In case you hadn’t noticed the huge deluge of promotional emails over the last few days from every media company on the planet, NAB is coming up next week in Las Vegas. NAB is always an exciting event to attend, not just because you get to see and experiment with every possible piece of equipment and software, but because so many totally new products are announced that week. We get a glimpse of things to be looking forward to over the next year, that will (hopefully) soon be making our lives easier or furthering our workflow options. It is also a good opportunity to meet the “experts” face-to-face, to compare ideas and share information in more direct ways than online forums and blogs.
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Viewing stereoscopic media in realtime requires that the combined stream be transmitted to your display in some form. Originally this was accomplished with two independent streams going to two separate output devices, like polarized projectors, or LCD monitors with a beam splitting mirror box. Now with standalone 3D displays, usually the source streams have to be processed in some way to combine them. Panasonic’s professional 3D display accepts separate left and right SDI streams, but most other monitors require the sources to be combined in some way, either spatially or temporally. Passively polarized LCDs usually require a single stream with the left and right views interlaced together, which reduces the viewable resolution, but can be transmitted over regular SDI, DVI or HDMI connections. 120hz displays require left and right frames interleaved together, usually over HDMI 1.4. Standard 2D displays require anaglyphic processing to combine the images, and color filtered glasses for the viewer to get a monochromatic preview of the depth illusion.
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It seems like just about every week there is a new 3D technology being announced or released. This is due to the fact that there are so many possible ways to present stereoscopic media to a viewer, but none of the existing solutions are perfect, so there is clear room for improvement. There has been a lot of creative innovation in this regard over the last few years, which is one of the reasons I am so interested in this subject, but the variety of competing solutions can be quite confusing, especially to someone unfamiliar with any of the options.
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3D Movies have been all the rage ever since Avatar came out and made a ton of money. “3D” has risen and fallen in popularity multiple times in the past, but it looks like it is here to stay for now. The point of no return will be reached when auto-stereoscopic (no glasses) displays are widely available at reasonable prices. In the meantime, certain sectors of the market will have opportunities to push the limits of the technical envelope with stereoscopic production.
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SANs are a hardware solution that allows multiple systems to share access to the performance and security offered by large high speed disk arrays. A single array of disks can be partitioned in a way to provide each connected system direct access its own volume, with the each system taking advantage of the redundancy and speed benefits of a large RAID.
Shared SANs takes the benefits of having all of your storage interconnected with high bandwidth links, and extends it one step further. By running special software to synchronize the connected systems, it allows each of the connected systems to access the same the data on the same volume on the SAN, without overwriting each others files or corrupting the data. Most SAN software is designed to function as a peer to peer solution for smaller installations, (5-10 systems) or with dedicated servers for larger SANs.
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After my last article explained why USB3 is not ready to be used as the interface for primary media editing drives, this has led to the question of: what interface should be used for attaching media arrays to editing workstations for maximum system performance? Even more so than with basic external hard drives, there are a number of competing options, none of which have emerged as clearly superior. At this point the answer really varies a lot depending on your needs and budget. It has been three years since my last article on the subject, so the market has changed considerably since then. The primary options as I see it, are eSATA, SAS, external PCIe, and Fibre Channel. While older parallel SCSI based devices are technically still available, the interface has no real advantages over even eSATA, let alone the more expensive options.
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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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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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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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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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