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-800 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 demoing 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.

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.

The current Neo4K workflow is to use RedCine to export Cineform4K MOV files from the RedOne camera’s native R3D files.  These compressed files can be played in realtime, usually at 2K display resolution, in Premiere, AfterEffects, and a variety of other programs.  Filmout is the primary application for 4K finishing, and most filmout facilities are still going to require DPX files as the final step, but Cineform can be used for all of the steps prior to that point.  If they optimize their downsampled playback correctly, realtime CCR in Speedgrade should be possible in the near future, with 2K live playback and 4K renders.  Iridas needs to get Speedgrade working correctly in HD and 2K first though, before we get too far ahead of ourselves.

I Updated/Rewrote the following section Saturday morning after further testing and research:

I was able to download 2K and 4K R3D demo files directly from Red, and successfully imported them into RedCine.  I then was able to export them to Cineform2K and Cineform4K MOV files.  The 4K files took 4-6 seconds per frame to render, and the 2K took about 1 second per frame, on my dual 3.2Ghz Xeon workstation with my new 8800GTX GPU.  There is a known error in RedCine that prevents the encoding of files at exactly 4096 pixels wide, so testing is being done at 4088 pixels width instead.  I also converted the resulting MOV files to AVI, so I had four files to test, AVIs and MOVs at 2K and 4K.  After updating Quicktime at David Newman’s suggestion, all my files worked in both Premiere Pro (Prospect2K project) and in AfterEffects.  The 4K files do not really playback in Premiere, but you can scrub them.  In AE, I get 2fps at 4K in full quality.  At half quality (4K->2K) I get 6fps, which is the same as I get when playing back 2K footage at full.  All these AE tests were done at 8bpp, since I foresee doing work at 2K-8bit, and rendering at 4K-16bit.

Clearly there is still work to be done, but the software was all released in the last couple of days, in first public beta form.  Regardless, it is amazing that I am now able to edit 4K video footage in my bedroom on my Xeon workstation from 2005.  Once it is working correctly in AE, I will be all set, because that is where I like to do most of my online work.  It is much more precise than Premiere Pro, and the type of work I do rarely requires much realtime playback.  I am looking forward to getting a chance to do some “real” work with Red footage, but given the current performance, I am hoping that my first steps can be with a shorter project.  It also reassures me of my recent decision to invest in a new workstation, since 4K is a lot of data to be manipulating, no matter how you compress it.

Blackmagic has become the first company to support the Mac version of CS3 with their line of hardware products, with the version 6.6 release of their drivers on Oct 26.  I was aware of this at the time, but didn’t report it here until I had a chance to experiment with them myself.  I have installed a Multibridge Extreme in my MacPro and done some quick tests.  Everything seems to be in order, and most of the issues I encountered can be attributed with my lack of familiarity with the Apple way of doing things.

The only real advantage I see Mac offering over the equivalent PC system, is that the Quicktime engine allows a greater variety of compression formats to be played in realtime through the hardware output. (For example DVCProHD)  I am hoping that this more open approach to compression support will allow Cineform compressed MOV files to be output in realtime sometime in the future, maybe even at 2K with the MultibridgePro.  I also hope to see this on PC, but the Mac Quicktime architecture currently seems one step closer to achieving this than the eventual PC solution.

I plan to do a more full fledged test of the HD-SDI I/O options in the near future.  So far, the only thing I have been unable to do, is get a realtime down-converted SD output of my HD timeline.  Does anyone know if this is supported, and if so, how to configure it?  I will need it to add pulldown, since most of my HD work is 23.976fps.  Since I only have an internal SATA array on the MacPro, I will not be able to push the Blackmagic hardware to its limits.  My three disks will be struggling to provide the data-rate required for 1080p 4:2:2, let alone 4:4:4 RGB or 2K.

UPDATE: I found the settings for downconverting, and it seems to automatically add pulldown for SD output, but I don’t see a way to add pulldown to HD output.  Unfortunately my system is currently doing a center cut to SD even when I have anamorpic or letterbox selected.  I have also been having many other playback issues, so it seems there are still a few things to be worked out.

One other benefit that the Blackmagic solutions provide, is that the same hardware can be used by PC applications in Windows.  This will be a significant advantage to those of you out there who are using Bootcamp to run Windows and OSX on a MacPro.  Currently Blackmagic offers the only hardware solution that publicly supports this dual environment compatibility.