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Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM
For the 15th Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, Helifilms provided the requisite POV shots using Iconix Video’s compact HD-RH1 compact SD/HD camera head and processor.
Taking HD Where It’s Never Been Before
By Dan Ochiva
Challenged by the idea of doing HD production in a place that claims to be the “largest domed indoor sports facility in the world”? That's what Helifilms (www.helifilms
.com) faced when it won the contract to provide POV shots for broadcasters attending the 15th Asian Games, played out this past December in the tiny Middle Eastern kingdom of Doha, Qatar.
The vast interior of the Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence offers broadcasters a futuristic backdrop, but it adds to the live television challenge. For example, those ubiquitous equipment towers you'll find sprouting up around most U.S. stadiums are at a minimum, limiting potential POV camera platforms. Traditional-style blimps, another big venue solution available to capture the requisite POV crowd shots, wouldn't work well in the confined, tent-like space.
At the games, Melbourne, Australia- and Berkshire, U.K.-based Helifilms devised a solution that combined its relatively small (around 13ft. long) controllable ICE blimps with a newly released camera technology: Iconix Video's (www.iconixvideo.com) HD-RH1, a compact HD/SD camera head and processor. A high-speed wireless video link transmitted HD POV shots of the pool feed from the blimps to attending broadcasters.
While the company has flown helicopters as well as its small custom blimps for its aerial production and stock footage operations, Helifilm's Sara Hine couldn't find an HD camera system to her liking — one that was both light and sturdy enough to fly on the blimp. That is until she made a visit to the Iconix Video booth at NAB 2006. “There's simply nothing similar [to the Iconix camera system] that exists and works so well,” Hine says. Comparable-quality HD POV cameras, then available from the major players, weighed more and were too bulky, she says.
The complete HD-RH1 system, which prices at $16,000, weighs less than 3lbs. without lens. The small 2.3oz. camera head employs three 1/3in. progressive square-pixel CCDs. But instead of the usual bulky lenses, the RH-1 uses petite C-mount lenses. A longtime standard for machine vision and surveillance cameras, C mounts also allow the use of cheap, but high-quality 16mm film lenses such as Switar and Cooke.
While it uses relatively small 1/3in. imagers, the camera system's electronics keeps image quality high via the latest technology, such as an improved generation of 14-bit A/D converters, as well as an unusual asynchronous signal processing architecture. The latter allows the CCD to run at a different clock rate from that of the output signal; this enables the codec to output an improved signal when compared to standard cameras, in which synchronous processing and output limit the amount of extra processing time. The system can deliver some 35 flavors of the HDTV spec, including a full 1080/60p, 4:4:4 HD signal via an optional dual-link connection.
Digital Content Producer’s The Briefing Room
Adobe Production Studio To Be Available for Both Mac and Windows
Adobe Systems announced that the next version of Adobe Production Studio, the integrated video and audio postproduction tool set that is part of the Creative Suite family, will be available for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Film, video, and web professionals currently using Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator on the Mac will soon be able to harness the power of completely new Macintosh releases of Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Encore DVD, and Adobe Soundbooth — all key components of an upcoming milestone revision to Adobe Production Studio. The software will have its first public demonstration during the Macworld 2007 Conference and Expo at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, Jan. 9-12 (Booth 901). The next release of Adobe Production Studio is expected to ship in mid-2007. …
Post Logic Studios New York Hires Peter Bavaro
Post Logic Studios, a leading bicoastal independent postproduction and digital intermediate (DI) service facility, has appointed Peter Bavaro to executive director of sales and marketing.
“It's great to have Peter on board with us,” says Larry Birstock, CEO, Post Logic Studios. “Peter's depth of production experience will be an invaluable asset in supporting our growth strategy. Post Logic Studios continues to be well positioned to build on its present success and become recognized as one of the industry's most creative, professional, and highest-quality providers of visual effects, postproduction, and DI for film and television projects.” …
Harris Corp. Named Exclusive HD Radio Transmission Vendor For Jefferson Public Radio
Harris Corporation announced that Jefferson Public Radio (JPR), owner of 21 public radio stations in Oregon and Northern California, will exclusively install Harris HD Radio transmitters for its FM and AM stations. Harris will also provide its FlexStar family of HD Radio products (FlexStar HDI-100 Importer, HDE-100 Exporter and HDX-FM Exciter) at all FM stations for future multicasting initiatives, as well as at all AM stations for improved audio quality. Harris NeuStar SW4.0 pre-codec conditioners, powered by Neural Audio, will be installed at all sites for HD Radio audio processing. …
What digital media server is providing playback for Pink’s I’m Still Alive tour?
