NEWS

NAB 2008: Better Solutions and Cheaper Gear
Even Avid and Apple Couldn't Stay Away
by Dan Ochiva


Triplehead2go: Enjoy a totally immersive surround gaming experience.
Photo by Pamela Malouf, A.C.E.

In statements made before the show, both Apple and Avid said that they had better ways to meet with their customers than to put up booths at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas in April. Whether that was the case, or if the move was made mainly for cost-saving reasons, a number of attendees queried on the show floor expressed disappointment that the two major vendors of nonlinear editing products were no-shows.

Although show attendance was slightly down compared to last year, one wouldn’t know it from walking the massive, crowded South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Whether you checked out new digital cinema gear from Red, Sony or Arri, pondered price cuts from vendors such as Autodesk, or sat through demos of new Internet products from Adobe and Microsoft, the aisles were filled with eager attendees.

But Apple and Avid didn’t really stay away. Signs could be found discreetly posted in the convention center, for example, announcing meetings by Apple executives to discuss plans for an upcoming Final Cut Pro release. Meanwhile, Avid kept a strong presence by setting up camp in the Renaissance Hotel, a short walk from the show, where the company held meetings, demonstrated new gear, and hosted get-togethers for users.

Avid also announced that its high-end finishing system, Avid Symphony, will be available on a Mac for the first time, as well as full support for 64-bit Mac OS X and Microsoft Vista versions. Improved codec and file-based format support is now standard in the new systems too, including native support for “thin raster” formats (less than full 1920 x 1080) resolutions such as DVCPRO HD and XDCAM HD.

Better Color on Tap
As digital technology gets more capable, industry groups and manufacturers alike hope to better address an often complicated issue: controlling color throughout production and post.

The issue has been tackled on many fronts over the years. Back in 2006, for example, Thomson announced that its Bones open post-production software framework complied with the recently ratified ASC CDL (American Society of Cinematographers Color Decision List) standard, intended to create a standard method of describing colors. Calibration, it turns out, is key to pulling this off.

HP tried to make a big splash at the show by announcing DreamColor Technology, a joint venture of HP and DreamWorks to develop displays with 30-bit color and a “simple color management process.” One result: A proposed product, an LED-backlit LCD monitor, is claimed to equal studio-quality LCD displays at a fraction of the cost.


Cine-tal's cineSpace-supporting display.

But even with DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg waxing at the show (albeit via satellite) about the technology, the announcement met with a general “prove that it will be useful first” response from a couple of DPs. After all, the technology really wasn’t even a debut, since it was rolled out last year and aimed at users of HP printers––mainly graphic artists and professional photographers. Also, it’s obviously not an open standard, so there’s probably little here for the high-end production market in the end.

Cine-tal Systems, which develops hardware and software to better manage color in production and post, announced an agreement with Rising Sun Research (RSR) to wholly acquire its cineSpace color management technology and product line. cineSpace will continue to be marketed as a stand-alone solution for color management for effects and DI post.

At NAB, Cine-tal and RSR demo’d cineSpace-supporting display profiling and matching LUT generation using Cine-tal’s eL1000 and Cinemage product lines. In the future, Cine-tal will work to integrate cineSpace software with its own display management software, with the aim to ensure constant quality as both captured images and digital effects move through production, DI and finishing. One rampant problem today is that image display systems residing in different production and post facilities can radically affect the desired image.

UK-based FilmLight, which has been developing tools for color calibration in post, made a move to bring it to production with the debut of Truelight On-Set at the show. It’s an increasingly competitive space: Arri, da Vinci and LaserPacific are among the other companies working on products and proposed solutions.

On-Set is claimed to enable the director and DP to set a look during the shoot that will serve as the foundation for color correction in post. The software integrates calibrated profiles of cameras and displays with color correction, all keeping to the ASC-CDL format, of course. This means that any color decisions made on set can be transferred to other ASC-CDL-compliant devices used in post-production. The company also announced Truelight Unlimited, for exporting 3-D LUTs to the rest of post, such as Autodesk Lustre or Flame.

In an interesting twist––Thomson, although it competes with FilmLight (which has developed a high-end scanner to challenge the Thomson Grass Valley Spirit), will collaborate with the company to allow FilmLight’s BaseLight color grading system to control a Spirit. It turns out that the well-thought-out control interface panel of the BaseLight unit is a hit; high-end colorists around the world are moving to the BaseLight device, but want to use it to control the Spirit, not BaseLight’s scanner. Now they can.

Quantel made a parallel announcement of an innovation in control surfaces. Its Neo color correction control panel for the Pablo color corrector is a clean, simple panel. The choice of the colors and the product “feel” on the buttons and knobs, for example, are pleasant and carefully chosen so as to sooth eyes and fingers over long days. Ergonomics and interactivity seem well matched here, with dedicated one-touch controls for all major functions, an integrated keyboard and glide pads for maximum comfort in long grading sessions. For those who hate going through levels of drop-down menus, Neo gives one-button access to all menus––HSL, RGB high/low, DVE–– and shapes.

