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Gems from the Last Day
It's the waning hours of NAB 2006 and I've seen some really kick-ass
products. Here's a bit more news to post...
Surprise, surprise - the Foundry, long known for their visual effects
plug-ins, is now in the DI game. On an Open FX platform - which makes
it available for DI suites such as Digital Vision's Nucoda, Assimilate
Scratch and Filmlight Baselight—the Foundry offers the Kronos retimer,
Steadiness stabilization tool, rig and wire removal, texture
replication, degrain and regrain and key light, as well as the Tinder
suite of effects.
Video pioneer Jim Farney is now
representing at Exavio, a company that was originally focused on VOD
work and now has set its sights on being a SAN accelerator or, as
Farney puts it, "We're out to save the world one SAN at a time." That
equates to four streams of real-time 2K, by using storage in an
efficient manner. It's being beta-tested at CCTV in China for
uncompressed HD and closer to home at an Ascent Media
facility.
Exavio's solution is sandwiched between
the server and storage, the latter provided by DataDirect, which is
already OEMed by Silicon Graphics and Discreet's Lustre. DataDirect,
however, will work with any processor partner. This company is also
aimed at content creators in general and DI suites more specifically,
with its 9500 storage unit for DI production, which givdes two streams
of real-time, concurrent 4K or up to six streams of real-time,
concurrent 2K. Pacific Title has already laid claim to a 9500 for its
DI pipeline. The 9500, which relies on Fibre Channel drives, offers 336
terabytesw in a single system. The nearline storage solution, the S2A
nearline SATA solution, offers 480 terabytes.
SmartJog is a fully closed network connecting studios, post facilities
and broadcasters, with hubs in Los Angeles, Paris and Hong Kong. The
system, which was used to send VFX between Cinesite London and Sony in
Culver City, for production of "The da Vinci Code," delivers 25,000
files a month.
DI system Edifis is coming out with
f-stop, a 2K DI solution. The first installation will be Clear Cut
Pictures in the U.K.
After several years of
planning and work, In Phase Technologies will be shipping its first
holographic storage unit the end of 2006. Tapestry, the storage unit,
begins beta testing in May at four large studios and broadcaster sites.
The current model offers 300 GB at a 20 megabyte transfer rate. Pappas
Telecasting is the first television group to sign on for Tapestry. Some
facilities are looking at it as a possible DI mastering solution, says
an In Phase spokesperson.
Remember Paul Bamborough?
The inventor of LightWorks editing system is back in the industry after
a few year hiatus. THis time with Codex Digital High Resolution Media
Recorder. A field recorder that can record output from any digital
camera up to 4K, each removable hard dtrive holds .75 terabyte (or 750
GB). It can trecord the output of two 2K cameras uncompressed,
simultaneously, or one 4K camera. The images are always stored raw and
uncompressed. And they deliver whatever format the client wants,
natively and seamlessly, from AVI files to a Mac, DPX files to the VFX
department, or files to a PDA. LUTs will also playback in
real-time.
Two cool LCD monitors from e-Cinema and
Cine-tal. e-Cinewma is a prototype that offers a 1920x1080 picyture.
Shipping in September, it will be a 40-inch diagonal screen with
10-bits per channel, perhaps up to 12-bits by ship
date.
Pixel Farm is working with Arriflex,
Filmlight, Imagica and other companies manufacturing scanners, to
utilize the IR (infra-red) defect map within PF Clean. Version 2,
shipping the end of May, adds some video tools, including up-resing
from SD to HD.
