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.

After announcing it last week, today Avid released the next version of Media Composer, and it is a major update.  The key thing that will affect all users is that the program will now be a natively 64bit application.  This will exclude users who still have 32bit systems, but allow the software to use more RAM, and therefore effectively do larger projects, on 64bit systems, which are pretty prevalent at this point.  From what I can tell, re-coding an entire application for 64bit is also good for cleaning up the code for existing features, and streamline performance and threading.  Avid’s primary competition: Adobe Premiere Pro, saw a huge improvement in both performance and stability when the first 64bit version (CS5) was released.  This has led to a huge increase in that application’s popularity, especially for larger projects.  The level of competition presented by that change may be a key factor in why we are now seeing so many major changes from Avid.

The next most significant new feature, that will affect many users, especially new ones, is “Avid Open I/O” which is Avid’s new approach to integrating hardware with Media Composer.  Avid now supports hardware I/O via products from AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox and others.  We have seen hints of this coming, with support for the Matrox MXO2-Mini and AJA ioExpress in versions 5.0 and 5.5 respectively.  This change has two major benefits, it will allow most users access to professional hardware I/O solutions without paying for Avid’s overpriced hardware, and nearly as important, it will allow edit systems to run multiple applications on the same system and hardware.  Add this to advances in project compatibility and interchange, and users will be able move their editing projects between Avid and Premiere Pro (and FCP on the Mac side) on the same systems, using the same video output hardware.

Avid also added a myriad of new features to enhance more advanced workflows, with better support for stereoscopic content, more advanced color correction tools, and surround sound mixing options on the audio side.  They also have a 4:4:4 RGB version of the popular DNxHD codec, and natively support ProRes files.  Their Symphony finishing toolset no longer requires Nitris DX hardware, but I have yet to find the pricing structure for that option.  It looks to be a solid feature set, and I am looking forward to trying it out.

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.

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.

Blackmagic Design has a lot of new products available, many utilizing SDI over fibre optic cable.  It is a pretty straightforward idea, but since fibre is even more expensive than BNC cables, I personally will have little use for it in the near future.  Their new UltraScope product is very exciting, and if it works as well as advertised, fills a big hole in the market.  Most other HD-SDI scope products are in the five figure range, so a $700 solution will be a very welcome option.  They also have two new variations to their Videohub line, the Enterprise version with 144/288 I/O channels, and the more reasonable Studio version with 16/32 channels.  I have filled our old 12/24 channel original model Videohub at Bandito Brothers to capacity with about 8 edit stations and the supporting equipment.  But between having 33% more connections, and 3Gb SDI support to avoid wasting two channels at a time, the new version would probably support facilities twice as large.

Thats all for now, as I have to prepare for another big day, but I will be checking in with my friends at AJA, Matrox, Sony, and maybe even Avid over the course of the week here.

Blackmagic has a number of new mini-convertors for analog component HD, HDMI, and HD-SDI, as well as an updated and expanded Video hub. The new “Broadcast” Video Hub is in a whole new category, increasing sixfold from 12×24 to 72×144 inputs/outputs, while adding support for 3Gb SDI.  They also released the BlackMagic Video Recorder, a micro sized H264-encoding HD capture device that offers component HD, and optionally SDI input, connected via USB.

Adobe has released another update for Premiere Pro CS3, so now we are at 3.2.0.  Among other smaller items, this update adds native support for XDCam-HD, and XDCam-EX, in all standard formats.  Adobe was much quicker to support Sony’s SxS solid state recording format than they were Panasonic’s P2 solid state format that had been out for two years.  On that note, I personally prefer the Sony varient for a number of reasons: modern ExpressCard interface, high transfer rate, 1080p cameras, etc.  Now we just need larger and much cheaper SxS cards.

Although I have yet to personally make it to that hall, I hear that Sony has a couple of cool new toys.  The PMW-EX3 extends their XDCam-EX line with a second model that adds support for interchangable lenses, capable of interfacing its 1/2″ imager with both 1/2″ and 2/3″ HD lenses.  There is also an XDCam-EX VTR, the EX30, which I anticipated was coming, but it seems that it is physically larger than I was hoping.  The EX format lends itself well to the creation of a small scale HD-SDI recording and playback device, which would pair well with a tiny HD-SDI camera.  They also seem to have finally finished their new XDCam-HD camera that records their new MPEG2-422 format to XD.   I expect that new 50Mb/s XDCam format will eventually be a broadcast HDCam replacement.  No 24p support there, so I won’t be using that format for a while, but we have seen that pattern before, and it will arrive eventually.

 Red also released details on their future products, but they aren’t due out until early 2009, so I will discuss those at a later date.

Originally the only way to generate Cineform AVI files at this resolution was to scan film to DPXs, and then convert those image sequences, presumably in After Effects.  Interestingly, while being at 2K resolution, these files were being downsampled to YUV colorspace, which improved compression rates and performance, at the expense of the quality certain color information.  Eventually the SI-2K camera provided a second root source of Cineform2K imagery, that did not involve converting from an uncompressed source file at any point in the process.  I anticipate we will see 2K data being captured over SDI directly to Cineform files in the near future, if they are not doing so already, as both AJA and BMD have products with the required hardware capability.

