AJA had a number of new products on display, and it seems that the new revisions fix most of the issues that I have had in the past. The Xena LH card used to prevent realtime preview in AE, at 1920×1080 due to frame caching bandwidth limits. The new Xena LHI is supposed to fix that problem, as well as add 3G SDI and HDMI 1.3 I/O. The new SDI to HDMI Mini-convertor adds 3G SDI support, full 10bit output, and now allows remapping 8 available audio channels. HDMI expects L,R,C,S,Ls,Rs while Premiere outputs L,R,Ls,Rs,C,S for surround sound, and this has led to the need for some interesting work arounds in our editing rooms. I mentioned the IO Express in my last post, and this differs from the IOHD in having a faster PCIe interface to the host system, with similar I/O connectivity, in a smaller physical unit. It is also the first AJA IO product that is PC compatible. I am hoping that this device is similar enough to the Xena series of cards, that Cineform will adopt integrated support for it, giving us 10bit compressed HD I/O on a laptop.
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So after a busy day, spent mostly in the Cineform booth on Tuesday, I finally got a chance to continue exploring today. There are a few more products that jumped out at me, mostly hardware products since they are easier to grasp in a short period of time that software, which usually requires a more extensive demonstration before its new capabilities become clear. This makes explaining Cineform’s new offerings a challenge, especially when you take into account that there are few other options with which to compare their new capabilities to.
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So after a long run of dry months, with few releases of new hardware and software, NAB has brought all sorts of new toys to the table. While I am spending most of my time as a demo artist at the Cineform booth, I did manage to take a look around at what a few other companies were showing nearby.
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Adobe Photoshop is one of the most ubiquitous image editing programs on the planet, used not only by photo editors, but illustrators, graphic designers, web designers, VFX artists, and many others. With the last few releases, Adobe has continued to push their most popular product into even more diverse applications, including 3D object support, video frame editing, and now medical imaging. It would sometimes feel that the basics have been completed and then left dormant with all these new peripheral changes, but there one new set of features in the CS4 release that has the potential to improve the performance of the program in any possible imaging workflow. This set of features would be the ones based on GPU acceleration from OpenGL supported graphics cards. My recent review of the new NVIDIA Quadro CX gave me an opportunity to really explore the possibilities that these new features bring to the table.
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So over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to test the NVIDIA Quadro ® CX, a new high-end workstation class graphics card. This is basically the next generation successor to the Quadro FX 4600, with double the memory at 1.5GB, and the addition of 10bit capable DisplayPort outputs. The primary marketing buzz surrounding the new Quadro CX is its support for hardware acceleration of the Adobe Creative Suite® 4 line of applications. There are many different aspects that I will be covering between NVIDIA’s new hardware and Adobe’s new software, so this will be the first in a series of three related posts. Stay tuned over the next couple weeks for the rest of the information.
The CS4 applications that will see significant performance gains from hardware acceleration, are After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro. The improvements in After Effects and Photoshop will also be evident with any other previous generation high end GPU, while the new hardware accelerated H264 encoding support for Premiere Pro is specifically tied to the new Quadro CX card. NVidia has also recently announced the Quadro FX 4800, with basically identical hardware specifications to the Quadro CX, and which retails for about $200 cheaper. The extra cost is buying you access to the CUDA based RapiHD H.264 encoder, that is available in no other form besides in conjunction with the Quadro CX card. If you have no need for accelerated H.264 encoding, you could consider saving $200 with the FX 4800, but I envision the possibility of NVIDIA releasing more CX-only tools for creative professionals, since that card is targeted towards that specific market. Not to be overlooked, NVIDIA has also released the Quadro FX 5800, with an incredible 4GB of memory, but that should only be needed by applications with the most intense processing requirements, and is a class above NVIDIA’s previous Quadro products. The Quadro CX is compatible with the same HD-SDI output daughter card that the previous Quadro FX 4600 and 5600 cards used, for broadcast and post-production applications. Hopefully we will see more software applications directly supporting that interface card in the near future. The Quadro CX is based on the same core architecture as the new GTX 200 series of consumer cards, while the Quadro FX 4600 was based on the same technology as the GeForce 8800GTX, which is now two generations out of date. It is to be expected, that there is an all around performance increase with the new cards in almost any application, but Adobe has been specifically adapting their software to leverage the power of these graphics processors.
