Graphics Cards-NVidia vs ATI

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I have had an NVidia vs ATI article in mind for a while now, but two recent announcements have brought that topic to the top of the list.  Both NVidia and ATI released information on new products this week.  NVidia added a new mid-level option to its GeForce8 line in the 8800GT, and ATI published details of its upcoming HD 3800 generation of DirectX10.1 cards. The ATI announcement is of little consequence, since there are few applications for DirectX10.1 in the post-production workflow, and ATI is rarely the solution of choice in this field.  The GeForce 8800GT on the other hand, has a few unique feature that might be of benefit in the post-production world.  The first is support for PCIe 2.0 which simply put, doubles the available bandwidth to and from the card from the motherboard.  The increasing the bandwidth FROM the card is of little use to the card’s target audience, gamers,  since all almost output from games is sent to the monitor, BUT applications that depend on the GPU to process video before saving it back to disk could see more significant benefits from this.  With performance almost equal to the 8800GTX, the new card will take up one less slot, and if initial reviews are accurate, it will generate less heat and noise, and draw less power than any similar product.  This is especially important in the post-production environment, since the average high-end workstation is stuffed full of drives and I/O cards, and excessive noise is detrimental to certain creative processes.

As newer post-production software is developed to squeeze every last bit of available performance out of available hardware, the GPU is becoming a more important factor in building a high performance workstation.  A few pieces of software that I use that depend on the GPU are: Matrox’s AXIO-LE, Red Giant’s Magic Bullet (especially Colorista), and Iridas’ SpeedGradeHD.  Each has a list of supported cards, and hopefully there will be some intersection in those subsets, or these software applications will be incompatible with each other.  For any given product, there are usually a variety of options, sometime ranging in price from $50-$2500.  Determining which of these options best suits your needs is an important decision, and sometimes the best choice is not immediately apparent.
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Portability-HD Acquisition

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While it is clearly possible to achieve high levels of processing performance in a portable laptop solution, the major limitation will be professional level I/O.  There are few simple solutions, but a fair number of possible work-arounds.

The simplest solution that provides HD-SDI input to a laptop is the Motu V3HD.  Connected via Firewire, it allows capture of digital and analog High-Definition video signals at DVCPro-HD quality.  Limited to 1280 pixels in width, and 100Mb/s, this is a lower end HD solution, but bears mention none the less.  I have not personally used one, but it is supposed to be compatible with Premiere Pro CS3, as well as Final Cut Pro.  The data rate and processing requirements allow this format to be used on most high end consumer laptops, but those looking for full resolution 1920×1080 solutions must look farther.

The next solution is currently only available to Mac users in Final Cut Pro, but is a significant  technological development.  AJA’s “I/O HD” is a Firewire800 based solution that can capture and playback full resolution material, with 10bit color, in Apple’s new ProRES codec.  Although not a PC based solution, it does enable mobile users to capture high quality, full resolution footage.
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Portability-HD Editing

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There has been a lot of discussion recently on the reduser.net and dvinfo.net among other places, about portable HD editing systems.  Technically, almost any editing system is portable if you want to go to the trouble of taking it with you.  For the sake of this discussion, I am going to consider any collection of items that will comfortably fit within a regular backpack to be a legitimate “mobile” solution. 

Technology has come a long way in the last two years, especially in the CPU processing aspect of the equation.  A well equipt laptop can be purchased now that has more processing power than the highest-end Windows based workstations of two years ago, thanks to the Core2 Duo.  I bought a Xeon workstation in 2005, and one year later, bought a 12″ notebook for LESS money, that has MORE CPU power.  With the upcoming release of quad core mobile CPUs, we can remove processing power from the list of limitations that mobility imposes.

