Earlier this month, Canon announced the C300 as the first product in their new Cinema EOS series, which they see as their next step in the world of digital filmmaking. They stumbled into the forefront of DSLR film-making entirely by accident, and are trying to figure out how to capitalize on that position. Their new camera is intended to bring some of the benefits of DSLR type filmmaking to the high end market, without the limitations presented by the existing 5D and 7D cameras.
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I haven’t posted much in the last few months, because there have not been many new developments that caught my eye or piqued my curiosity. But this month we are seeing a number of releases that are relevant, and moving the industry forward. The first one to actually become available to users is Avid’s release this morning.
After announcing it last week, today Avid released the next version of Media Composer, and it is a major update. The key thing that will affect all users is that the program will now be a natively 64bit application. This will exclude users who still have 32bit systems, but allow the software to use more RAM, and therefore effectively do larger projects, on 64bit systems, which are pretty prevalent at this point. From what I can tell, re-coding an entire application for 64bit is also good for cleaning up the code for existing features, and streamline performance and threading. Avid’s primary competition: Adobe Premiere Pro, saw a huge improvement in both performance and stability when the first 64bit version (CS5) was released. This has led to a huge increase in that application’s popularity, especially for larger projects. The level of competition presented by that change may be a key factor in why we are now seeing so many major changes from Avid.
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To provide us with vision, our brain combines the two separate images from both of our eyes to create the perception of depth. Stereoscopy imitates that to create an artificial sense of depth, perceived by the viewer where there is in reality a flat surface (screen). Imitating the differences in those two images is not as simple as it would seem, and much research has gone into how to do this most effectively. From my own experience, I know that I used to get headaches from watching 3D movies a few years ago, and as technology has developed, viewing 3D content has gotten easier for me, feeling more natural. A lot of this has to do with recent advances in the stereoscopic finishing process. These advances include both new ways of aligning images, and ways to do it faster and with more precision, leading to a better final product.
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In theory, stereoscopic media content can be edited exactly the same as 2D content is, when an offline-online workflow is used. This allows the editor to edit one stream in 2D, in any standard offline editing application, and the stereoscopic 3D aspects are taken care of later in the post production process once the editorial cut is completed. While this is a workable option, the depth information that is being ignored can have an impact on the finished piece, that the editor will be totally oblivious to during that step of the process.
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I did get a chance to check out some of the new products available at NAB. These are the things that stood out to me:
Cineform’s big news was their acquisition by GoPro, and a reduction of their prices. Neo (Previously “Neo4K”) is now $300 and the full Neo3D is $1000. There is also a new free utility called the GoPro Cineform Studio posted on the GoPro site, designed to help users easily process their footage from the new GoPro3D. That download effectively makes the basic Cineform codec freely available to anyone who needs it. I highly recommend having the Cineform codec available on any system you do video work on, since it is a useful cross-platform compression format.
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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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