The editing environment is being rethought in radical ways this year as management and editors alike are scratching their heads and asking a lot of questions. Do we finish this job on a Mac? Do we do more of the creative edit on a high-end system? Should the editor really handle the composite just because he has the tools? In short, there isn’t much of a difference between online and offline anymore except the speed at which various tasks can be executed.
Cost reductions, merging workflow processes, increasing flexibility and emphasis on HD functionality are top of mind at most post operations. Perhaps less obvious are trends like the encroachment of general purpose graphics boards into traditionally sacrosanct video I/O territory and the emerging importance of handling native 12-bit RGB 4:4:4 NLE files.
Transitioning to HD
Expect to find turnkey HD/SD workstations that can be assembled for under $25,000 (and sometimes under the new magic number, $10,000), not including the storage infrastructure, at the show. Almost every vendor has incorporated or is incorporating HD and the newly ratified HDV into the product mix. HD SANs capable of handling multiple real-time streams simultaneously between workstations are being announced and shown. With respect to NLE software independence, a demonstrable commitment to open-standards including working with mixed resolution formats and integrating XML metadata capabilities is driving vendor interoperability and workgroup integrations. Clients are demanding that vendors play nice with each other.
With the recent shipping of its DNA (Digital Nonlinear Accelerator) family— Avid Mojo, Adrenaline and Nitris— Avid is following the trend of using a hybrid architecture to splice host-based software with hardware-based accelerators. No longer will clients be required to purchase both NLE hardware and software in lockstep. Charlie Russell, senior product marketing manager for postproduction says, "It’s all about protecting our customers’ investments. Even with current PC and Mac performance there is only so much that is possible with software-only implementations."
On the HD front, expect to see Avid’s next-generation implementation of the DNA family and an HD Unity MediaNetwork shown at NAB.
Apple takes another tack, explains Paul Saccone, Final Cut Pro marketing manager, "enabling editors to work on a common platform with a user interface that handles everything from DV to film resolution."
Apple representatives declined to specify what the company will show at NAB, but indications are that the company doesn’t plan to be shut out of the digital intermediate space.
"With the complete separation of software away from proprietary hardware, there really isn’t any reason why digital intermediates could not be edited on a G5 workstation with its 64-bit processing power," says Saccone. Flexibility, XML integration and an adherence to open standards is allowing Apple to work with multiple hardware and software providers in their efforts to solidify their strengthening grip on the NLE market.
Quantel, too, is touting openness "across a common UI from PC through to the eQ and iQ," states Steve Owen, business manager, post-production. "Multi-format editing from SD to HD and beyond and an absolute commitment to open standards and interoperability are paramount trends we are building to. Essentially our approach is to let customers develop their own ideal workflow; whatever they choose, we will interface and operate with."
What Quantel calls "resolution coexistence" seems to be a guiding factor underlying all of its efforts to date. At NAB, the company will show v2 of its generationQ platform with up to 250 percent speed increases and new tools including a multi-view compositor, additional connectivity and teamworking features.
"It’s a given that our ability to be creative is infinitely expandable so technology will never be able to keep up and execute everything in real time," says Maurice Patel, product manager at Discreet Systems Division. "For us, this means consistently meeting and raising the bar at the top end of the postproduction process, a trend we see as neverending." But even at the high end, open access and interoperability of applications is a key trend, as is centralizing storage infrastructure, implementing data-centric workflows across an IP network and implementing an RGB 4:4:4 pathway across the entire production pipeline. At NAB, Discreet will demonstrate a comprehensive set of high-performance, high-resolution creative tools for DI, combining Fire conform and editing, Lustre digital grading and color-correction and Inferno visual effects. And, for the first time, Discreet’s booth will host hands-on training sessions featuring Smoke 6 SD on Linux workstations.
While companies like Quantel and Discreet have long provided tools for HD and film editing, relative newcomer 1Beyond believes HD acceptance is gaining the critical mass necessary to drive post companies and broadcasters to streamline their entire video workflows atop shared SAN solutions. "Our focus is on providing a truly open and low-cost NLE system that scales across all current formats from DV to HD," says President Terry Cullen. To this end, the hardware manufacturer and integrator will show an HD shared SAN solution dubbed Harmony.
