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.

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.

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.

Elsewhere on the mobile recording front, I have been using some prototype units that record HD-SDI directly to SATA drives.  We tested them in some pretty extreme operating environments, and when used with Solid State SATA drives, they held up pretty well.  While we weren’t without our share of problems, the units were able to capture some pretty amazing footage when combined with an Iconix camera system.  I won’t post a full review until the creators have had an opportunity to solve some of the issues with the units, that our tests exposed.

Nvidia also released a new high end professional video card, the QuadroFX 4700 X2.  This card has two independent GPUs that can be harnessed together with SLI or used separately to drive 4 separate displays.  The stats are not much more impressive than the current top of the line 4600 and 5600 solutions, so they are really just updating the previous 4500X2 which was made obselete by the new generation of GeForce8 based cards released last year.

 AXIO 3.1 has few major improvements.  Besides overall stability improvements and bug fixes, Canon’s 25f HDV mode is now supported for you PAL folks, and AXIO systems are now compatible with Omneon media servers.  Nothing significant that effects the workflow of the other 95% of their users.

 Sony’s new HDV Cameras have a couple of interesting features.  The HVR-S270U is shoulder mount camcorder while the HVR-Z7U has the more usual ‘Handycam’ formfactor.  Both cameras use a similar imaging solution to the HVR-V1U, with three CMOS imagers at 1920×1080.  The larger HVR-S270U supports full sized DV cassettes, for over four hours of continuous recording, and has an HD-SDI output.  The smaller HVR-Z7U has a cheaper HDMI output instead of the SDI, and is limited to standard 1-hour MiniDV size cassettes.

The biggest feature that sets these two cameras apart is that they both use interchangable lenses.  Previously, the Canon XL-H1 was the only HDV camcorder to support this.  This is the primary feature that is missing from the new SxS flash media based XDCam camcorder, the Sony EX1.  Speaking of flash based recording, both of these cameras also support a new solid state recording accessory, the HVR-MRC1.  This little iPod sized device attaches to the side of the camera, and records the HDV stream directly to solid state CompactFlash memory cards, bypassing the tape entirely, but not the HDV compression.  CompactFlash cards are significantly cheaper than P2 or SxS cards, so I can see this becoming a very popular accessory.  Supposedly it interfaces directly with the new camcorders, but existing HDV camcorders can take advantage of it through the iLink or IEEE1394 firewire port, which transmits the HDV compressed stream live.  This would be similar to the disk based Firestore products, but with the added advantage of being a solid state solution.

The simplest solution that provides HD-SDI input to a laptop is the Motu V3HD.  Connected via Firewire, it allows capture of digital and analog High-Definition video signals at DVCPro-HD quality.  Limited to 1280 pixels in width, and 100Mb/s, this is a lower end HD solution, but bears mention none the less.  I have not personally used one, but it is supposed to be compatible with Premiere Pro CS3, as well as Final Cut Pro.  The data rate and processing requirements allow this format to be used on most high end consumer laptops, but those looking for full resolution 1920×1080 solutions must look farther.

The next solution is currently only available to Mac users in Final Cut Pro, but is a significant  technological development.  AJA’s “I/O HD” is a Firewire800 based solution that can capture and playback full resolution material, with 10bit color, in Apple’s new ProRES codec.  Although not a PC based solution, it does enable mobile users to capture high quality, full resolution footage.

Anything beyond that will involve a bit of creativity, and what follows is highly speculative.  Newer laptops have replaced PCMCIA card slots with ExpressCard slots.  The new formfactor is much simpler, and has two basicinternal variations.  The slot has pins available to interface directly into the USB subsystem (480Mb/s) or directly into the Southbridge via the PCIe x1 interface (2000Mb/s).  The PCIe interface provides an ExpressCard slot with enough bandwidth to support uncompressed HD video, at least 10bit 422 at 1080i/p.  RGB 444 might even be possible at 24fps, but that would depend on how much overhead was imposed by the interface itself, among other things.  This bandwidth has been utilized in the design of the ExpressCard option for the CalDigit HDPro, but having a single slot with the capability of transfering video at uncompressed data rates leaves us with a problem.  If the ExpressCard slot is being used to connect some form of video I/O interface, how do I connect my storage at uncompressed speeds.  Unless you find a laptop with two ExpressCard slots, you will not be able to use both at once.  I guarantee that the capture card is necessary for realtime full resolution HD acquisition, so how can we do it without using the high speed storage?  Compressing the video becomes the obvious solution.  So a capture solutionis needed that allows realtime compression, and can be jury-rigged to connect to an ExpressCard slot at PCIe x1 bandwidth.