- Debra Kaufman, 3:21, 4/27
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Final Words (en Route to the Airport)
As NABs go, this year’s show seemed light on big, groundbreaking (or
allegedly groundbreaking) new products. Some of the stuff that was hot
last year has only now started shipping, so products that got a lot of
press in years past are settling in to real-world workflows where
they'll live and die on their merits. Beyond the circus sideshow that
was the Red booth, there wasn’t even a lot of the kind of overt hype
that has become de rigeur in Vegas every year. If the number of fresh
new products wasn’t exactly overwhelming, it seemed to be a good
working show – several companies told me they took a surprising number
of orders on the show floor – and gave attendees a good opportunity to
consider the multiplicity of workflows that are opening up in
production and post. It was the first show where media for mobiles had
a significant presence, with Verizon Business and Nokia among the
exhibitors introducing showgoers to content transmission over wireless
networks. And if you ever wanted to watch dailies on your iPod, well,
this was the NAB for you.
It’s an exciting time in the mid-range market for cameras, with new
ideas in acquisition flying fast and furious. Putting your money down
on a Red camera is certainly one way to go, but what about that camera
from Silicon Imaging that records directly to the fancy CineForm codec?
How about the Rev Pro path Grass Valley’s taking with the Infinity
line-up? Or the more efficient compression Panasonic says it will use
to fit twice as much footage on a single P2 card? How much of a
headache will highly or exotically compressed footage cause you when
you get into post-production?
The big sea change on the horizon in the motion picture industry – a
wholesale switch to digital projection – is happening to a greater
degree overseas than in the U.S., but NATO President John Fithian
insisted at the Digital Cinema Summit that the roll-out will start this
year, and a lot of NAB attendees hope he’s right. (Fithian seemed a
little anxious about Sony’s big push toward 4K projectors, fearing that
will muddy the waters for exhibitors worried about being immediately
one-upped by the next technology coming down the pike – wonder if
anyone took him to the back of the central hall to see the 8K projector
demonstration from NHK and JVC.) Look for more from the Digital Cinema
Summit at the Film & Video Web site next week,
along with some more details from the show floor.
- Bryant Frazer, Film & Video, 15:10,
04/27
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Scattered Thoughts on Day Two
I wish them the best and I hope it’s a real kick-ass camera (it sure
looks cool) but I’m a little freaked out by the widespread love for
Red, sight unseen. 150 preorders (and counting) with a $1000 deposit?
For a camera that still hasn’t come out from the inside of those glass
cages in the big red tent on the show floor? I guess there’s a lot to
be said for pure showmanship ...
I share Matt’s admiration for the ideas behind the Silicon Imaging
camera, having spent some time with the guys from SI and CineForm at
the Adobe booth today. David Taylor was trying to explain the concept
to a potential user who was struggling to update his old-school
mindset. What’s the offline and what’s the online?, he wanted to know.
“It’s all online,” Taylor told him, and you could see the concept
click. It’s pretty cool to keep working with raw data all the way
through the render process, using the CineForm codec to keep it
straight – the color matrix is encoded as metadata right in the stream,
meaning you can’t do anything to permanently jack up your color space.
And they say it’ll work on Final Cut by the time the system ships in
September. That will be interesting ...
Patrick Myles at Dalsa (not exhibiting) hipped me to a product from a
company called Root 6 that looks like a great dailies tool. You record
to storage from an input device like a film scanner or the Dalsa
camera, and then the Root 6 system, called ContentAgent, captures the
data and automatically handles multi-format encoding and distribution
to your spec. Want to watch 4K DPX files from the Dalsa downconverted
for a WMV HD DVD – or your iPod? Yeah, they can do that. They’re in the
Avid developer’s area right behind the main Avid booth
...
Finally, if you sometimes shoot with smaller cameras, and you like
monopods, there’s a new monopod over at the Bogen booth in the central
hall that you gotta see. It’s the Manfrotto 560B video fluid monopod
($149), and they’ve got it set up so you can compare it with a
no-frills version and see which one gives you smoother pans. [Addendum:
The press release is
here.]
- Bryant Frazer, Film & Video, 00:25,
04/26
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NAB Rant and My Vote for Product of the Show
Greek mythology gave us many visions of condemnation. Prometheus was
condemned to have his liver picked away every day by an eagle, only to
be regenerated in the morning to the delight of the voracious eagle.
Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll
back down at he near the peak. Mental pain vs. physical torture? Which
would you choose?
NAB seems to combine both in a special sauce of hell. From the
haphazard configuration on booth numbers, where booth number 4801 is
literally a mile away from booth number 5107, terrible signage for
booths, the deafening sounds from the booths, equipment that promises
great things but are not shipping yet or beyond your price range, the
booth babes that wouldn’t give you the time of day if they weren’t
being paid to be pretty, and the constant swarm of people that see
nothing wrong with just stopping dead in their tracks in the middle of
the aisles. Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of exciting things
happening at this NAB, more than most years in my opinion, but you show
me a person that truly enjoys NAB and I’ll show you a Phillipino dwarf
that speaks Swahili. And after all the miles of walking I’d be willing
to pay $200 for a foot massage that would NOT involve the option of a
‘happy ending.’
Now that that is off my chest, for the things that impressed:
Flying deeply under the radar leading up to the show, tucked away in
the Adobe booth, in what I am terming (and possibly trademarking), the
anti-Red marketing campaign, is the digital camera from Silicon Imaging
(Click
here to read the press release). Having been at
the show and asking the stock question of ‘what has impressed many
responded with varying levels of excitement of the major players, but
many got a glint in their eye as they responded, ‘have you seen the
camera from Silicon Imaging.
Coming from the world of industrial imaging Silicon Imaging seems to
have had no intention initially to enter the film/TV market. But when
approached by some filmmakers who were interested in their technology
they started developing this camera two years ago.
It is a working camera, with footage shot two days ago around Vegas,
and will ship in the next few months with a feature film already on
board. And they literally solved the final codec with Cineform two
weeks before the show. A 1920x1080p camera using a Cineform RAW codec,
it features hot-swappable direct–to-disk recording, it uses a 2.3” CMOS
with an 12-bit A/D converter. It supports 1080/24p 720p (variable),
from one to 72 fps recording, is shipping and has complete integration
with Abobe Premiere (and Avid and Apple support should be added in the
coming months). The first thing that strikes you when you see the
camera is that there are no knobs, other than a power button on the
camera. All of the controls are manipulated via the touch-screen
monitor. Besides the cool factor this will allow the camera to up
updated with software instead of hardware.
And the
essential body of the camera is a removable piece, about 3”x3”x1” that
can be removed and set up for POV shots with C-mount lenses connected
via USB to a hard drive.
It is shipping bundled
with Adobe Premiere for around $22K.
With virtually no marketing campaign leading up to the show, Silicon
Imaging’s new camera is quickly, and unassumingly, becoming the talk of
the floor.
- Matt Armstrong, 10:16, 04/25
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NewTek Breaks Out High-Power NLE
I stopped by NewTek’s booth to check out the cool new features of
Lightwave 3D v9, which I was quite impressed with, when the company
totally pulled a fast one by introducing a new high-power, low-cost NLE
that’s pretty damned impressive. It’s called SpeedEDIT, and NewTek is
billing it as “the fastest video editor” on the
market.
I got a demo from Philip Nelson, VP, video sales and marketing, who
really blew me away with the software app’s long list of features.
SpeedEDIT offers an open architecture, seamless mixing of multiple
video formats, aspect ratios and frame rates all within the same
project. You can also mix SD and HD clips with real-time and
full-resolution playback. It also has a real-time three-wheel color
corrector, a built-in vectorscope, edits native files, and is FAST.
And, a real nice bonus, it’s expected to ship sometime in mid-summer
for $495.
- Linda Romanello, 7:43, 04/25
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Autodesk fully Linux’d and the growing market of film scanners
Autodesk has now gone whole hog for Linux. As of this NAB, all their
products run on Linux, says producer marketing manager Marcus Schioler.
Lustre, which is now shown in version 2.7 with support for Incinerator
super computing, has also been paired with GPU performance via NVidia,
an intriguing match that I will doubtless follow up later for DI
Studio.