Next is RAM, and we are in a unique situation in that regard.  Most systems still use 32bit OSes, and are limited to 4GB of RAM.  This software limitation has allowed notebooks to catchup with desktops in this regard, as demand has not climbed as much past 4GB in the desktop sector, and notebooks were under no similar limit until they caught up.  4GB of notebook RAM can be had for under $200.  Obviously mobile solutions will not be limited by the maximum available RAM. (Any more than a desktop)
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Premiere Pro 3.1 Update

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I realize I have been remiss in not mentioning this fresh development until now.  I do claim to run a technology website focused on PC post-production, primarily with Adobe products, after all.  Partially I have delayed because I have seen no official announcements from Adobe.  Since I was on the Beta, I was aware when the update went GM, and already had access to it.  I have neither seen nor heard any mention of it on the Adobe Download site, and the only indication I have seen that it is publicly available is that the Adobe Update service now automatically prompts you to install it.  Anyway, regardless of how it was released, it is here now, so let’s see what it has to offer.

The most significant feature that it adds is native support for Panasonic’s primary recording formats, DVCPro50 and DVCProHD.  Interestingly, the update does not support capture of these formats from tape, which requires purely a software solution, since Firewire is the primary I/O mechanism.  It does allow DVCPro AVIs created elsewhere to be imported and used though.  The ideal workflow that Adobe is trying to support with this update is the P2 workflow, primarily from the HVX-200 camera.  “Capture” from P2 cards is an OS level file copy, so regular capture settings are not required.  The P2’s native wrapper is not AVI, but MXF, so this wrapper is now supported in Premiere Pro 3.1.  My hope is that they extend this MXF support to include native XDCam files in the next revision, whenever that may be.

Other improvements from the update include fixes for the Project Trimmer, which did not handle WAV files correctly in CS3, and a bunch of random little fixes which aren’t worth noting, but that I definitely appreciate having.  Adobe has not added features to Premiere with an update between releases since it added HDV support in version 1.5.1 back in February of 2005.  At that point, their HDV solution was licensed from Cineform, very similar to their AspectHD, which was the most popular HDV editing solution for Premiere Pro at the time.  It bears noting that Matrox has supported P2 MXF files in Premiere for over a year with their AXIO line of products, and in a way similar to Adobe’s recently released solution.  Hopefully that trend increases the possibility of my desired native XDCam MXF support, similar to Matrox’s solution, becoming a reality in the near future.  Until then, I will be testing out the fixed project trimmer to free up lots of “extra” disk space, and playing back my P2 cards and DVCProHD captures without necessarily needing to use an AXIO system.

Storage-Interfaces

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Well now that we have established the idea that SATA drives are usually the ideal choice, we have to deal with the next logical question:  How should we go about connecting a whole bunch of these drives to our editing system?  The primary considerations I will be examining are cost, throughput, reliability, and shared access.  The most popular solutions, offered by multiple vendors, are SCSI, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, iSCSI, eSATA and the recently implemented External PCIe.  There are few other proprietary options available, but those are the ones that are widely available.

Let’s start with SCSI, since it is the easiest to dismiss.  While we are discussing the connection of SATA drives, many of the first generation SATA arrays had intergrated controllers and Raid hardware, and then needed a fast connection to the host.  These arrays were designed to replace much more expensive SCSI drive based arrays, so the target customers trusted the SCSI interface, and already had high end SCSI controllers in their systems.  That made SCSI the optimal connection solution for early SATA arrays.  The SATA Raid controller masquerades the entire array as a single SCSI disk, allowing connection to systems through existing SCSI cards.  With up to 320MB/s of bandwidth, a single SCSI channel can efficiently support 5-7 SATA disks without much impact on performance.  The biggest reason to dismiss SCSI as a serious possibility is that eSATA is a better option for most, and the remaining will be much better served by a Fibre Channel interface, allowing for economical upgrading to a full SAN in the future.
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Storage-Hard Drives

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There are many different issues that need to be taken into consideration when evaluating data storage options for post-production.  Cost is a primary factor to consider, since without that issue, there would be little to weight against high end systems.  Performance is key as well, for efficiency as well as creativity.  Reliability is a frequently undervalued consideration, that effects everything from insurance prices to stress levels.  The ability to share data effectively can be an important consideration, since post-production is usually a collabrative effort.

