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.

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.

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.

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 basic internal 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.