Richard Antley, now with Imagica, had some
interesting things to say about the scanner business. Imagica has come
out with two new products: the HSX scanner which scans 3 frames per
second at 2K and 1 frame per second at 4K, and the HSR (for "high speed
recorder") which is at present only available in a 2K version, priced
at $475,000. Antley claims that thre HSR is "four to six times faster
than the ARRI laser recorder," and reveals that they'll add the 4K
upgrade by Q3 2007. The HSR is based on DiLA 2K chip technology
licensed from Kodak.
Listing the players in
scanning—Arri, Filmlight, Thomson and Imagica—Antley says that the
next two to three years will be very competitive. "The market is big
enough for three players," he says. "Someone will have to die." He
softens his stance a trifle noting that "we're in a constantly changing
environment." "There's less scanning due to high-res cameras," he says.
"But then there's more scanning from material that would have been
telecined."
Da Vinci introduced Polygon Power
WIndows which has an ability to fit any shape with hundreds of pointsw.
They also showed Splice, which creates an interface between linear and
nonlinear, creating a virtual telecine with the Transformer engine and
Resolve, for real-time sizing and rotation.
- Debra Kaufman, 6:40, 04/24
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Liquid After the Avid Makeover
But wait; there¹s more. That phrase rolled off the tongue of David Krall,
Avid¹s CEO, more than once yesterday. When you¹re a company with an ever
expanding set of mature product lines, and you¹re coming off of an extensive
R&D cycle that included the acquisition of another mature product line,
you¹ve got to pack a lot of info into one press conference. I went into the
event expecting a few upgrades but was more curious about what Liquid would
look like, and how Avid would position it alongside its other powerful NLEs,
now that the acquisition of Pinnacle was comfortably behind us.
It reminded me of when Avid had just acquired Soft in the late Œ90s and had
to blend Softimage|DS into its existing line. You kind of scratched your
head, said a quiet farewell to that original, elegant interface that had
just been developed by the Soft team in Montreal, and sat back to see what
Avid would do with it. Some people even thought DS would disappear
altogether, given Symphony¹s hold on the market. But DS is now an important
part of the hardware-accelerated Avid editing-to-finishing food chain, the
2K/4K icing on the cake, really.
It wasn¹t so clear if Liquid would blend as easily into Avid¹s existing
product line, especially when you remember that it was once a direct
competitor of software-only versions of Avid Xpress Pro. Avid¹s answer is to
bundle, and to look to Web. And it¹s a smart answer. As Avid watches Adobe
and the former Macromedia team make beautiful Web video together and bundle
so many necessary tools into the new Production Studio (you can bet Avid¹s
been watching Apple¹s clever way with bundling for some time), it has
positioned the Liquid line as an all-in-one software NLE that lets video
editors output to the Web, on disc and on device.
Inside Avid Liquid Chrome HD v.7, the version announced yesterday, are
templates that let you output to Flash, and to devices like the iPod and
PSP2. You¹ve also got a full HDV workflow, DVD authoring and support of
Avid¹s Open Timeline (throw DV, MPEG-4, WM9 or HDV sources at it in any
combination and you don¹t have to transcode). There¹s even a version of
SmartSound custom-music software inside that lets you add soundtracks right
to the timeline.
But the bundle still stands apart from Avid¹s other tethered NLEs, and it
appears that Avid wants it that way.
Avid¹s also the beneficiary of Liquid¹s original design from Fast, which
Pinnacle had acquired in 2001.
- Beth Marchant, Studio Monthly, 8:10, 04/24
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Avid Adresses Next Big Challenge
I suppose I've become jaded by the fact that every year there are
hopes of big, potentially groundbreaking announcements coming out of
NAB. This year I didn't get my hopes up too much as a bunch of the
major players had rolled out major announcements in the past few months
(re: Adobe; Pansonic and Sony). So I'd settled in for a NAB of sublty,
important and significant, that of workflow and integration, but
nothing that set you back on your heals.