The industry has responded with many different solutions, that vary in concept beyond recognition and in price by many orders of magnitude.  The earliest solutions involved video tape, analog replaced by digital recording.  Hard disks were introduced for random access to data, and now those are slowly beginning to be replaced by solid state flash chips.  Since this site is targeted to PC users, we will focus on hard disk based solutions, and the interfaces with which they can be accessed by a media workstation.

Hard disks are produced with five popular interfaces:  IDE/ATAPI, Serial-ATA (SATA), Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel (FC).  IDE and SCSI interfaces are currently being phased out and replaced by their more capable and flexible Serial varients.  I know little of true Fibre Channel hard disks, but that format is rarely used in this industry.  That leaves only two options, which are now somewhat similar and compatible, SATA and SAS.  With identical connection cables, and both offered in 3.5″ and 2.5″ form factors, it is hard to tell the two options apart visually.  Their interfaces both support 300MB/s, dedicated buses for each drive, and port splitting when that is not required.
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Offline/Online Paradigm

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There are those out there, primarily DV and HDV shooter/editors that don’t understand the fundamental concepts of the offline/online process for high resolution post-production.  This used to be required for HD content, but computer technology has advanced to the point that 2K and 4K Digital Intermediates are the primary workflows requiring an offline/online post solution.  That being said, the release of the Red One, and a few other new digital cinema cameras, are pushing new people into this unfamiliar territory.  I originally wrote the following piece in a post on reduser.net and decided to post a polished version here as well.  It is designed to introduce DV and HDV editors to the principles and workflow of the online conforming process.

I will try to explain with this analogy.  Most HDV cameras allow you to capture HDV recordings to downconverted DV files in realtime, for backwards compatibility with older NLEs.  Imagine you shot footage in HDV, but you want to offline in DV, and online in HDV.  You capture your HDV footage into a DV project one full tape at a time, and are left with bunch of DV avi files.  You edit the entire piece, and export the final audio, and a DV guidetrack.  Now that you have the final edit in DV, you are ready to conform it at HDV quality.

There are a number of approaches you could take to accomplishing this.  You could throw away the project file and recapture everything in HDV to do an eye match to the DV guidetrack, withno other reference.  That would obviously be a tedious process. Alternatively, you could offline all your media in Premiere Pro, and recapture every entire tape, starting and ending at the exact same timecode values as your DV captures were, giving you an identical set of AVIs, that are at the higher HDV resolution.  This is more efficient, but still requires a lot of storage if your online format is 100 times larger than your offline (not true with HDV) and capture time.  Once finished capturing, there would be very little more work to do. (Resize titles, etc.) You could do a “Remove Unused” in Premiere to totally skip any tapes that were not used in the final edit.  This could save you some space, but only if you have a lot of captures you never ended up using at all.  The next option is to use the project manager to create an offline trimmed project, and recapture only the required parts of clips from HDV (usually with handles).  This process works in Premiere even with high end HD-SDI projects, but will not yet work with data centric workflows.  The alternative that SHOULD work for the Red RAW 4K workflow, among other tapeless formats, is very similar.  In our DV to HDV example, we export an EDL from our DV project and import that EDL into an HDV project to recapture only the needed material.  This allows us to easily capture only the required segments of higher resolution footage, saving tima and disk space.  The new captures will already have a project sequencing them in the correct order, so all that remains is to redo any titles and graphics or effects at the higher resolution, and the project will be ready to send to color correction or whatever the next step in your specific workflow is.

Silicon Imaging SI-2K Camera

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The Silicon Imaging SI-2K is a single sensor CMOS camera that mimics 16mm film camera optics.  It uses a bayer pattern to derive RGB images from a single native 2048×1152 pixel sensor.  These images are transfered uncompressed over a Cat6 ethernet cable to an Intel based computer system, which compresses the image data using Cineform RAW wavelet based compression.  The resulting data rate is low enough to be saved to a single 2.5″ hard disk.

