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MillimeterProduction and Post at NAB 2008
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By D. W. Leitner and Dan Ochiva
This year's show saw many advances in digital cinema and color-management technologies.
Da Vinci Systems Resolve R300
I also saw a demo of Bones Dailies, part of Thomson's DI toolset. Bones speeds workflow by making it easier to automate the production of daily review copies of a previous day's shoot. Expect the company to push the new CDL metadata standard as the basis for everything from Bones dailies through to final finish.
Colorists got a lot of attention at NAB — Quantel had a parallel announcement of an innovation in control surfaces. Colorists will enjoy sitting in front of the Neo color-correction control panel for the Pablo color corrector. It's a clean, simple panel. The colors and the feel of the buttons and knobs, for example, seem pleasant and carefully chosen to soothe eyes and fingers over long days. Ergonomics and interactivity seem well-matched here. Neo features dedicated one-touch controls for all major functions, an integrated keyboard, and glide pads for maximum comfort during long grading sessions. For those who hate going through levels of drop-down menus, Neo gives one-button access to all menus, e.g., HSL, RGB high/low, DVE, and shapes.
By allowing database sharing between two separate post islands, Da Vinci expects to break down barriers that have slowed workflow. The database sharing goes on between the company's Revival image restoration system and the Resolve digital mastering suite. Here's a scenario for which Da Vinci proposes its new solution: Currently, during restoration, when colorists encounter specks or other damages within frames, they make a handwritten list noting the location of each. They then pass that list to another operator, who searches for the exact frames to repair. It's clearly an unwieldy and time-wasting process that is prone to error.
Now, by integrating Revival and Resolve, the frames marked for repair are saved to the shared database, from which they are retrieved and then fixed by the Revival technician. Automatic updating of the database gives the colorist instant access to the fixed image so he or she can keep working.
Da Vinci also announced technology that harnesses Nvidia's Cuda development language. (Nvidia software gives a programmer direct access to the graphic card's powerful GPUs for more general-purpose use.)
Da Vinci's CORE (Cuda Optimized Resolve Engine) is central to the speedy re-engineered 4K Resolve. The company claims that the Resolve R200 — with a single CORE card — works faster than any system Da Vinci has ever delivered, while the Resolve R300 — with two CORE cards — is twice as fast as the R200. The system closely integrates a storage system from Bright Systems, which is gaining a rep for delivering storage that has specific enhancements for media playback. By working with Bright's APIs, Da Vinci was able to optimize how data is recorded to the drives, allowing for faster reads and writes.
Keeping everything file-based to improve high-end workflow was also the theme at MTI Film's booth. Working with Arri and Pandora International, the company created a 2K dailies workflow. It starts with an Arriscan Film Scanner, which captures 35mm film to 2K DPX files and records them to a SAN. YoYo, Pandora's nonlinear data management technology, took each camera roll's data as it was scanned, generating a realtime HD 4:4:4 stream for color correction via a Pandora Revolution color corrector. Finally, MTI Film's Control Dailies captured the color-corrected HD 4:4:4 media, as well as essential metadata, including an ASC CDL. How do you view it? Control Dailies also generates SD proxies from the HD 4:4:4 media.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