Boxx Technologies is another company specializing in building systems that are optimized for broadcast and postproduction workflows with heavy emphasis on system integration and technical support. "While purveyors of general-purpose computers build systems capable of handling much high-end post-production functionality," Todd Bryant, co-founder and CTO, maintains that "very few are able and willing to supply the necessary level of support required by the professional postproduction marketplace." In short, reliable support policies are more critical as customers mix applications and hardware from multiple vendors. At NAB, Boxx will show new workstations capable of housing as many as 12 internal drives for a maximum of 2.4 TB of usable disk storage.
Leitch will unveil its VelocityHD NLE at the show, guaranteeing six real-time HD streams, two each of video, graphics and transitions/effects, making online HD editing as easy, fast and efficient as SD editing while maintaining an accessible price point. As Avid does with DNA, Leitch’s Altitude leverages hardware to enable the software to provide features and functions beyond the host PC’s capabilities.
Mike Nann, product marketing manager, post-production, stresses that even though the process has evolved to the point where a common workstation is adept at all aspects of postproduction, "it is the people factor that determines the variance of its use. Of course, guaranteed real-time layering capability and a commitment to delivering SD and HD solutions within a common workspace go a long way to supporting this trend.
"The additional cost of going HD over SD is very low. There isn’t much of a premium for our customers to go high-def," he says. The Altitude platform allows playback to the monitor with no rendering and supports 8- and 10-bit as well as proprietary variable compression.
VelocityHD ships this summer starting at $10,000. What does that get you? It includes the Altitude hardware board, the VelocityHD software, and the I/O breakout cable— real-time transitions and effects, real-time color correction, and real-time title rolls and crawls are all enabled, but you won’t get real-time 3D DVE or the optional on-board dual-channel SCSI controller for that price.
Revvin’ up the Desktop
Blackmagic Design’s experience as a QuickTime codec developer and board manufacturer lets the company harness general-purpose CPUs and GPUs to provide the necessary power to drive software-only nonlinear tools. On an under- $10,000 turnkey PC workstation, applications like Combustion, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress Pro, Photoshop and Premiere Pro will now be able to work with image resolutions all the way up to uncompressed 10-bit HD in real time.
"For the first time, money is not important and anyone can purchase the best quality NLE equipment possible," says Grant Petty, Blackmagic’s president. "Up until now, the post-production culture has long been equipment centric rather than creatively based because of its equipment-for-hire business model. The haves (post houses) charge the have-nots (producers) a recurring fee, thereby limiting creativity according to the budget. If you can’t afford to be creative, what’s the point?"
At IBC last year, AJA showed a pair of dual 2 GB G5 systems, both easily executing seven real-time image streams using Xserve RAID storage and AJA’s I/O infrastructure. Expect to see this and more at NAB. "With the bulk of the professional creative community editing on the Apple platform, the powerful combination of Apple’s Final Cut Pro application and AJA’s IO infrastructure enables editors to quickly and reliably create SD and HD broadcast programs," says Ted Schilowitz, worldwide product manager for AJA’s desktop video engine.
Though Adobe spokespeople would not comment on their plans for NAB, rumor has it that the company will show Premiere Pro v1.5, which will put the finishing touches on its professional feature set, pulling it neck-and-neck with Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Avid’s Xpress. " Adobe undertook a two-year project to completely rewrite its prosumer-level editing application from the ground up in order to satisfy the far more rigorous professional editorial requirements," explains Richard Townhill, group product manager for Adobe video products. The advantages are a tight interoperability with both Photoshop and After Effects, two of Adobe’s longtime mainstays in the professional post-production space.
According to 3Dlabs’ Neil Trevett, three key trends will hotrod future generations of workstation PCs to handle what only expensive outboard NLE render engines can today. The first is the integration of PCI Express on motherboards, enabling as much as 4GB/s of data throughput in place of today’s PCI-bus maximum of 133 MB/s. Second is the migration of fixed-function graphic accelerators to highly flexible programmable visual processing units with up to 32-bit floating point per component precision— which means they’re able to handle uncompressed HD compositing and editing easily. Third is the use of DVI as a backchannel to transfer pixel data back to the video I/O for downstream processing before output to display or storage. " 3Dlabs is working with leading OEMs via our Wildcat family of graphics cards to accelerate these trends and deliver maximum productivity to video-editing end users at minimal costs," he says.