I should have known better as Avid was even more secretive than usual.
A few differnt editors I spoke to prior to NAB stated quite frankly
that Avid and Apple didn't have any major things to work on as far as
their own abilities and the challenges now were in integration and
asset management.
Well Avid must have been listening as it addressed those in major ways
with an intelligent, flexible asset management system, software
versions of Media Composer, further support for Macs, enormous upgrades
in storage capabilities and on and on... Quite honestly the Avid press
event was an overload of announcements and attendees exited still
trying to wrap their collective heads around it all and were eager o go
to the booth to see more. (See all the press releases on the
Studio Daily Home
Page.
There was the thought that the NLE war between Apple and Avid were
over, that users had settled in and chosen their favorite. With the
Avid releases, especially the increased support for Macs, this is
certainly a shot across the bow. While Apple had no press conference
this year the rumors are (though I haven't found confirmation of this)
that Apple acquired an asset management company SALT. More tomorrow on
the revitalized format war.
- Matt Armstrong, Studio
Daily, 11:17, 04/23
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Grass Valley's Infinity, a Newly Designed Chip and Partnership with Avid
The stars of Grass Valley's press conference on Saturday afternoon were the
handful of prerelease but fully working Infinity cameras, which we got to
see in use (now we just need to take a look at the footage—more on that
soon). But there were a few other notable news bites.
First, the Grass Valley introduced version 1.0 of a new chip, the result of
three years of R&D, that will usher in the next generation of high-end HD
cameras. The compression processor, called the HD-ACP, will encode HD video
in HD MPEG-4/AVC at bitrates as low as 4 Mb/s. Grass Valley's president,
Marc Valentin, said the chip will begin manufacture in September.
In other news, GV announced a new partnership with Avid that will
streamline the workflow for users of both the Infinity camera and Avid NLEs.
- Beth Marchant, Editor-in-Chief, Studio/monthly, 12:10, 04/23
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Quantel Aims Big at DI Value and Newsroon Apps
Quantel intends to double its U.S. market within the next 12 months,
announced Ray Cross, who was appointed CEO/chairman in December 2005.
Cross, who comes to Quantel from telecommunications and IT services,
said that the dramatic uptick in market share will be the combined
result of the new Newsbox HD and DI solutions. Quantel introduced the
Newsbox HD, a self-contained news system, which starts at $250,000 and
is aimed at local broadcasters seeking affordable workflow
solutions.
Digital Intermediate solutions are represented by the iQ and Pablo,
both of which are being shown at NAB 2006 in 4k configurations.
According to Mark Horton, marketing manager for post & DI, there
are now nine Pablos in Los Angeles, one in Vancouver, and one in
Detroit, as well as approximately 120 DI iQs in Los Angeles, New York
and Toronto. "We see massive opportunities in the high-end DI," says
Cross.
Cross hinted that Quantel plans to roll-out
an inexpensive—or what they call a "value for money"—DI solution
towards IBC. When questioned as to whether Quantel's DI systems would
feature CDL (color decision list) compatibility championed by the ASC
(American Society of Cinematographers), Cross declined to give a
definitive answer saying "it's part of the roadmap going
forward."
Quantel is also demonstrating its TimeMagic technology, which enables
rendering within the system without a network render farm, dramatically
reducing render time. TimeMagic is integrated in the new SD/HD
Paintbox, doubling its render speed.
Cross's
appointment as CEO/Chair indicates a new path for Quantel, emphasizing
a more aggressive business plan. Cross created a business plan for
Quantel two years ago, as part of Quantel's MBO (management buy-out),
and was also involved in numerous transactions with Quantel as part of
LCD, the venture-capital firm that has invested in Quantel. "You have
to build a business with shareholder value," says
Cross.
In another interesting twist, Horton noted
that Quantel's proprietary hardware—often regarded as an anachronistic
hold-out in an open-platform, software-based environment—now plays a
role in preventing pirating, unlike all-software solutions. "Yes, we
use CPUs and broadcast cards and off-the-shelf hardware," says Horton.