When used with just the sensor, the SI-2K is an amazingly small and light imaging device for use in the tightest places, but it must be tethered to a computer system within 100 yards.  Usually the lens is much larger than the imager.  If an all-in-one form factor is desired, there is a full-sized camera body that can be attached to it, which contains a fully functional PC, running Windows XP Embedded.  The data is then saved on removable hard disks, that can be hot swapped via the internal USB interconnect.  With 300GB 2.5″ hard disks available now, you should be able to get 4 or 5 hours of footage onto a single drive.

Once the Cineform RAW footage is on disk, it can be edited in that codec on most popular NLEs with Cineform’s Neo2K product.  For best performance, you can use Prospect2K in Premiere Pro to edit with accelerated playback and rendering.  The RAW files are debayered in real time by the software, and edits or exports are rendered to regular Cineform 422 or 444 files, which work seemlessly together.

The SI-2K, when processed at the highest quality, generates a 10bit log RGB image at up to 2048×1152 pixels.  The colorist I work with has been very pleased with the dynamic range the images retain by the time they reach him in color correction.

Its small size gives this camera a few unique advantages.  Like the Iconix, it can capture stereoscopic footage without the use of a beam splitter, since the cameras can be mounted so closely together, side by side.  ParadiseFX has also recently developed an interesting application for the cameras, in their 18K wide 360 degree surround 2K360 video capture system, utilizing nine cameras running in parallel.  It has very limited and specialized uses, but will be much cheaper than any similar solution.  The next logical step is the inverse of this, with a ring of cameras pointing inwards, allowing time to be frozen while the perspective changes, like in the famous shots from The Matrix.

There are a few issues to be dealt with in using the camera though.  No matter how you configure the capture setup, you are using a Windows PC as your capture device.  This entails almost all of the same possible pitfalls of any other direct to disk recording system.  Your camera has to “boot up” and could lockup, crash, or even theoretically get a virus, if you network it to offload capture files.  Eventually you will probably have to reformat and reinstall the software as performance declines.  Silicon Imaging says they are currently working on a USB Flash based solution to that problem.  On the positive side, it makes it much easier to update the drivers and software, to add functionallity to the system as it continues to be developed by Silicon Imaging.  For example support to capture directly to Quicktime wrapped .mov files was recently added.

This is all around, a very creative and innovative imaging solution from Silicon Imaging, but they are still developing it into a smoother running product.  It has many possible uses that it is uniquely well suited for, but one needs to be ready to compensate for its limitations as well, as with any imaging solution.

Intel vs AMD

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It was only two or three years ago that AMD had the workstation solution of choice, over the bigger Intel.  AMD’s Opteron series was the first to offer many features that were especially important to video editors, from native 64 bit processing and multiple cores, to hypertransport frontside bus and integrated memory controllers.  Opteron’s with these features were  released about a year before Intel’s Xeons could catch up.  By the time Intel released Nocona core Xeons with 64bit support in mid 2005, AMD was selling Opteron’s with dual cores, and so on the race went.  The only advantage the Xeon’s were able to hold onto was their higher clock speed, but it was well known that Opteron’s were far more powerful at a given clock speed.

Then in the summer of 2006, Intel released two major processor upgrades back to back.  The Dempsey cores (5000 series) were a maxed out variation of the Pentium 4 “Netburst” architecture, and finally brought dual cores to the Xeon line.  The 3.73 Ghz was well above AMD’s 2.6 Ghz and the 1066Mhz FSB final topped AMD’s 1Ghz.  Only one month later, Intel released its entire new line of CPUs for all platforms, based on their totally new “Core2” design.  The Woodcrest series of Xeon’s (5100 series) were clocked lower, were supposed to be much more efficient per clock cycle, along the lines of the Opterons.  Woodcrest had everything to finally close the gap between Xeons and Opterons, with dual 64 bit cores runnning more efficiently and already at higher clock speeds, with a 3Ghz model available.  AMD had very little in the way of improvements in their response, and were totally unprepared when Intel released their next update less than 6 months later.