One of the largest graphics-board manufacturers, NVIDIA, exemplifies this trend. "We are now adding more professional video functionality to our graphic solutions and intend to further that functionality quickly," says Jeff Brown, general manager, professional workstation graphics. "For example, by adding genlock to our boards, we effectively merge what traditionally have been separate subsystems."
NVIDIA has been focused on providing prosumer-level editing support on their graphics products for about four years, but only in the last year has the focus gone upmarket— a direct result of the technology trends galvanizing graphic board makers, and a trend that shows signs of dramatically heating up in the near future.
Integration Rules
Even though NLE software and hardware is being unbundled in the name of openness, Bernard Lamborelle, senior technical marketing director for the video products group at Matrox, maintains that there is still a need for the integrated-suite approach— tight integration among various editing, compositing and authoring tools. "For $1500 you can purchase Matrox’s real-time RT.X100 board set and the complete Adobe professional suite of After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere Pro," he notes. "Essentially it is like getting either the board or the software for free." At NAB, Matrox will demonstrate its next-generation multistream HD editing technology using Premiere Pro, expected to be released later this year.
"While dedicated hardware will continue to play an important role in NLE, there is a strong market trend toward software-only postproduction solutions," notes Canopus General Manager Robert Sharp. "The latest version of Canopus’ Edius Professional software reflects this trend." Equally, with the cost of HD cameras coming down significantly in price this year, HD post-production is set to expand dramatically. "The recent ratification of the HDV standard will do to HD what DV did to SD in terms of opening up market accessibility," Sharp says. At NAB, Canopus will unveil a real-time HD solution that includes an HD-SDI card using a newly developed HD codec and the Edius Professional HD NLE application. Because Canopus uses the same compression ratio as Sony’s HDCAM, the need for upconversion or downconversion for editing is eliminated.
Media 100 has always championed the editor’s ability to move into compositing, and this year the company goes after the low end of the market with the Media 100 HD. The resolution-independent editor applies 844/X technology on the Apple Power Mac G5 platform, with a price tag less than the company’s SD offerings at $7995.
"Media 100 continues to drive a trend it noted a long time ago— that compositing was a way for editors to differentiate themselves," says Rick Keilty, VP of product marketing. "With the new version 3 of our flagship 844/X solution, we’re extending that trend." Among the features of the new rev is a much cleaner key, thanks to reallocation of four uncompressed video streams. (As we went to press, Media 100 was in negotiations to sell its assets to Optibase.)
"Real-time access to multiple HD streams will impact the way NLE will be conducted in the future," says Sony’s Linda White, general manager of XPRI sales and marketing. At NAB, Sony plans to demonstrate that SANs capable of handling HD throughput are of increasing importance. "The ability to streamline the entire post process from HD and SD capture (HDCAM, XDCAM) all the way through to finishing is a trend that customers are increasingly taking an interest in as well," adds White. One of the more interesting XPRI capabilities is the advent of dual-stream real-time HD and SD ingest to expedite the input process.
For all the openness, interoperability, flexibility and HD functionality, without interconnectibility, this would all fall apart. At Pinnacle, network editing for workgroups is being implemented in earnest this year. The idea is to extend the traditional control of editorial decisions across the entire spectrum of users and open up a full range of collaborative tools. "Combining shared storage, NLE, graphics capabilities, playout servers and interoperability with third-party solutions is necessary to deliver real value to broadcasters, newsgroups and post-production facilities alike," argues Jim Guerard, Pinnacle’s VP and GM, advanced editing. At NAB, Pinnacle will stress seamless internetworking between different NLE and post-production solutions, including introducing a new low-cost Liquid editing solution for workgroups attached to a Palladium Store 100 for tapeless central storage.
Questions You’ll Want the Answers to This Year
What level of editing will you or your clients require in the future: YUV 4:2:2, RGB 4:4:4? Will formats require native QT, JPEG, MPEG, uncompressed HD/SD, etc?
How many real-time layers and alpha channels will you require for editing and/or compositing? Will you want to combine both functions onto a common work-station?
Will your NLE implementation(s) be largely standalone or part of a larger workgroup process? What level of SAN capability (and media asset management) will be necessary? In SD or HD?
What is the true cost of building your own system (encapsulating both the hard and soft cost to do so)?
The Harmony HD shared SAN system from 1 Beyond
Leitch unwraps its new VelocityHD nonlinear editor
NVIDIA is adding pro-video functions like genlock to its graphics boards
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