By sharing a database between two separate post islands, color corrector maker da Vinci expects to break down barriers that had slowed workflow. The database sharing goes on between the company’s Revival image restoration system and Resolve digital mastering suite. Here’s the scenario where da Vinci sees its new solution helping: Currently, colorists encountering specks or other damages within frames during the restoration process make a handwritten list noting the location of each, then pass that list on to another operator to search for the exact frames for repair, an unwieldy and time-wasting process that is prone to error.

Now, by integrating Revival and Resolve, the frames marked for repair are saved to the shared database from which they are retrieved and fixed by the Revival technician. Automatic updating of the database gives the colorist instant access to the fixed image so he or she can keep working.

da Vinci also announced technology that harnesses NVIDIA’s Cuda development language. (NVIDIA software allows a programmer direct access to the graphic card’s powerful GPUs for more general purpose use.) The company’s CORE (Cuda Optimized Resolve Engine) is central to the speedy re-engineered 4K Resolve. The Resolve R200, with a single CORE card, is claimed to work faster than any system da Vinci has ever delivered, while the Resolve R300, with two CORE cards, is twice as fast as the R200. The system was obviously helped by closely integrating a storage system from Bright Systems, which is gaining a reputation for delivering storage that has specific enhancements for media playback. By working with Bright’s APIs, da Vinci was able to optimize how data is recorded to the drives, allowing for faster reads and writes.

High-End Workflow
An example of improved high-end workflow––by keeping everything file-based––also turned up at MTI Film’s booth. Working with ARRI and color corrector developer Pandora International, MTI created a 2K dailies workflow for attendees to view. It begins with an Arriscan Film Scanner, which captured 35mm film to 2K DPX files, and recorded them to a SAN. Pandora’s YoYo, its non-linear data management technology, took each camera roll’s data as it was scanned, generating a real-time HD 4:4:4 stream for color correction via a Pandora Revolution color corrector. Finally, MTI Film’s Control Dailies captured the color-corrected HD 4:4:4 media, as well as essential metadata, including an ASC CDL. How does one view it? Control Dailies also generates SD proxies from the HD 4:4:4 media.

Improvements in computer technology allowed Iridas to introduce Speed-Grade XR, a software/hardware combo designed to handle a flood of RAW data poured out by high-end digital cameras. The Munich-based company, which demo’d live de-Bayering from a camera, claims to be the only company to do this for all available RAW formats, although not yet with RED formats. (De-Bayering decodes an image from the CCD’s Bayer matrix to a full-color picture.)

Jim Hays, digital workflow supervisor at Paradise FX, was in the booth to discuss his use of SpeedGrade XR. He’s supervising post on Dark Country, a new stereo feature film shot with Silicon Imaging’s 2K camera. The Iridas software is being used for dailies and pre-grading.

With partners at hand (in this case Silicon Imaging, CineForm and Wafian), Iridas also promoted end-to-end digital workflow. An SI 2K Silicon Imaging digital cinema camera captured to the CineForm RAW format, using the SpeedGrade OnSet software, which is actually built into the SI system. Wafian was in the booth to present its family of recorders, including the new HR-2-DS Direct-to-Disk HD Video Recorder, which can record and play back a single 4:4:4 stream, or stereoscopic 4:2:2 streams into CineForm format clips for grading in SpeedGrade DI.

Assimilate brought out Scratch Cine, a “virtual telecine” for projects shot on RED Digital Cinema cameras. The idea is to emulate operations that used to be handled in telecine suites, such as dailies, one-light color grading, color and shot management. The angle here is that it’s specifically designed to work with the native RED r3d file format. Offhollywood Pictures is currently using it to post a RED shot film, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead, an “indie vampire comedy.”

Once the REDCODE RAW .R3D files are loaded into SCRATCH, users can review, assemble, conform, do real-time playback, color-correct, and finish. Output is available to any format at any resolution––up to and including full 4K.

Swedish company Digital Vision presented the latest version (v4.0) of Film Master, its color grading and finishing system. Now capable of handling 4K in real time via a grid computing network and open SAN storage, the setup allows facilities to begin editing, conforming, grading and finishing 4K material without any ingest delays. The company claims you’ll save time and storage costs and simplify data management. Release is set for the fourth quarter of 2008.

Digital Vision also presented newly reconfigured Digital Vision Optics (DVO) tools. The software now includes more than 20 tools for sharpening images, removing dust and dropouts, changing and controlling grain, and converting formats. It works with the company’s finishing systems: Film Master, Nucoda SD and HD. Four new restoration tools were introduced at the show that eliminated film weave, automatically aligned RGB separation prints and removed vertical scratches typically missed by dust/dirt removers, among other corrections.

In preview was Turbine, a new high-performance render accelerator for all Digital Vision software. The scalable system is based on the latest Dell computing blades; it allows facilities to assign as many CPUs as are necessary to a project. DV claims it delivers eight times more processing power than any other high-end finishing system available––in half of the rack space and requiring less power.

Posting in 3-D
With all the talk of a new age of 3-D on its way, technology that addressed it in post popped up on the NAB show floor.

