

There are a variety of video I/O devices on display that use the new Thunderbolt connectivity technology, but they are all probably a ways off from being released as finished products.  They will be faster than USB3, but besides the daisy chain option, I see no immediate advantage over ExpressCard based I/O products.  AJA, Blackmagic, and Matrox all had their own flavor of external device hooked up to new Macbook Pro  laptops under glass.  Combining these devices with Thunderbolt based storage solutions will greatly enhance the expandability of laptop systems, especially for onset media management and review work.

In the edit bay, stereoscopic content can be output from a workstation in a number of forms.  AJA and NVidia can output separate SDI streams for each eye, using the same display interface that would be used onset.  Combining the left and right view into a single stream allows it to be played out a single SDI port or even standard DVI on a GPU to a passive 3D display.  Those specific options will depend on what software you are using, and need to match your display requirements.  Outputting 120hz from a dedicated HDMI 1.4 port requires a newer GPU and specific application support, but greatly simplifies the hardware setup.  I am sure there will be a whole variety of new options announced at NAB next month, and as new hardware and software tools are developed, the preview options become cheaper to setup and easier to use.

Shutter glasses can be used with displays that have high refresh rates, to filter alternating frames from one eye or the other.  A 120hz display can provide 60 frames to each eye, which is enough to create smooth motion and make the blinking shutter imperceivable.  The disadvantage is that each viewer requires a pair of expensive active shutter glasses, which all require charged batteries or some other source of power.

Polarization has been used in many different variations of 3D display solution.  The most straightforward is to use dual projectors, each projecting onto the same silver matte screen, with opposite polarizing filters in front of the lenses.  Complementary filters are used in cheap passive 3D glasses that each viewer wears, filtering out light from one projector or the other, from each eye.  One issue with this method is that perfectly aligning two projectors on a large screen can be very challenging.  To solve this, RealD took this process a step further, and created a polarizer for a single projector that alternates the polarization angle at the same rate that shutter glasses usually blink.  The result is that the “active” part of the filtering for a 120hz projection is done once, and each viewer can use cheap passive 3D glasses to separate the views for each eye, while experiencing the full resolution results offered by shutter glasses.

Polarization can also be used within passive 3D LCD displays, but currently with these solutions, any pixel is permanently polarized either right or left.  As long as the image sent to the screen conforms to the pattern, usually horizontal interlaced, it can send imagery from the correct angle to each individual pixel.  This requires a 1:1 image to pixel ratio, in order to ensure that the display places pixels from the correct angle in the correct locations.  The disadvantage is that usually half of the image resolution to each eye is lost to the filtering process.  Displays that have this type of built in polarization can be viewed with cheaper passive 3D glasses.  In my opinion, any passive 3D is also easier on the viewer’s eyes, especially over periods of extended use, since there is no alternating flicker.

The cheapest, but lowest quality option for viewing stereoscopic depth information on regular displays, involves using color information to separate the images for each eye.  This is called anaglyphic processing, and the benefit is that nearly any standard full color display device can be used, but it comes at the cost of most or all of the original color information being discarded.  Anaglyphic video can either be generated on the fly during playback from two separate streams, or rendered out into a single stream to be edited, usually as an offline version.  Viewing anaglyphic imagery, or even just wearing anaglyphic glasses for any significant period of time is usually not comfortable.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are certain displays available that use lenticular filters to isolate the separate views, and focus them on each eye.  This is similar to the process used to create depth and motion effects on static 2D surfaces, called lenticular printing, but using this method for video requires the underlying display to be extremely high resolution.  With stereoscopic source, this results in certain areas where the effect is null or reversed, and requires the viewer to be in just the right spot for maximum effectiveness.

The next step to solve that issue is to replace the alternating left and right views projected from the lenticular screen, with a series of progressively different views.  That way any viewing angle within reason can be accommodated for, without gaps where the illusion breaks down.  Instead of recording every variation of viewing angle, these perspectives are usually generated on the fly from a single recorded perspective, usually with the help of a Z-depth map.  The Z-depth channel is like an alpha channel, but instead of storing values of transparency info, it records how far an object on screen is from the camera.  This information can either be captured at record time with specialized hardware, or be generated from an image analysis process, with a bit of interpolation.

At the end of the day, each option has certain pros and cons, and multiple display types could be used at different stages of a single project.  As long as you have both full streams of data available, you can adapt your content for any display.  Once you render it into a display specific format, like interlaced or anaglyphic, certain image content may be lost that cannot be recovered for use on other  display types, without going back to your original source.  Because of this, it is highly preferable to have a system that allows you to display stereoscopic content in 3D without having to pre-render into a dedicated display format.  As computers become more powerful, and better software is developed, that capability is becoming much more common, greatly aiding the stereoscopic post process.

