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MillimeterNAB 2006
Mar 5, 2006 12:30 PM, By S. D. Katz, D. W. Leitner, and Dan Ochiva
More for Your Digital Dollar
Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI
Personal Media Players
While PMPs are considered consumer electronics, they are quickly adding capabilities like record and playback of video in multiple formats and have at least some application to production for previsualization on set, on location, or just as the hippest way to show your reel.
A PMP like the X2 Mega View 566, with its 20GB of storage, plays back video at DVD quality to an external monitor and an SD/MMC flash-memory slot, and reads just about any media format. Other hybrid devices such as cell phone/camcorder/PMP/game PMPs are on the drawing boards and represent a new market for content, whether made specifically for handhelds or simply repurposed entertainment.
MPEG-4 support is becoming common on these devices — a dose of reality for all the prognosticators of 2004 that declared WMV the winner of the Player Olympics. The other significant consumer product in 2006 was the Sanyo Xacti HD1 camcorder, a 9Mbps camera that stores HD on a Flash memory card. Priced at less than $800, this is the first HD camera aimed at the general consumer and certainly the first of many. The low data rate MPEG-4 and 640×480 image size is not going to impress cinematographers, but I can guarantee that it will be used by guerilla Indies and may provide a sharper image than MiniDV cameras in the same price range.
— S.D.K.
Compositing & 2D
With the release of Adobe Production Studio, After Effects 7.0 receives a major interface overhaul and tighter integration with Premiere Pro, Audition, and Encore. While the AE/Premiere Pro combo provides the most highly evolved editing and compositing product in the industry (with the most value), this is a Windows-only connection.
Anyone considering a suite built around Adobe Production Studio will want to check out the hardware products and systems supporting Adobe's most integrated postproduction system. Dell has an HDV NLE solution based on its Precision 670 workstation; meanwhile, the HP xw9300 dual-core, dual-processor AMD fitted with an AJA Xena-HS HD-SDI board handles HDV, SD, HD, and 2K.
These and other certified systems will be all over the show floor as Adobe realizes the advantages of integrated software on proven systems. This is part of the maturation of Adobe and Apple. As they win market share from more traditional players, they have had to graduate beyond the era of guerilla desktop systems that were cost-effective, but not necessarily dependable in a studio or post facility environment.
While Autodesk Combustion 4 (Windows) came out in 2004, the OS X system has taken longer. Mac users will finally be able to look at all the new features at NAB. The question is, however, will they also be looking for a new Intel-based Mac system? The Apple Laptops and PowerBooks based on an Intel chip debuted at Macworld in January. While Apple hasn't made any noise about releasing a full workstation version, it's still early in the product cycle, particularly if you purchased a dual-core G5 over the past 18 months.
Nuke 4.5, compositing software from Digital Domain (DD), will debut in an OS X version. This is likely to be an increasing trend now that Apple is on Intel hardware. Many graphics professionals are going to feel at home, because OS X is based on Unix. With Nuke 4.5, DD has also made the software more user friendly. It must have realized that a product that grew out of a huge Hollywood VFX pipeline and considerable proprietary code might not be all that user friendly. Nuke 4.5 is positioned against Shake, which just goes to show the paradox of success for Apple — improve the hardware but expect to attract competition along with new customers.
Apple is back. There is no question that the move-to-Intel strategy is going to help. Many users who switched to Windows over the past few years for the faster and cheaper AMD and Intel hardware have an alternative to consider.
Compositing software depends heavily on plug-ins, and a trip to this year's NAB Plug-in Pavilion will be worth the shoe leather; where else will you see so many new plug-in sets with only one stop?
Boris FX will also have its own booth with the newly released Continuum Complete 4 for After Effects, Combustion, and FCP. Among the cooler effects is a Motion Key that selects and removes foreground objects from the background while leaving the background intact. There is also an Optical Stabilizer to automatically remove camera shake. Until recently, these filters were standalone plug-ins that sold for more than the entire Continuum package of more than 150 filters.
— S.D.K.
Hardware Wars
Only a couple of NABs ago, the industry fell in love with GPU technology. Much of this was inspired by the leap ahead in game rendering made possible by programmable chips, as well as significant speed gains overall on boards from 3D Labs, ATI, and Nvidia.
SDI I/O capability and the promise of enormous speed gains created the misperception that final renders in 3D and 2D may not be as realtime as Half-Life, but that GPU render farms nonetheless were going to transform the industry. It has not quite happened that way, although the gains in GPU performance are significant and responsible for many new rendering capabilities on the preview side.
Up until now, Nvidia has targeted the high-end VFX market more than any other GPU vendor. However, be sure to check out ATI's new generation FireGL series, which debuts at the show. The Canadian company claims its new products trump Nvidia's current lineup.
— S.D.K.
Quantum SDLT 600A
Quantum's SDLT 600A data tape system represents an important next step in the move toward file-based post workflows. Building around the company's SDLT archiving standard, a mainstay in the corporate world, the network-attached 600A drive features MXF-aware hardware and built-in Gigabit Ethernet. By relying on the growing use of MXF wrappers for media, users won't need to buy as much VTR-specific hardware, yet can still enjoy VTR-like access to subclips by timecode as well as access to metadata stored on the tape.
What: Boxx Apexx 8 workstation
Why: While Boxx earlier this year announced the Apexx 4 workstation — it sports four dual-core AMD Opteron processors — this eight-way debuts at the show. With 16 processor cores and up to 128GB of memory, the company positions it as a “super-workstation” capable of handling 2K and 4K film, while blowing through video encoding chores.