Cine-tal Systems, working with Dolby Laboratories, announced product for the playback of 3-D movies during production when working with the Dolby 3-D Digital Cinema process. Cine-tal Color Processor for Dolby 3-D targets anyone producing stereoscopic 3-D films using a Dolby 3-D Digital Cinema process for post operations such as color grading and screenings. The setup employs Dolby’s color processing for playback of any 3-D source material that has not yet been packaged into a DCP (Digital Cinema Package).

Assimilate’s Scratch now offers a stereoscopic/3-D workflow. This includes data management, conform, color grading, preview, dailies, real-time playback, rough cuts and finishing. 3ality used a Scratch system to post the three-dimensional feature, U2 3D. For that project, Scratch ran on a Boxx workstation, and handled the two necessary hi-res streams via dual-DVI outputs from an NVIDIA Quadro FX card.

Quantel’s new V4 software allows Pablo users to record left-eye/right-eye stereo signals at the same time in real time. With the software, the UK-based company claims to address colorimetry, sync, editorial and imaging errors, enabling them to be corrected in context. Other special 3-D features include a comparison mode (50/50 mix, left/right eye, difference map) and the ability to see when left/right eye link is broken.

All new Quantel Pablo 4K, iQ4 and Max 4K systems can optionally add on the new Stereo 3-D toolset. (Current Pablo 4K or iQ systems can also be upgraded to Stereoscopic 3-D.) The Quantel Stereoscopic 3-D Option for Pablo iQ and Max enables playout and manipulation of two simultaneous streams of HD or 2K in sync and without rendering.

Dan Ochiva is a freelance writer living in New York. He can be reached at dochiva@yahoo.com.

Going Mobile
Broadcasting to handhelds was a huge topic at this year’s NAB. The take-away information of the day was the estimated $2 billion in additional advertising revenue that broadcasters can expect to harvest from broadcasting mobile television within their DTV channel spectrum by 2012. Based on consumer research, the maximum length of time people will watch a shortform video, like a mobisode, is five minutes, and for audio-only episodes, 20 to 22 minutes.
Producer Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI family of TV series, pointed out at a presentation that the five minutes-or-less format of YouTube clips––despite almost non-existent production values and no celebrities––was absorbing a huge share of young potential TV viewers’ free time. And as consumers demand mobile TV reception, the fact that most cell phone users replace their handsets every 24 months could foretell a rapid ramp-up in mobile TV-capable devices.
- Pamela Malouf, A.C.E.


photo: Pamela Malouf

Really Hi-Def

Okay, so what is Ultra High-Definition Television (UHDTV)? Regular HDTV is 1920 x 1080i, Ultra HDTV1 is 3840 x 2160 and the new Ultra HDTV2 is 7680 x 4320. With 4320 scanning lines, ultra-high-precision images are retained even when projected on 350-inch screens! Hence, viewers express a high sensation of reality and find themselves attempting to touch the screen. As I watched a football game on a 112-inch screen, I felt like I was standing on the sidelines and then, while watching aerials, I felt like I was inside a helicopter. Really incredible.
- Pamela Malouf, A.C.E.

Smoke for Less
We’re going after the Final Cut Pro users who want to move beyond being just another Final Cut Pro user, who want to differentiate themselves,” says Bruno Sargeant, TV industry manager for Autodesk, speaking of the just-announced drop in price for an entry-level Smoke finishing system. It’s not a bad strategy, since Apple claims to have sold over one million copies of its NLE software. Sargeant feels that even if Autodesk gets only one percent of that market, “it’s a good business.”

At the show, a lower price point on Smoke and the ability to work with compressed media were just two of Autodesk’s more significant moves heralding future trends. Smoke 2009’s $64,000 tab for a turnkey hardware/software finishing machine––storage included––is a breakthrough for many mid-level shops which blink when faced with the company’s typical six-figure offerings.

Working with compressed formats like Panasonic P2 MXF shows that Autodesk doesn’t want to turn its back on this quickly growing market. Likewise, the ability to integrate with third-party software and gear that employ common pro QuickTime codecs keeps Inferno 2009, Flame 2009, Flint 2009 and Smoke 2009 relevant to a new generation that widely deploy Mac-based products.

In the works for some two years, Smoke’s intuitive and powerful Batch FX––the application’s new tree-based compositing workflow in 2K––ties together the Smoke’s editorial timeline with a 3-D compositing interface. The demos in the booth sped by, as the system uses the top-of-the-line NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 card, which ships with all of the company’s new effects and finishing products.
- Dan Ochiva

Supa Shoota
The Supacam is so tiny and inexpensive ($300), yet shoots tapeless video and streams it at DVD quality over the web, enabling full-screen web video. It has NTSC and PAL settings, Panasonic five-layered glass lens, 720 x 480 resolution at 30 fps and a three-inch LCD viewer. It records up to eight hours of video on a 4 Gb SD card in MPEG 4 video file format. For more information, visit www.supacam.net.
- Pamela Malouf, A.C.E.

[ return to top ]