Minutes after the floor opened for NAB2007, a line started to form at the Red booth, and it didn’t subside until the end of the show. The company needed bouncers to control the flow of fans and customers.
In production and post circles, Red has been a topic of suspense, mystery and controversy since it first showed up at NAB2006 with promises of a 4K camera (more than four times the resolution of HD) that will sell for only $17,500—a price point that many thought was impossible to achieve. But with the pizzazz and showmanship of a Vegas act, the company promised to spark a “rebellion” in the production industry by putting very high-end filmmaking tools within reach of aspiring filmmakers, freelancers, broadcasters and even wedding videographers and wannabes.
The company has been taking $1,000 deposits for its Red One camera (sight unseen) for over a year now, and by the end of NAB, there were over 3,500 cameras on order. Do the math: Red has pocked $3.5 million in deposits alone. But Red has yet to actually ship its camera. At press time, the company put out a terse statement that it was experiencing an engineering delay and that “a revised approximate shipping schedule will be posted sometime in the near future.”
The big challenge of working with 4K is the sheer volume of data generated, but Ted Schilowitz, whose title at Red is “leader of the rebellion,” explained that, “That’s true if you’re shooting uncompressed, and the camera can shoot uncompressed if you want, but we’ve been really focusing on the whole compressed workflow using Redcode, because that’s what makes the camera affordable.”
RED APPLES
Apple announced that it will support the Redcode codec natively in an upcoming point release of its new Final Cut Studio 2. The new version, unveiled at the show, includes Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, and also adds the new professional color grading and finishing application called Color—at no extra cost.
“Final Cut Studio 2 was specifically designed to enable the rapidly growing community of over 800,000 Final Cut editors to animate, mix, grade and deliver their work as a natural extension of the editorial process,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of applications product marketing.
The idea of 4K (and 2K) data acquisition represents a sort of Holy Grail in production. With 4048 X 3112 lines of resolution, compared to HD’s 1920 X 1080, 4K can generate a much better quality master, ideal for theatrical release, and easily downconvertable to HD for broadcast.
Silicon Imaging introduced its highly anticipated SI-2K camera. Although 2K offers a more manageable data rate, it’s still a new concept in production.
Silicon Imaging worked closely with partners Iridas, Cineform, Cine-tal and Rising Sun Research to develop a convenient workflow behind the camera that allows the cinematographers to shoot 2K data and control the look of their images throughout the postproduction process based on 3D look-up tables (LUT’s)—metadata used to manipulate the color space of the images without actually altering the underlying data.
“That would probably be the most unique value proposition of our camera system—that it’s really not the camera system but the workflow that goes with it,” explained Ari Presler, president of Silicon Imaging. “The ability to take an image and create a particular look for a picture and load that into the camera and in realtime be able to see that look transformation in the camera.”
SI-2K users can see the images in the viewfinder with an LUT applied, developed in Iridas’s SpeedGrade software. They can then display that image on set on a Cine-tal monitor with a LUT from Rising Sun Research that will give an accurate representation of what the film out will look like (calibrated to various film stocks), and then pass that LUT along through the post-production pipeline, embedded in the Cineform RAW codec as nondestructive metadata, all the way to the colorist.
It’s a process that enables the cinematographer to communicate intentions to the colorist without “baking in” color decisions that are better left to later in the process.
While 2K or 4K data represents a paradigm shift from the traditional videocentric workflow of HD, especially for TV production, uncompressed HD 4:4:4 has become a hugely successful format.
In the HD camp, Sony unveiled the next generation in Sony’s CineAlta line—the F23. The camera relies on three 2/3-inch, 2.2-megabit CCDs, and delivers either a 4:2:2 or 4:4:4, 1920 x 1080p image. The F23 features film-like ergonomics, as opposed to Sony’s previous ENG-based CineAlta cameras. And since it’s based on HDCAM SR, which has become a common format for TV deliverables, there are already numerous post facilities equipped to accommodate projects shot on the F23, and the output for broadcast deliverables is very simple.
2K AND 4K POST
With post houses all over the world gearing up for 4K post production, the demands on computer hardware and networking in post are getting intense, requiring innovative new approaches.
Quantel introduced a new infrastructure for post and DI applications called Genetic Engineering, which gives users a completely open-technology, SAN-based environment. The system enables every Quantel eQ, iQ or Pablo in a facility to access the same media and work completely independently.
“SAN-based teamworking is a continual drag on efficiency, with multiple copies of media clogging up disk space and leading to significant media management issues, especially when working at resolutions of 2K and above,” said Steve Owen, director of marketing, Quantel. “Genetic Engineering allows multiple users to access the same clips at the same time without copying or moving media. Reliable playout is guaranteed and Genetic Engineering handles all the different resolutions in realtime and without creating any new media. Linux or Windows-based third party systems can hook into the shared space just as easily as Quantel machines—there are no proprietary APIs.”
The “GenePool” lies at the heart of Genetic Engineering. Available in either HD RGB or 4K configurations, the GenePool can host guaranteed multiple streams and its RAID-protected workspace—up to 80 TB—can accommodate multiple, movie-length projects simultaneously. The company’s FrameMagic frame level media management technology keeps track of each and every frame being worked on in the Genetic Engineering environment.
This enables, for example, film scanners to scan directly into the GenePool, while restoration and dust-busting applications can work on media where only the modified frames are added to storage and automatically spliced into the original.
In other introductions, Autodesk unveiled its new Incinerator 2007 for the Autodesk Lustre 2007 digital color grading system, which incorporates the latest multicore CPU technology, Infiniband networking and GPU acceleration to deliver a realtime color grading environment for facilities with huge volumes of data to manage.
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