A company named Magma has developed a solution that really opens up the available options.  Their ExpressBox Pro product allows a PCIe card to be inserted and connected to a laptop via an ExpressCard slot.  At the very least, PCIe x1 cards can be expected to work, and ideally higher end PCIe x4 based capture cards may function properly as well.  After all, the HD video data itself is usually well under 200MB/s, depending on the specific settings and format.

The first option that comes to mind are the Intensity cards from BlackMagic Design.  They allows full resolution capture of 1080i/p at up to 10bit color in the 422 YUV colorspace, over HDMI or analog on the Intensity Pro.  Convienently, Blackmagic also makes an HD-SDI to HDMI converter, the HDLink, so we can use this to pump HD-SDI into the Intensity card.  Blackmagic also has a MotionJPEG codec that we can capture directly into, so it would seem that they offer a fairly complete solution to our problem.

Another option using the same hardware is to use Cineform compression, as detailed here.  In my experience Cineform’s compression results in a higher quality final picture than Blackmagic’s current implementation of MotionJPEG codec.  The downside of using Cineform is that they don’t support live playback, out of the Intensity card the way Blackmagic’s codecs do. If you have an external monitoring device available, this can be a very helpful option when trying to edit on a small laptop screen.  To Cineform’s credit, they allow you to use the secondary display output from your laptop as a full screen video output if your graphics card supports it.

Our next PCIe x1 based solution is the RT.X2 from Matrox.  Although I have not been able to confirm that this has ever been successfully used in this capacity, it remains a theoretical possibility.  The RT.X2 would be advantagous in that it would offload much of the compression processing from the laptop CPU to the PCIe card.  It would allow analog HD capture, but would be limited to 1440 horizontal resolution, and would allow preview via DVI or analog HD.  On the positive side, with hardware acceleration, Matrox’s MPEG I-Frame codec would probably give the best creative editing performance of any of the solutions we are examining here.  Realtime effects and exporting would be advantagous for the editing process, but the original footage acquired would not be as high quality to begin with.

In theory, the Magma ExpressBox could support other cards.  While the bandwidth is limited to the 2000Mb/s (200-250MB/s) of the ExpressCard’s PCIe x1 bandwidth, the phyical connector in the box is a PCIe x16 slot.  It would be interesting to know if it would support an AJA LHe or a Decklink HDPro.  The AJA card would allow 10bit capture into the Cineform ProspectHD codec at full resolution, and Decklink might allow RGB 444 capture at 24fps.

There is one more Blackmagic based option that I know isn’t fully developed yet, but seems very close.  The Blackmagic Multibridge is based on the same technology that allows the Magma ExpressBox to work, external PCIe.  If an ExpressCard could be fabricated that interfaced the ExpressCard PCIe x1 bus to the DVI shaped cable that the Multibridge uses, that would be a great solution.  When the first Multibridge Extreme was released, it was listed to be compatible with PCIe x1 slots, at least at SD resolutions.  PCIe x1 has the bandwidth for HD if used efficiently, and the Multibridge has many I/O options, so I think it would be the ideal portable solution.  I know it can capture to MotionJPEG, and I believe Cineform includes capabilities to capture from it into their codec as well.  I have not been able to confirm that, but it is implied on their website.

The last option I will mention has been discussed and rumored about for years, but I have yet to see a product hit the market.  Why not have an ExpressCard with HD-SDI I/O directly on it?  Heat will be an issue that needs to be overcome, and mini-BNC connector could be used to improve the form factor of the physical connections.  Ideally if it was a Blackmagic product, it would support live capture into MotionJPEG, Cineform, and ProRES on a Mac, for maximum possible market.  If/When it gets developed, I know it will sell well, assuming it functions correctly in an established normal workflow.  Realtime compression will be required for any laptop solution, but this doesn’t have to be accomplised in the card itself, it just has to be compatible with it being done by the CPU.  I look forward to seeing a product like this released, as it would greatly enhance the workflow for portable post-production solutions.