The Clovertown (5300 series) CPUs were simply two Woodcrest chips in a single socket, making it a Quad Core CPU.  This allowed a regular Xeon motherboard to support 8 discrete processing cores, clearly doubling performance in high end applications.  I had the privilege to use a Clovertown system for about a month when they were first released, and it was without question the fastest computer I have ever used, by a long shot.

AMD’s response was a new line of CPUs with a new numbering scheme, but no new major features.  Then recently, a year after Intel brought Quad Core CPUs to market, AMD released their long awaited Barcelona line, which were native quad core CPUs.  I have yet to see any version of those for sale nearly a month after release, and almost every review and benchmark has been negative.

We are now a month away from Intel’s next refresh of their CPU line, and are looking forward to more L2 cache, 1600Mhz FSB, and much lower prices.  AMD seems to have nothing in sight with which to compete with, which is unfortunate for both Intel and AMD users, since competition usually drives prices down for all users.  On the positive side, Intel doesn’t seem to be using their monopoly on the ultra high end to dramatically inflate prices. 

Xeons are still lacking AMD’s integrated memory controller and Hypertransport link, but those are scheduled to be included in Intel’s next major redesign, “Nehalem” in late 2008.  It will be interesting to see what AMD brings to the table by then.  Stay tuned for details when Intel releases their new line of CPUs next month.

Blackmagic HDLink & Video Hub

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Besides their Mac and PC compatible I/O components, Blackmagic makes a couple of utility devices that greatly increase the options available to a small post facility in using SDI video gear.  Technically, the Multibridge used to fall into this category as well, until they added PCIe support to it, totally extending its functionality.

The HDLink is a small box that converts HD-SDI video signal to DVI or HDMI, for monitoring video signals at full resolution with a computer LCD screen or projector.  It supports regular 1080 and 720 in most variations, and RGB 444 over dual link SDI.  It also has stereo sound output for audio monitoring.

These HDLinks are in widespread use at a number of the facilities I work at, and at under $500, they are within the reach of independent editors or anyone else who needs an economical solution for monitoring SDI.  They do get hot though, so they should be powered down when not in use, and they don’t last forever.

The new HDLink Pro adds 3Gb/s SDI for 2K support on a single SDI cable, but lacks dual link support, which is still the most popular RGB standard.  It also adds 6 Channel Audio de-embedding to analog RCA ports for 5.1 surround sound monitoring.  I have not yet had the opportunity to try one of these out yet, but I look forward to doing so as I find myself doing more 2K work, especially now that I have a 30″ LCD to connect it to.

 Separately but related, Blackmagic’s Workgroup Video Hub is a 12×24 SDI router.  It supports SD and HD, but currently not the 3Gb/s SDI standard that Blackmagic has been rolling out this year.  With a bit of creativity, it can easily support dual link connections, but that lowers the number of devices you can connect by half.  All patching is controlled in software via USB, which is connected to a single system, that hosts a network utility to share control with all users.  Their utility for patching as well designed and fleshed out at this point.  You can also patch through a built-in downconverter to SD, and it has a Still Store, ideal for color bars or logos.

We use these at three facilities I work at, and they bring a dramatic increase to the flexability and efficiency of your workflow.  They are not economical for use by a single individual, but will be well worth it in work areas shared by 3-10 people.  They greatly ease the sharing of high end video equipment.  For example, I can output any edit workstation’s SDI playout to either: a projector on an HDLink, an LCD on an HDLink, an HD CRT, our vectorscope, or any combination thereof.  Using a Video Hub can have a significant effect on your environment if you frequently find yourself reconfiguring your peripherals when switching between different projects.