The SI-2K brought with it one other new option to the format, which was an alternate pre-debayer RAW ‘colorspace’ instead of the YUV data that was normally being compressed.  CineformRAW video files had even better compression ratios, but the only way to take advantage of the benefits of pre-debayered images was by tapping directly into a single sensor imager, as the SI-2K did.  This eventually led to a third underlying option, with the development of Cineform 444.

Cineform444 allows full RGB encoding, processing, and mastering of image data, which is the norm in a digital intermediate environment.  The RAW files of the SI-2K had the required information for RGB processing, but it hadn’t been fully taken advantage of until that point.  DPX filmscans have full RGB info, as do most still images and CGI files.  Only ‘broadcast video’ files and formats are limited to YUV.  While increasing file sizes and processing requirements, this RGB processing brought the “Cineform Intermediate” to the next level quality wise.  Cineform now shows off their format in comparison the the popular HDCam-SR format, which doesn’t directly compare since SR can’t be accessed natively, but it communicates the idea to people who still think in terms of tape formats.  I believe SR tapes that are recorded in 444 RGB can be captured directly to Cineform444 via BMD hardware, but I have not had the opportunity to test that myself.  I have worked on projects where we captured 444 RGB data uncompressed through a BMD Multibridge, and then later converted parts to Cineform444 to work with.  I have also extracted CineformRAW files from the SI-2K directly to full range Cineform444 files.  Either way, this workflow has allowed me to work on visual effects shots at full 2K resolution in RGB, on my system at home without a dedicated RAID, and even on my laptop if I could suffer the 12inch screen size.

Around the same time that the Cineform444 capabilites were being developed, the option to include an imbedded alpha channel was added, and the maximum bit depth was increased from 10bit to 12bit.  I have yet to take advantage of the 12bit capability, but the embedded alpha channel can be useful for everything from animated titles to visual effects.  I find the biggest gains from this development when using Cineform for my After Effects work.

Cineform has also been working to develop a cross-platform solution, so that Cineform compressed media can be easily shared between Macs and PCs.  Their first step was to develop a Quicktime wrapper for their original AVI codec.  Next, they ported the compression codec to OSX, assisted I am sure, by Apple’s switch to Intel processors.  The last steps remaining to be completed are an accelerated CineformRT engine for the new Mac version of PremierePro CS3, and an OSX port of their HDLink conversion tool.  At this point Cineform is the only reliable compressed format for transfering video between Windows and OSX systems, besides saving to a DPX sequence, which has obvious disadvantages.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Cineform has recently released a beta of their next improvement to the capabilities of their format, with support for 4K imagery, or higher.  Although 4K filmscans could be used as source, their immediate target is data from the Red One camera, with 4K output from the RedCine conversion utility.  With wavelet compression for efficient reduced resolution decoding, RGB colorspace, 10 or 12bits of color depth, support for alpha channels, and cross platform compatibilty, Cineform seems well positioned to meet the needs of this emerging market.

3Gb SDI has very little hardware available to support it at this point.  The only real solution on the market at this point is to use Blackmagic’s Multibridge to generate it, and Blackmagic’s HDLink Pro to receive it.  This solution merely converts it DL-DVI, which we will discuss below.  The Multibridge allows fullscreen 2K without depending on the workstation video card.  In the future, I expect that this standard will be widely adopted to replace dual-link SDI.  This is especially beneficial as we move towards more 4K finishes, which currently require 8 HD-SDI links to support full resolution in realtime.

I am not aware of any solutions allowing 2K to be displayed over VGA besides using software to output the signal from a computer graphics card.  Certain older 21-22″ CRT monitors support 2K resolution, but you will need to be able to configure your software and/or your graphics driver to allow you to get fullscreen video output to the monitor.

Dual Link DVI can support 2K, but flat panel LCDs are the only products I am aware of that support this connection interface.  This makes it less than ideal for color grading work, but a great solution for visual effects work.  The excess resolution removes the need for dedicated full screen output, but that can usually be achieved as well.  Both computer graphics cards and the HDLink Pro can output 2K resolution over DL-DVI.  Graphics cards are obviously cheaper, and will likely work better in AE, but an HDLink Pro, with the appropriate hardware to drive it, will probably offer better performance in an NLE, like Premiere Pro.  It really depends on your budget, but if you can afford dual desktop monitors PLUS a full screen monitor, the HDLink Pro enables this configuration.

So those three interfaces dictate most of your actual display options in that regard.  Current 2K projectors are driven by Dual Link SDI, but we will see DL-DVI and 3Gb SDI replacing that in the future.  2K CRT monitors can be driven via VGA connections, and LCD flat panels can support 2K and above using DL-DVI.