"But for the heavy lifting, we use proprietary hardware, and that can't
be copied."
- Debra Kaufman, Film & Video, 12:15,
04/23
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D-Cinema Summit: Day 1
I guesstimated around 600 in attendance at Day One of the Digital
Cinema Summit on Saturday — a full room, for sure, but not quite
packed to the gills. A splendid time was had by all, with a high point
being the screening of around 10 minutes of footage from In-Three's
"depth-restoration" job on STAR WARS. You put on a $25 pair of glasses
so your left eye sees the original movie while the right eye sees,
essentially, a VFX recreation of the whole movie but adjusted ever so
craftily to simulate a slightly different perspective on the action.
The result is, no kidding, STAR WARS in full 3D.
I'll admit that I've long been skeptical of this stuff, but they really
pulled it off. If my mouth was hanging open (and it was), imagine the
intense nostalgia blast that must have been hitting George Lucas when
he saw this stuff — like going back in time three decades and standing
on those old sets again. No wonder he hired the In-Three brain trust to
prep STAR WARS 3D for a 30th-anniversary reissue next
spring.
In-Three President/CEO Michael Kaye came
out after the screening to talk about the technology in general terms,
but also seemed a little defensive. "This is not a gimmick," he
insisted. Yes, of *course* it's a gimmick. But it's a pretty good
one.
There will apparently be lots more 3D on
Sunday, when James Cameron arrives in town. Stay
tuned.
- Bryant Frazer, Film & Video, 11:06,
04/22
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Pre-Game
Red, Red, Red Red. The camera can't possibly live up to the buzz, can
it? Having heard all the specs on this camera, the price and all the
rest, I think it just might, as long as it isn't vaporware, which it
doesn't appear to be. Yes, it's good to have inside info -
unfortunately I'm under non-disclosure til Monday midday when the
exclusive interview with Jim Jannard will be published right here on
Studio Daily. Now that that shameless self promotion is out of the way.
I will simply provide what I wrote for Studio Monthly on RED, just to
make sure I don't slip and disclose some info (they take my firstborn
and pinky finger if I leak):
Will RED be Worth the Wait?
For months now on tech message boards, the buzz has been growing to
nearly a fever pitch over the new camera being produced by the somewhat
mysterious company RED, the brainchild of Oakley Sunglasses’ owner Jim
Jannard.
Specs released so far boast a true 35 mm size image sensor of 4520 x
2520 pixels, 4k/2540p/1080p/720p/480p, variable frame rates from
1-60fps, ability to output 4:4:4 through dual fiber channel outputs,
4:2:2 out the HD-SDI output and recording options of the RED Flash
system, external hard drives, Blu-ray or tape.
And what is causing just as much anticipation as these specs are the
rumors of the price. While no definitive price has been set Jim Jannard
has claimed that this will "radically change the price/performance
ration of video cameras."
While there will not be a shipping model at NAB, there will be a demo
model and the rumors are that the RED camera will be available in the
fall.
Other things that should be interesting is if one of the HDV camera
manufacturers actually took the time to create an HDV deck with time
code so that it can plausibly be used in a professional setting.
Wouldn't that be great.
Tapeless workflows should be the another big subject of the show and
for years to come. Not all are looking forward to this eventuality
though. As one editor told me as he thought of tracking all the files
with no physical media to grab onto, "It's going to be a nightmare."
Well there's no going back and no waking up.
IPTV is really moving ahead at a rapid pace it seems with networks
preparing to launch later this year with promises of over 1,000
stations. Maybe they won't make me wait a full day to come install the
system in my house.
I got a few more juicy tidbits that I am under NDA for so if you see me
Saturday and Sunday you can do your best to buy me enough drinks so
I'll spill the beans. Hey, it's worth a shot, or shots.
- Matt Armstrong, Studio Daily, 4:10, 04/21
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