The most significant feature that it adds is native support for Panasonic’s primary recording formats, DVCPro50 and DVCProHD.  Interestingly, the update does not support capture of these formats from tape, which requires purely a software solution, since Firewire is the primary I/O mechanism.  It does allow DVCPro AVIs created elsewhere to be imported and used though.  The ideal workflow that Adobe is trying to support with this update is the P2 workflow, primarily from the HVX-200 camera.  “Capture” from P2 cards is an OS level file copy, so regular capture settings are not required.  The P2′s native wrapper is not AVI, but MXF, so this wrapper is now supported in Premiere Pro 3.1.  My hope is that they extend this MXF support to include native XDCam files in the next revision, whenever that may be.

Other improvements from the update include fixes for the Project Trimmer, which did not handle WAV files correctly in CS3, and a bunch of random little fixes which aren’t worth noting, but that I definitely appreciate having.  Adobe has not added features to Premiere with an update between releases since it added HDV support in version 1.5.1 back in February of 2005.  At that point, their HDV solution was licensed from Cineform, very similar to their AspectHD, which was the most popular HDV editing solution for Premiere Pro at the time.  It bears noting that Matrox has supported P2 MXF files in Premiere for over a year with their AXIO line of products, and in a way similar to Adobe’s recently released solution.  Hopefully that trend increases the possibility of my desired native XDCam MXF support, similar to Matrox’s solution, becoming a reality in the near future.  Until then, I will be testing out the fixed project trimmer to free up lots of “extra” disk space, and playing back my P2 cards and DVCProHD captures without necessarily needing to use an AXIO system.

The one Axio feature that I use the most, is Matrox’s somewhat proprietary HD compression format, MPEG I-Frame HD.  It supports full size and frame rate HD files at a constant bitrate, between 50 and 300Mb/s, depending on your needs.  I use 100 or 150Mb/s for projects going directly to broadcast video, and 50Mb/s is useful for offline edits that will be reconformed uncompressed.

Matrox also allows native editing of many different formats that Premiere does not otherwise support, including DVCProHD, P2 MXFs, XDCam MXFs, and HDV including 24fps.  In theory these all play in real time on the same timeline.  Real world results are a bit different, and I have experienced many performance problems when mixing these formats, but individually they all play back great.  My usually solution to this mirrors the Cineform workflow, to convert everything into one high performance codec, specifically Matrox’s MPEG I-Frame HD codec.  Matrox’s wide file support allows me to make all of these conversions without leaving Premiere, although using a separate project for asset preparation is highly recommended.  This conversion process is also accelerated by Matrox’s faster than realtime exports of all supported formats.

Matrox has done extensive work to allow their video effects to be accelerated by the system’s video card GPU, on Axio LE systems.  There are a limited number of supported GPUs, but they are budget friendly consumer gaming cards, as opposed to expensive workstation OpenGL certified cards.  This allows motion, opacity, advanced color correction, and many other effects to be processed in real time.  This realtime performance is their primary selling point, and allows for a lot of creative freedom.  Combined with native imports and realtime exports, this makes Axio a very efficient editing system as long as you aren’t trying to work too far outside the box.

The MPEG I-Frame HD codec is hardware accelerated in all applications, but has very poor performance in systems without an Axio installed.  Matrox sell the M.key, a USB dongle to unlock that codec on systems without Axio Hardware, but using it for anything besides rendering to or from MPEG I-Frame HD will result in poor performance.  On the other hand, MPEG I-Frame HD is the only COMPRESSED codec I have ever gotten to playback in realtime with Iridas’ SpeedGradeDI software, but only with the Axio card installed of course.  Matrox uncompressed files can be read on any PC using their free VFW codecs.  The fact that all supported compressed formats are limited to 8bit color is a significant limiting factor, as well as memory issues in larger projects. Timelines with more than about 10 minutes of edited material begin to exhibit performance problems, and until native 64bit processing allows for addressing greater than 4GB of Ram, that will continue to be an issue.

Axio is a highly accelerated editing platform for HD 422 work, but is not well suited for long form projects.  It is not going to help you online your film at 2k or 4k, or even process RGB data at 444 at all.  It does however support 24fps footage and editing, so it could work well as an offline editor. Offlining your short film on Axio at 24fps offers some interesting advantages when onlining in Premiere Pro with a different solution, like Cineform 2K or Blackmagic RGB.  All titles, motion effects, and other Premiere specific edits should pass through automatically to the conform.  Axio will also probably be the fastest way to edit your 30 second spot, or 10 minute corporate training video, after shooting on HDCam or HDV.