Pink’s fans are not only treated to aerial acrobatics during the live performance, but they also get to experience video playback and IMAG via a customized High End Systems Catalyst digital media server triggered by a WholeHog 3 console. The three-camera IMAG is run through one of XL Video’s standard PPU systems.
Inbox
Macrosystem recording questions
I liked your review of the Macrosystem HDV Recorder. I had questions for you about the recording of footage into the recorder. Let's say you have an HDV tape that only has five minutes of footage on it and another tape that has 15 minutes. Let's say you record the five minutes of footage into the recorder and then stop and swap the tapes. Is it possible to continue to record the 15 minutes of footage after the five minutes of footage into the HDV recorder in the same project, if you first stop the recorder and swap the tape right then?
Is it possible to record 23 hours from many different tapes one after the other in the same project? Is it possible to hook up a HDV camera to the unit via FireWire and record live into one project until the hard drive is filled up?
I would like to archive my regular DV tapes to the HDV recorder and use the recorder as a server, meaning a place to archive my footage to access it later. Is there a timeline to allow the user to record regular DV footage into the recorder?
Paris J. Fox
Pars Digital
Tom Patrick McAuliffe responds: I spoke with the folks at Macrosystem, and here's what we came up with. Regarding laying down one video after another as the same clip or project, the HDV Recorder is not really designed for it, but this can be done. You'd have to leave the record menu rolling on the HDV Recorder as you stop the source footage and swap tapes. Once you hit play on the source, the Macrosystem HDV Recorder automatically sees the signal and continues to add it to the same video clip or project (they call the different projects “films”). There is no delay between the two sets of footage, but there is often a digital artifact between those two sections, so its not a clean break. It's best to keep separate tapes in separate projects.
Additionally, as you propose, it is possible to record 23 hours from many different tapes one after the other in the same project. This is based entirely on theory, however, and has not been tested by Macrosystem. This would require the machine to stay on for the entire time in the record mode and have tapes swapped for this duration. The addition of so many breaks between sections in this same film could cause some calculation errors and may affect the sync of the footage. Again, it's best to have separate tapes with separate projects. If you have too many tapes for the number of projects, remember the machine does have removable hard drives and you can store the different material on different drives.
It's also possible to hook up a HDV camera to the unit via IEEE-1394/FireWire and record live into one project until the hard drive is full. As far as using regular DV footage, the machine was designed and built for HDV, so using a standard-definition signal (Y/C, composite, etc.) is not something the device is currently capable of. From speaking with the developers at Macrosystem, it does not appear to be one of the features that will be designed into future upgrades of the product.
The article discussed in Inbox can be found at:
digitalcontentproducer.com/cameras/macrosystem_hdv_recorder
Media Resources
Web articles:
Majority Report
By Stuart Armstrong
May/June Hub 2006
The Digital Signage/Group
www.tdsg.net/resources/MajorityReport.pdf
Creative Screen Spotting: Effective Mounting Solutions for Retail Digital Signage
By Dale Smith
Peerless
www.tdsg.net/resources/CreativeScreenSpotting.pdf
White papers:
Understanding the Interactive Video Network Viewcast
whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/whitepaper.aspx?&kw=video&c=1&docid=46760
Final Cut Pro 5:Working With High Definition and Broadcast Formats
Apple
manuals.info.apple.com/en/FCP5_HD_and_Broadcast_Formats.pdf
Clocking, Jitter and the Digidesign 192 I/O Audio Interface
Prepared by Gannon Kashiwa
Digidesign
akmedia.digidesign.com/news/docs/WhitePaper_ClockJitter_30863.pdf
Blogs:
AVC-I Compression Explained
Professional Audio/Video
Industry Blog
Ear.net
http://blog.ear.net/journal/2006/12/12/avc-i-compression-explained.html
Consumer Reports: LCD and Plasma Flat Panels as Reliable as Tube TVs
Professional Audio/Video
Industry Blog
Ear.net
http://blog.ear.net/journal/2006/10/27/consumer-reports-lcd-and-plasma-flat-panels-as-reliable-as-tube-tvs.html
Business Intelligence: Storage that Supports Your Workflow
By Jim McKenna, Vice President, Facilis Technology
Getting projects out the door efficiently has become overwhelmingly important for corporate video facilities. Amid shifting client demands and format changes, the one constant is this: Time is money.