I get lots of inquiries about making regular DVDs from High Definition material. Hopefully from now on I can respond to those questions with a link to this post. There are two aspects of the downconvert process that cause quality problems if not handled correctly. First is the interlacing problem. Even if both HD and SD were lower field first, there would still be issues, but the fact that HD and HDV are upper field first at 1080i, makes the potential problems even more obvious if not processed correctly. Scaling normally averages adjacent pixels, but in interlaced video, each alternating pixel line represents a slightly different slice of time, so scaling a whole frame without accounting for this difference will never lead to good results. One application that gives you the level of the control you need, to ensure that this process is handled correctly, is Adobe After Effects. By properly interpreting the source footage, and enabling the field rendering option in the render que, you can ensure that smooth motion in your video is maintained through the down conversion process. Essentially 1080i30 footage is really 60 frames of 540p footage, that needs to be scaled to 240p for 60 discrete images, and then reinterlaced to 480i30 for SD viewing on DVD.
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Adobe has just started shipping their CS4 line of products, which coincides with an announcement from NVidia, that their new Quadro CX Graphics card is optimized to accelerate CS4 via the CUDA interface.
Adobe has added many minor tweaks and improvements to all of their apps in CS4. My favorite so far would be the new Adobe Media Encoder, which allows you to render and encode Premiere Pro and After Effects sequences in the background, while you continue to work in the applications themselves. This should help finally utilize all those extra CPU cores we all have buried in our systems. There is also supposed to be more support for 64bit processing, especially in Photoshop. The speech to text engine and enhanced dynamic link are the other features Adobe has been highlighting, but I don’t have as much use for those personally. One thing that has been made clear by third parties, is that Premiere Pro is not finished, and that we should expect a major update soon. I am not sure which details of that have been made public, but until that release, most third party extensions of Premiere will not be compatible with CS4. Specifically I am awaiting support from Cineform for ProspectHD/4K, and from Matrox for the AXIO line of products. Both companies have stated that their software will require support from the extended SDK in the update, so stay tuned for any news on that from Adobe in the near future.
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It has been quite a while, but I hope to get back into the habit of posting regularly, now that I have returned to Hollywood. A few items of interest have surfaced while I have been away. Many products that were announced at NAB have finally begun to ship to customers, and we are seeing how they hold up in real production environments.
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As much as it may seem like it, I have not totally abandoned this site. I have been very busy recently, and will continue to be occupied elsewhere for the next 3 months or so. Once that is complete and I return to Southern California, I hope to have time to continue extending the content on this website. In the meantime, here are a few things I have come across recently that are of interest.
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I finally got a chance to explore the rest of the show today, and found a few more interesting newly released products.
Panasonic has released a number of new camcorders. They have three lines of solid-state recording: AVC-Intra to P2 Cards, DVCPro-HD to P2 Cards, and AVCHD to SDHC cards. At the upper end, the new HPX3700 and HPX2700 both record 10bit 4:2:2 to P2 in AVC Intra. Both support “Varicam” variable framerate options at 1080p, and the top of the line HPX3700 model also has Dual-Link 4:4:4 RGB output capability. In the prosumer market, three cameras that I would describe as variations to the HVX200 have been released. All have 3 1/3″ CCDs, and have the same basis shape look of the original. The updated HVX200A has improve optics and sensor, as well as the addition of an HD-SDI output. The lower cost HPX-170 removes the outdated SD-MiniDV tape option option, allowing only P2 recording. Lastly, the HMC-150 is similar in physical formfactor, but record to SDHC cards in the AVCHD codec, at much lower bitrates. The other two options in the new professional AVCHD line are the shoulder mount HMC-70 and the 1 lb, 3CCD, HV30 competitor, the HSC1U.
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