We began seeing the first products supporting 6G SDI announced at NAB this year. I heard this was coming, but didn’t fully grasp the significance of it until looking around the show floor. Hardly anyone is using dual-link 3G connections, presumably for 1080p60 in full RGB, and basically all 4K work is done in RGB, so going from four cables to two isn’t that helpful. But broadcast applications with QuadHD frame-sizes is where this new technology is going to be key.
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I just returned from yet another week in Las Vegas for NAB 2013. I was in the AJA booth again, showing off 4K editing in Premiere Pro, output to a 4K display through the Kona 3G. Compared to last year, which was basically cuts only, the newer systems are fast enough for full effects to be rendered on the fly. So I am looking forward to putting that capability to good use in the near future. AJA also had the KiPro Quad on hand and shipping after last year’s announcement, and few other new products. I can respect their new policy of not announcing products that are not ready to ship, to combat the trend thoughout the industry for vaporware. It is nice to know what is coming when planning future projects, but frustrating when it doesn’t arrive when expected.
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It has been a while since I have posted on here, but that is because there haven’t really been any significant developments worth noting. But there are now a few to summarize before the deluge of NAB announcements.
NVidia has a few new products available. The Quadro K5000 is now joined by the K4000, K2000, and K600. Each step down reduces the number of cores by 50%, so the performance should really scale up throughout the lineup now. In prior generations, the 3800/4000 has been nearly indistinguishable from the the larger 4800/5000 in terms of real world performance.
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It would seem that I missed a few important new hardware announcements while I was traveling in Europe. As to be expected, most of them revolve around 4K production.
Sony announced two new 4K cameras, both of which have a very modular design. The PMW-F55 will fit near the top of their lineup, just below the “8K” F65. It will capture and output up to uncompressed 16bit 4K RAW to an outboard recorders, and record 300Mb XAVC compressed 4K to SxS cards internally. It can also capture up to 240fps at 2K, or 180fps internally. The biggest feature that will differentiate it from other 4K cameras is it “global shutter” which should eliminate all potential rolling shutter artifacts that can plague other large single sensor CMOS cameras. Price estimates vary, but if this camera becomes available at the expected $25-35K price point, it will really shake up the market.
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Canon’s camera division seems to have been very busy recently. Besides the Rebel T4i which I examined in my last post, they have also released three other new cameras, which are all very different from one another.
The C100 is the newest member of the Cinema EOS line, and is a stripped down version of the C300 for half the price. It records 24Mb AVCHD instead of 50Mb MPEG2, and has no slow motion options. It has HDMI instead of SDI output, and is marketed as being 15% smaller and lighter than its big brother. It looks like they have done a pretty good job of creating a stripped down C300 for those smaller operators who want that level of image quality without paying for all of the extra features that they will never use.
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There have been a few interesting product announcements this week, presumably due to the IBC show inEurope. Most of them relate to the development of new tools for 4K workflows, which I expect will be the pattern for a while to come.
AJA announced a new 4K interface, the Corvid Ultra, which is based on the Riker technology they were showing off at NAB 2011. It has a new scaling engine called TruScale that I hope to see in other products in the near future. They also started shipping their T-TAP, which was announced at NAB 2012.
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NVidia finally announced the first of their professional lineup of products, based on their next generation Kepler processor. The Quadro K5000 is a high-end professional graphics card, while they also announced thr Telsa K10 and K20, which are dedicated GPU processing cards. They were announced earlier this month during SIGGRAPH, but won’t be released for another month or two.
Besides having a terrible identifier in K5000 for product differentiation, the new Quadro looks to offer some useful new features. It supports PCIe 3.0 for faster transfer of data between the system and the GPU, which is becoming more important with CUDA accelerated processing needing data to be sent back into the system instead of to the display output. Speaking of display outputs, the new Kepler products support 4 separate monitors from a single card. This will be advantageous for those planning to use it to replace a dedicated video I/O card for fullscreen monitoring, but still wanting two UI displays. This was the one feature that AMD’s cards had over the Quadros up to this point. The K5000 will also be able to output 4K over a single DisplayPort cable, which will become more relevent once 4K displays become more widely available.
On the Tesla front, the K10 is basically a dual chip version of the same processor that is in the K5000, while the K20 will be based on a whole new GPU design. Both of these designs are departures from the previous Telsa products, which were basically Quadro cards with the display outputs removed. The new K10 appears to be about four times as powerful as the existing C2075 cards, at least on paper. They also announced the next generation of their Maximus program, marketing Telsa cards in parallel with Quadro cards, but we will have to wait for software developer to really leverage those capabilities.
Hopefully I will be able to offer a more in-depth look at the Quadro K5000, and its processing performance, once it is released to the public.
After being announced at NAB last month, Adobe has released CS6 to the public today. Most of the new features are well known at this point, but I am most looking forward to the anticipated increases in performance and stability, now that their native 64bit engine as had more time to fully mature. There are some cool new developments in this version to highlight though.
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The biggest challenge we faced in the DI finishing process for Act of Valor, was preparing for three different aspect ratios for our deliverable, without sacrificing resolution. All of our footage was shot 1.78 (16×9) and we were required to deliver 2.39, 178, and 1.33 versions of the film. The normal way to do this is to letterbox and reposition for finishing in 2.39, and then use that master to make the final 1.78 and 1.33 copies by cropping out the excess on the sides. The problem is that you lose a nearly half of your image resolution in that process, which we couldn’t afford to do with the 5D source material, if we wanted a crisp looking 16×9 version for Blu-Ray and other 1080p distribution.
Our solution was to do our entire post process on the full 16×9 image, with software letterboxing applied for monitoring. This allowed us to maintain the full scope of our image throughout the post process, but required some creative project management. All reframing had to be deferred until after we split out the versions for different aspect ratios. That meant that all titles had to be applied after that point as well, so they wouldn’t get repositioned out of sight in 2.39. And any changes we made to the movie after we split into different versions would need to be made to each version, and carefully tracked.
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At Bandito Brothers, we have always prided ourselves in being authentic and real. This is one of the values that led Scott and Mouse to cast real Navy SEALS for the main roles in Act of Valor, and doing things like using live ammo in certain scenes. So at first glance, it would seem surprising that we had hundreds of visual effects shots in the movie. About half of them were in response to issues that resulted from shooting with the 5D, but we also did have to add things like blood hits, and do fixes like painting out crew members. Additionally, we had a fair bit of motion graphics work, both overlaid graphics for the audience, and screen replacement for briefing information.
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