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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.
Assimilate Scratch CONstruct
MTI also announced the availability of Convey for Control Dailies. The idea here is to automate the creation of file-based deliverables such as DVDs. Convey does all encoding for all of the deliverable formats, and it gains power because it shares Control Dailies' project management, database, and scan-list parameters. That means you don't have to spend time with an assistant explaining who gets what and how to do it. All templates and configurations can be saved and recalled later, eliminating redundant input and setup.
Improvements in computer technology have also allowed Iridas to introduce SpeedGrade XR, designed to handle a flood of RAW data poured out by high-end digital cameras. The Munich-based company, which demonstrated live de-Bayering from a camera, claims to be the only company to do this for all available RAW formats, sans Red. (De-Bayering decodes an image from the CCDs' Bayer matrix to a full-color picture.)
Jim Hays, digital workflow supervisor at Paradise FX, was in the booth to discuss using SpeedGrade XR. He's supervising post on Dark Country, a new stereoscopic feature film shot with Silicon Imaging's 2K camera. The Iridas software is being used for dailies and pregrading.
With partners at hand (in this case, Silicon Imaging, CineForm, and Wafian), Iridas also promoted end-to-end digital workflow. A Silicon Imaging SI-2K digital cinema camera captured to the CineForm RAW format, using the SpeedGrade OnSet software, which is actually built into the SI system. Wafian was in the booth to present its family of recorders — including the new HR-2-DS Direct-to-Disk HD Video Recorder, which can record and play back a single 4:4:4 stream or stereoscopic 4:2:2 streams as CineForm format clips for grading in SpeedGrade DI.
Assimilate brought out Scratch Cine, a virtual telecine for projects shot on Red Digital Cinema cameras. The idea is to emulate operations that used to be handled in telecine suites, such as dailies, one-light color grading, and color and shot management. This virtual telecine is specifically designed to work with the native Red .r3d file format. Offhollywood Pictures is currently using it to post the Red-shot film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead, an “indie vampire comedy.”
Once the Redcode RAW .r3d files are loaded into Scratch, users can review, assemble, conform, play back in realtime, color-correct, and finish. Output is available to any format at any resolution, up to and including full 4K.
Swedish company Digital Vision presented the latest version 4.0 of Film Master, its color grading and finishing system. Now capable of handling 4K in realtime via a grid-computing network and open SAN storage, the setup allows facilities to begin editing, conforming, grading, and finishing 4K material without any ingest delays. The company claims you'll save time and storage costs and simplify data management. Release is set for Q4 2008.
Digital Vision also presented newly reconfigured Digital Vision Optics (DVO) tools. The software now includes more than 20 tools for sharpening images, removing dust and dropouts, changing and controlling grain, and converting formats. It works with the company's finishing systems: Film Master and Nucoda SD and HD. Four new restoration tools were introduced at the show; they eliminate film weave, automatically align RGB separation prints, remove vertical scratches typically missed by dust/dirt removers, and more.
In preview was Turbine, a new high-performance render accelerator for all Digital Vision software. The scalable system is based on the latest Dell computing blades; it allows facilities to assign as many CPUs as are necessary to a project. DV claims it delivers 8X more processing power than any other high-end finishing system available — in half of the rack space and requiring less power.