External SAS connected arrays function in much the same way as SATA based ones, but with a few advantages, that usually come at a significantly higher cost.  SAS is a full duplex interface, and the command set is based on SCSI instead of IDE, allowing higher performance and throughput.  More expensive SAS arrays also support multipath signaling, for greater redundancy in the supporting electronics. (As opposed to the redundancy provided at the disk level by RAID configurations)  SAS also supports much longer cable lengths, up to 10 meters or 30 feet.  This can be advantagious for quiet video editing rooms, since the disk array, which is usually the loudest part of the system, can be located farther away from the users.

A number of vendors have now begun offering external arrays that interface with the host workstation via a direct extension of the PCIe bus.  This allows all of the RAID functionality to be contained within the array, and gives full speed access to the data as if it was contained within the machine.  Among the advantages of removing the RAID functionality from an internal add-on card, are that it can be attached to a laptop via an ExpressCard, which uses the same signaling protocol as PCIe, and that with addition of a few cheap pass-thru cards, an array can easily be moved between systems.  This is definitely not a hot swappable solution, since it accesses the PCIe bus directly, which is initialized at bootup on most systems.  But if your main edit system has a total OS meltdown at a critical point in your project, it should be much easier to access your data from a different system than if you needed to reinstall the PCI SATA RAID card somewhere else, and allow you use your laptop as a backup edit system in certain instances.

Fibre Channel is by far the most expensive option.  Every part of the system is more expensive, the PCIe HBA cards, the fiber cables, and the disk array controllers.  On the otherhand, Fibre Channel offers capabilities that none of the other storage options really do.  It is a hot swappable interface, running on fiber cables that can extend access thousands of feet if desired, and can easily be networked and shared.  Devices can be connected directly together, shared in an Arbitrated Loop, or all attached to a central fibre switch for simplified management.  It is an efficient and low latency interface, and is available in speeds of 1,2,4, or 8Gb per second, and multiple channels can be combined for higher performance.  Higher speed devices are usually backwards compatible with older hardware, similar to the way ethernet works, allowing you to upgrade your storage network one piece at a time.

Choosing the right storage solution depends on your immediate media needs, your available budget, and the direction you anticipate growing in the future. SATA based solutions offer all of the speed you could need if scaled large enough.  SAS can offer similar performance in a smaller package, but at a higher cost.  Sharing data beyond gigabit network speeds requires a storage system that can interface with multiple computers, but that comes at a significantly increased initial cost.  Investing in Fibre Channel storage is usually only worth the expense if you anticipate the need to share your data on a SAN, either immediately or at some point in the future.  I will examine a few popular shared SAN options in my next post.

I was prompted to begin testing USB3 drives after reading an article on tomshardware.com a while back, and I agree with their assessment that Western Digital has delivered the best USB3 storage products.  I have used many of their 1TB and 2TB MyBook 3.0 drives over the last few weeks, and have had stunning results.  The first few drives even came with PCIe host cards in the box, but they are well worth the expense, even if you have to buy them separately.  I can sustain transfer rates of 150MB/s on a clean drive with Windows 7, and routinely backup a Terabyte of data in two to three hours now.  This used to be an overnight task, using USB2 or Firewire based drives.  Even more impressively, I have gotten nearly identical results from using an ExpressCard based USB3 adaptor in a Dell Precision M6400 as well as from the integrated USB3 ports on the HP 8740w Mobile Workstation.  Western Digital’s 2.5inch My Passport line sustains 90MB/s without needing a separate A/C power source, ideal for making backups onset and in the field, when shooting with tapeless acquisition formats.

These transfer rates are clearly a limited by the speed of the disks themselves, so ideally we will see external drives with two disks running nearly twice as fast in the near future.  One sign that that may not be the case is that when copying for one drive to another on the same USB3 controller, I am only getting 50-60MB/s.  That implies that the original 150MB/s may also be limited by the interface, not just the drive, meaning it may not be as simple as adding more disks to extend the capabilities of USB3 attached external drives.  Also I have occassionally run into an issue with the Western Digital drives where I can’t mount more than one at the same time due to a disk signature conflict.  Hopefully that is just a default software configure issue that will disappear in the near future, but I have been able to get around it fairly easily for now.

Blackmagic has tried to take advantage of this bandwidth potential with a number of products including the Pocket Ultrascope, the Intensity Shuttle, and the UltraStudio Pro.  They seem to be a bit ahead of the curve because I have tried all of these in the last few weeks, and have not been able to get them to work.  I tried them on both laptops and desktops without success, even after applying the firmware and driver updates that Blackmagic suggests.  Most existing USB3 host devices are not capable of the maximum bandwidth that USB3 offers, which is required for any HD Video I/O device to function correctly.  Hopefully the coming months will bring improvements in that regard, but until then I expect Blackmagic will have difficulty finding a strong market for their USB3 based products.

