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.

The solution that I use for my stereoscopic work is Cineform’s Neo3D, which allows 3D content to be processed through a fairly standard post production workflow.  They also have a creative way of supporting stereoscopic content, that allows stereoscopic finishing work to be done during any step in the process, even concurrently on a separate system if desired.  This process uses the same active metadata workflow that they have made available for color correction for the last few years.  All of the stereoscopic adjustments, as well as the muxing of the left and right streams is done on the fly by the decoder, so changes don’t have to be permanently rendered into the media, and the target application receives a premuxed single stream of video.  This allows certain 2D apps that have no integrated support for stereoscopic post, to be utilized for 3D editorial, and still give editors a live stereoscopic preview.  I discussed the options for connecting 3D preview displays, as well as some of the display options available, in earlier articles in the series.  I am sure the process will continue to evolve as new products are developed to simplify the workflow.

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.

Sony has a number of new toys that span the budget gamut.  On the high end, the SRW 9000 is an HDCam-SR camcorder with capabilities similar to the F23, and an all in one shoulder-mount formfactor like the F900.  With option boards, this unit is capable of recording up to 60fps at full raster 1920×1080, with up to 10bit 4:4:4 RGB of color information.  The next step below SR is really XDCam-HD422 at this point, since regular HDCAM is basically obselete.  The new PDW-F800 basically replaces all of the functionality of the F900 (30i/p, 25/44p, etc.) plus the advantages of full 1920×1080 recording in 4:2:2 instead of HDCam’s 1440×1080 at about 3:1:1.  The 50Mb files can also be edited in their native form in almost any NLE, and can be accessed in a non-linear fashion directly from the storage disk. (No rewinding, preroll, or realtime capture required)  The new camera even has a network jack right on the side for copying the recorded files to a network, and can dump the proxies to a USB flash drive if you want to go that route.  That won’t be necessary for any workflow I will use, since Premiere, FCP, and even Avid can access the full resolution files directly without import conversions, for truly native editing.  Finally a workflow that is actually designed to “work” and “flow.”  Sony also had a number of new LCD monitors on display, including a 4K one, two circular polarized 3D screens, and two new 30″ and 17″ additions to their BVM line of LCDs.  The 3D screens look great, and while I couldn’t confirm the inner workings, with a single input, it seems to use an interface technology that would be compatible with Cineform’s new Neo3D software that I have been demo-ing all week.

The only thing I was really impressed with at the Panasonic booth was that they created an Economy line of P2 cards, but I have yet to find the specifics on the new pricing levels.  With $900 being the minimum price, an economy option was definitely needed.  SxS cards at least have SDHC based replacement options, which is especially ironic since the P2 cards are rumored to physically contain 4 SDHC cards.  Panasonic also has a new 3D plasma screen, based on sequential alternating frames, which requires active 3D shutter glasses.  I have also heard they have a new 10bit 1080p projector for $2400 that I should go check out tomorrow.

NVIDIA has released OSX drivers for the QuadroFX 4800, so it seems that that will probably become the highend card of choice for those purchasing the new MacPro, which was recently revised with Nehalem based Xeon CPUs.  I have been pleased with the performance I get from my equivalent QuadroCX card, and I am looking forward to trying a QuadroFX 5800 on my SpeedGradeDI system sometime in the near future.

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.

Adobe has added many minor tweaks and improvements to all of their apps in CS4.  My favorite so far would be the new Adobe Media Encoder, which allows you to render and encode Premiere Pro and After Effects sequences  in the background, while you continue to work in the applications themselves.  This should help finally utilize all those extra CPU cores we all have buried in our systems.  There is also supposed to be more support for 64bit processing, especially in Photoshop.  The speech to text engine and enhanced dynamic link are the other features Adobe has been highlighting, but I don’t have as much use for those personally.  One thing that has been made clear by third parties, is that Premiere Pro is not finished, and that we should expect a major update soon.  I am not sure which details of that have been made public, but until that release, most third party extensions of Premiere will not be compatible with CS4.  Specifically I am awaiting support from Cineform for ProspectHD/4K, and from Matrox for the AXIO line of products.  Both companies have stated that their software will require support from the extended SDK in the update, so stay tuned for any news on that from Adobe in the near future.

The announcement of NVidia’s new high end GPU, the Quadro CX came as a bit of a surprise to me, since I had seen the specifications for what I believe will be the Quadro 5800, which should include 4GB of memory, and will be found in the new QuadroPlex.  The new Quadro CX card is very similar to the current Quadro 5600, with 1.5 GB of memory, and supports the same SDI daughter card, for broadcast preview and output.  This brings to mind the way that the GeForce9 series of consumer graphics cards were very similar to the previous line of GeForce8 cards.  The new Quadro CX seems most closely related to the Geforce 260 on the consumer side, but with a lower memory bandwidth for some reason.  One key new feature is the edition of DisplayPort output, which is made even more significant by the fact that is supports true 10bit color.  When combined with the new HP Dreamcolor LCD or similar display, this should allow true 10bit display of HD or 2K content without the need for expensive SDI interfaced components.  This is especially critical for desktop based color correction applications, many of which have been written specifically to be run on NVidia Quadro hardware.

Between better multithreading, and more use of the GPU, we should see significant performance increases.  The possibility of 10bit color out of CS4 is exciting as well, but I have not heard any details about that.  I have recently received one of the HP Dreamcolor displays, so I plan to post some info from my experience with that soon.

Apple recently released a free ProRes playback decoder for both OSX and Windows, which is pretty significant.  This with allow Final Cut Pro editors to share their footage using this efficient codec with Windows users and Mac users who don’t have Final Cut Pro.  Since there is still no way to encode to ProRes on PC, another format is still required to get footage back from the PC to the Mac.

Reading between the lines of some of NVidia’s Nvision, I believe I have acertained the specs on Nvidia’s next top end workstation graphics card.  The NVidia Quadro FX 5800 will have 4GB of memory, with a PCI-Express 2.0 interface, for 8GB/sec of bandwidth in both directions.  It should have two dual link DVI connectors and one DisplayPort connector, besides the usual Quadro stereo port.  It should support SLI Mosaic Mode, using four connections from two cards to support a four quadrant image, which will eventually allow full resolution display of 4K footage in realtime.

Speaking of 4K, Red has announced that Adobe will be releasing a plugin to edit R3D files natively in the CS3 suite of applications.  Coinciding with that due to the release of the first version of the Red SDK, Cineform has finally released an “official” version of their Red4K convertor.  They have also begun to advocate an offline/online workflow for the first time, under the brand name of Cineform Express.  My only comment is, once Adobe supports Red natively, shouldn’t the online be done straight from the R3D files?  In a perfect world, a Cineform offline with a relink to R3D files, exported as an EDL to SpeedGrade for color would be the ideal way to do post with Red footage.  If only life was that simple; maybe someday it will be.

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.