Today's workflows need scalable and practical shared storage. A data workflow centered around a SAN (storage area network) increases content management efficiency within a postproduction department. Shared storage also facilitates more creative changes and easier versioning of the final product. These benefits make it possible to expand the talent pool allocated to any project and make better use of content resources owned by the production.
In addition, with shared storage, rooms and workstations become identical in their ability to access project information any time, any day. This can eliminate scheduling hassles. Also, any workstation can be allocated more or less space when the project changes and duplication of data is no longer necessary.
At the high end of the spectrum, a SAN environment is high-cost, complex, server-assisted and file-level technology. On the low end, they are directly connected, static-partitioned storage solutions. In the middle is “server-direct” architecture, which takes the best attributes of both to create a simple, high-performance system that is easy to configure and lower in cost. In a server-direct configuration, all clients can connect directly to a server like they would to a simple hard drive. Virtual volumes of storage can be created in any size and deleted at any time, and these volumes are formatted like a local drive in the native file system of the workstation.
Any workstation can access storage volumes as if they were local to that system, but in reality the volumes are shared resources that are available to the workgroup via user-based permissions on the server.
There is no metadata manager, no required Fibre Channel switches, no installed client software, no required Ethernet network, and no client licenses. This removes many of the configuration complexities associated with server-assisted networks, which require dedicated client software or metadata-heavy custom file systems.
The best storage networks will grow with a facility, both in capacity and bandwidth. A good shared-storage system can be designed to withstand this advancement into bigger and better formats, while keeping cost of entry low. Some products are designed around the formats of today, offering little in the way of an upgrade path. By looking at server-direct SANs now, facilities can protect their investment.
A SAN environment should not dictate which tools you employ — it should support a range of applications and platforms. Deluxe Digital Studios of Burbank, Calif., one of the largest DVD-authoring facilities in the world, manages the replication and distribution of home-entertainment DVDs for all the major studios. With several hundred DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray titles passing through its operation each month, flexible, reliable storage is a requirement.
This means the production teams are responsible for integrating many moving parts, and they look for technology components that can do the same. As the company's services continue to evolve from tape-based to DVD and video-on-demand/download-to-own, and eventually to an entirely tapeless environment, Deluxe recognized its storage backbone would need to be scalable, flexible, and administered by many professionals in different disciplines. The facility wanted a tool that was both platform-agnostic and application-agnostic, one that could be used in mixed environments: editing, audio, graphic systems, and encoding.
Deluxe evaluated many local and shared-storage options and chose a server-direct shared SAN as the heart of its services. “Shared storage has made significant impact on all of our disciplines,” says Ron Martin, vice president of engineering and technology at Deluxe Digital Studios. “It has doubled our production capacity, tripled our SD and high-definition work, and quadrupled our download-to-own lines.”
Facilities that have invested in this new-generation SAN technology find that the investment pays off in efficiency and creativity. When time is money, greater collaboration and improved output from the entire workgroup makes the infrastructure worth every penny.
Skillset
High Definition From Start to Finish Presented by HD Cinema Group
Feb. 10
Seattle
$85
www.nwfilmforum.org/wiggly/workshops
Participants in this six-hour, hands-on workshop will use a Panasonic AG-HVX200, Apple Final Cut Pro, and a Windows Media workstation to go through all the steps of a high-definition project. From shooting with the HVX200 to importing and editing footage to rendering the project for delivery, students will gain a working knowledge of managing a digital workflow.
Advanced Adobe
After Effects 7.0
Feb. 21-23
Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, or San Diego
$1,295
www.ledet.com
Designed for graphic professionals who want to enhance their motion editing and compositing, this course includes many advanced tips and tricks using the latest version of Adobe After Effects. The course covers keyframe complexity, expressions, masks, color keying, compound effects, motion stabilization and tracking, and 3D animation, and is recommended for those planning to obtain the Adobe Certified expert status.