In all of these cases it is apparent that more optimization in the host devices and drivers are needed before we can realize the full potential of USB3 for realtime uncompressed HD video work, which is why there isn’t a large selection of external RAIDs being advertized as alternatives to SCSI, Fiber, or eSATA and SAS.  But until that optimization happens, I will be content with my 150MB/s transfers, which are at least 5 times faster than anything I was getting with Firewire or USB2.  And since a lot of what I do involves onset media management and systems administration for editing workstations, USB3 has already made my life much easier, and was well worth the investment.

AJA released a variety of new products, most of them adding 3D related features to previously existing offerings.  The Kona3G is a revision to the existing Kona3/Xena2Ke that adds stereoscopic support through HDMI 1.4 output and dual stream SDI-3G I/O, while also dropping in price about 30%.  Their Hi5-3D replaces the Hi5-3G and adds HDMI 1.4 output as well as a variety of options for processing dual stream and muxed stereo inputs.  The Ki Pro Mini is a smaller version of the Ki Pro that can now be mounted directly to camcorders, and record ProRes files directly to CompactFlash cards from HDMI or SDI inputs.

Blackmagic Design had their own selection of new products to announce.  Their line of SDI routers must have really taken off, because they are really scaling their offerings upwards, with new models that offer up to 288 Channels of input and output, and options for coaxial or fiber based connections.  I am just now upgrading to a 16×16 3G Micro VideoHub, but maybe someday.  Their other big news comes from their DaVinci line, with previously announced Resolve 7.0 for OSX finally being released.  It will be interesting to see what effect that new option has on the marketplace and the price of existing products.  My company will definitely be looking into setting up a Resolve system, and our primary colorist is very interested in the new capabilities it would give us.

NVidia released their new line of Fermi based Quadro graphics cards at Siggraph.  The Quadro 4000, 5000, and 6000 will be the successors to the current QuadroFX 3800, 4800, and 5800, with similar form factors and interfaces.  I have not had a chance to test them myself yet, but everything I hear has been positive.  Adobe has announced that the Quadro 4000 and 5000 will be officially supported for CUDA acceleration by the Mercury engine in Premiere Pro CS5.  This support came in the form of the Premiere Pro 5.0.2 update last week, which also adds the GeForce GTX 470 as a fully supported GPU option.  More significantly from a technology standpoint, they added 10bit Displayport support for Quadro cards, and also support for RedRocket acceleration, RMD files and newer Red camera updates, as well as better support for Broadcast Wave and certain XDCam-HD files.  There is also a 6 page list of smaller fixes in the new release, many of which fill significant holes in certain workflows.  I haven’t had much time recently to test out the new features, but getting 10bit color to my Dreamcolor is at the top of my list.

Avid Media Composer 5 was released three months ago, and they are now on the 5.0.3 revision.  I have had a chance to test it out at work, and while the ability to import any Quicktime via AMA can totally change the workflow for certain tasks, I wouldn’t use it as a primary way to edit large projects.  The performance and stability is not up to the same level as MXF based editing is.  You also need a very fast system for that to work.  Most of our Avids are HP XW8600s, while we have been dedicating our newer Z800 systems to CS5, but AMA playback requires more computing power than DNxHD editing, which is to be expected.  We also found Version 5 to be less stabile and less responsive on our large feature length DNxHD project, even without AMA based media.  The fact that it fully supports Windows 7 will be the factor that motivates our facility wide upgrade in the near future.

I was also able to test Media Composer 5 with my Matrox MXO2-Mini, for hardware HDMI out, and while it worked great at first, I once again saw a major hit in stability, with an escalating number of system crashes.  It is so close, but not quite there yet.  Hopefully we will see many of those issues worked out in intermediate dot releases, since most of these features are brand new.  Stay tuned, since I have a few other new toys that I will review in my next post.

FTC Disclosure: Many of the companies I refer to above have made their products available to me or my company in the past, but none of the new items discussed above were provided to me without independently purchasing them.

Adobe announced all of the features of the new highly anticipated Creative Suite CS5, which will include native 64bit, CUDA GPU acceleration, and better support for formats like DPX and DSLR clips.  I will have many more CS5 details in future posts, delving into how that will change the landscape of many workflows.  There are lots more new developments in the post world, but those are the primary things that stick out to me right now.  We still have two more days, and I will be spending a good bit of time demonstration Cineform’s Neo3D features at their booth at the back of the Lower South Hall.  So if anyone wants to catch up with me, feel free to stop by.

I know I haven’t posted anything here in a while, but there will be quite a bit coming in the near future.  I am writing a series of articles that will be posted between here and Shane Hurlbut’s blog at hurlbutvisuals.com.  I have worked with Shane on a number of projects, the largest one being the Navy Seal film over the last year.  I will be offering an overview of the post workflow options for video DSLRs on his site, with links back to this one to delve into the less glamorous, nitty-gritty details.  So stay tuned for some very focused articles detailing specific workflow obstacles in the next few weeks.  And then NAB is only a month away, which I am sure will bring a whole variety of new things to talk about.  I will be at Cineform’s booth as a demo artist/workflow consultant again this year, so feel free to stop by and check it out.