USB3 and Post-Production

USB3 has been talked about in the tech world for a couple of years now, but it has only been in the last few months that products have finally appeared on the market.  We are finally seeing mature products with affordable prices, but how does this effect the post-production world?  With a maximum bandwidth of 500MB/s it has a similar signal speed to a single channel of PCI-Express 2.0, which theoretically should be sufficient for uncompressed HD video data, even dual-link 4:4:4 signals, and possibly 2K frame sizes.
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Changes to this Site

So expect to see a lot more updates and changes here in the near future.  Now that I am finishing up work on the feature film that has been consuming my life for as long as I can remember, I plan to resume regular writings and posts on here.  Now that I am winding down on that project, I am also much more available now to do consulting.  This usually consists of planning new workflows for people expanding into HDSLR filmmaking or 3D stereoscopic production, or are just trying to scale their existing workflow efficiently for larger projects.
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IBC Announcements and Other News

Besides my CS5 reviews, I haven’t posted much about new products or developments in a while.  There were a number of interesting releases at IBC last week, and a few from Siggraph before that, that I hadn’t gotten around to yet.

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.
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CS5 Master Collection Applications

The Adobe CS5 Master Collection includes many other applications besides the video ones I reviewed in my last two posts.  Although I don’t use any of these nearly as extensively in my normal day to day workflow, they all come in handy from time to time.  I don’t use as many of the newer features of these apps, because I usually only need the core functionality, that Adobe established multiple versions back.

Photoshop is probably Adobe’s most popular media creation application.  It should really be called ImageShop at this point, since photo editing is a small slice of Photoshop’s feature set.  It also has extensive tools for digital painting and art, graphical interface design, 3D image manipulation, video effects editing, medical imaging organization, and hundreds of other features.  My primary uses for it at work include titles and graphics for video, and interface development for DVD menus, but I use it for all sorts of other things as well.
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Premiere Pro CS5 with NVidia CUDA

While all of the Adobe applications have been updated in CS5, clearly Premiere Pro is the centerpiece of this release.  Adobe has been touting the Mercury Playback Engine for months, with new 64bit code, and additional GPU acceleration through NVidia’s CUDA technology.  This acceleration allows highly compressed formats like AVCHD and H.264 to be played back seamlessly in the timeline, and intercut with other formats without transcoding intermediate files or rendering previews.  Premiere Pro now supports native editing of a stunning number of acquisition formats, including HDV, AVCHD, XDCam-HD and XDCam-EX, DVCProHD and AVC-Intra files from P2 Cards, Red R3D files, and my favorite: Canon H.264 DSLR footage.  It can also edit DNxHD and ProRes footage, for greater compatibility with Avid and Final Cut Pro.  DPX sequences are another significant addition to the formats natively supported, for both import and export.  This greatly enhances Premiere Pro’s usefulness as a DI conform tool, especially when combined with native support for so many other source formats.
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Adobe Creative Suite 5 Video Apps

Adobe announced CS5 at NAB 2010 and has recently begun shipping the retail version.  Now in its fifth iteration, Creative Suite has grown from a compilation of four stand alone applications into a fully integrated product line with extensive content creation functionality.  It is hard to count the number of individual applications that make up the suite, since sub programs have been folded into other applications, and Flash now has multiple variations, with Builder, Catalyst, and Pro.  From a digital post production perspective, the primary applications of concern are clearly Premiere Pro and After Effects, with their subsidiary apps: OnLocation, Media Encoder, and Encore.  Premiere Pro CS5 is clearly the centerpiece of this release, with its new Mercury Playback Engine and optional CUDA based GPU acceleration, but non-video applications like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash still play an important role in many large scale post production workflows, because they are useful in creating supporting artwork and other imagery, and for interfacing your project with the internet in a variety of ways.
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Editing DSLR Footage in Avid

Avid Media Composer works on a very different paradigm than either Premiere or Final Cut.  This makes the application more stable than its competitors on larger projects with lots of source footage, but involves more steps in the workflow to get your final product. (The recent announcements about Avid’s new features in the upcoming version 5.0 will offer dramatically different options.  New AMA support will allow you to work with DSLR footage and other Quicktime files in a similar fashion to how they are handled by Premiere and Final Cut.  These new workflow options will be further examined in a separate post once the new version is publicly released)  While Avid is capable of doing online quality work, it is most popular as an offline editing program.  
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Live from NAB 2010

So after the first two days of the show, I have finally found some time to post some info here.  By far, the most revolutionary new development announced at the show, is Avid’s new native support of Quicktime files via AMA in Media Composer 5, which is scheduled to be released on June 10th.  This will effectively eliminate the need for a lengthy conversion process to DNXHD upon import of any Quicktime files.  The primary uses I see for this capability are for native editing of Canon DSLR MOV files which are explicitely supported, even with speed changes and effects, and for live support of Cineform’s active metadata updates, to impliment non-destructive color and stereoscopic 3D workflows.  It also supports native playback of Red R3D files, and hardware outputs from Matrox MXO2 devices.
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